In Their Own Words: Not-So-New Converts

People who have been in their religion longer and have had to spend more time explaining why they believe what they do tend to explain their belief differently than the people in the last post. Take, for example, this Russian woman who converted to Islam with her husband. She is explaining why she believed in life after death, even before she converted.

I had doubts [about the permanence of death], even though with my mind I understood that we are all mortal and that we will die. In my heart I still felt that the soul doesn’t die, even though the body dies, you bury it, and it turns to dust. I always wondered where the spirit went. The body dies, but what about the spirit? I always looked for answers to the question. I’m a doctor, and I read in a journal that some American researchers did an experiment. When they weigh a body after it’s death, it suddenly looses about 30 grams, and they took pictures of the body with infrared and they saw these beams over the body and they thought that might be the spirit. And plus when people are clinically dead and then they come back, they all tell the same thing, that they saw a path, a tunnel, and that there was a light at the end of it. And the closer they got to the light the more they felt that they were loved, and they felt such happiness at the moment. Those people lived in all different countries, didn’t know each other, but they all tell the same thing. At that time, it helped me to understand what happened to the spirit, but where does it go after that? What happens to it? We found our answers in the Qur’an.

Not-So-New Converts use these kinds of stories a lot. Why is alcohol forbidden in your religion? Well, look at all of the evidence about what alcohol does to people, to their health. Why don’t you eat certain foods? Look at the health consequences of those foods. Why do you believe in your scriptures? Look at this archaeological or scientific evidence that fits what the scriptures say. And the scriptures were written hundreds or even thousands or years before anyone knew about the scientific evidence.