Julio Altamiranda shared his story how he has converted to Islam.
I was 27. I had left a job in finance after reading the Torah and then Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19 verse 29.
My
girlfriend was Muslim. I had quit my job on a whim. I read the above
verse on a wednesday morning and quit that afternoon. I was raised
Catholic but by 13 I had decided Christianity was nonsense. I was not
willing to accept that my non-Christian friends, many who were much
nicer and generally better human beings than I was, were all going to
hell, even my Jewish friends who prayed and went to Synagogue on
Saturdays.
I was also not interested in being
told that Jesus died for my sins, when not once does Jesus say anything
about this in the Bible. Also by the looks of my life and the life of
others in the world… we are all suffering all the time.
According
to Judaism and Islam and just about all the other religions (EXCEPT
CHRISTIANITY) people suffer because they are being punished for sins, or
because of Karma (which is really the same thing), or even sometimes
because God might be saving them from something worse…
I
cannot answer that question, but at the age of 13 I was still 100% sure
that believing that someone died for your sins creates a situation
where you are likely to continue sinning.
So I
stopped going to church and just fucked around for years. Then I took
LSD. It became blatantly obvious to me that there was a God, or at least
something going on. So I began searching.
I
studied Hermeticism, and saw that Christianity was really just a hodge
podge of beliefs based on whatever was popular in the Roman empire. As
if the President of United States looked on facebook at the most popular
religious beliefs and created a new religion based on those. It was not
based on any of the things Jesus said to do, because Jesus was not a
Christian. It rejected several concepts that had been part of Judaism
for thousands of years, and not based on what Jesus said but what Paul
says.
So at around 26, I moved to Brooklyn. I
would see the Orthodox Jews reading their books on the train and
thought, well these people have been doing this every morning, for
thousands of years! So I bought a book of Psalms and began reading it
with the lunar calendar. I still do this everyday.
I
looked into Judaism, my grandmother was Jewish, and the Orthodox
community in Brooklyn is very vibrant and interesting but I found the
religion very racist, not towards me… or any skin color, but in general
there was this belief that God only loved us, and that we did not owe
anything to others. For example the Torah says “do not lend on interest
to your brother”
The word brother according to
Orthodox Rabbis meant other Jews… so it is ok to lend on interest to
non-Jews. I could not accept this hypocrisy. Also I was reading the Quran… a Quran I found in a Synagogue!
The
Quran simply made more sense, and believe it or not, was much less
violent than the Torah. People say the Quran is violent because they
have not read the Bible in its entirety, or they argue that Jews do not
take the Bible literally and Muslims take the Quran literally.
I think it says multitudes about a group of people and their book if they cannot take their own book seriously.
It
became obvious to me that the Torah was not ONE book that Moses wrote
after God gave it to him at Sinai. I began to do research and see that
it was not until Maimonides that Jews even began to say or believe that
the Torah was written by Moses based on what God gave him at Mt. Sinai.
This is very interesting because Maimonides lived during the Arab Golden
Age, meaning he most likely stole this idea from Muslims.
Prior
to Maimonides, Jews thought exactly what most mainstream Jews and
Christians believe today about the Bible… that it is made up of
different books written by different people at different times who
believed different things.
the Quran
I learned that there
was only one version of the Quran. There are not disputes among Muslims
like there are among Christians and Jews as to whose version is
correct. There is no evidence like the Dead Sea Scrolls that basically
proves the Torah inside our Synagouges today… IS NOT what Jews had 2000
years ago, and that prior to the first written Masoretic texts… the
Torah was not a concrete text, but a fluid one that was always being
written differently.
It also was interesting that the earliest Torah we have is from 2300 years ago but Moses lived over 3000 years ago.
The
earliest Gospels were all written after Jesus left the earth, and all
the canonical Gospels (the 4 in the Bible) were written in Greek. There
are no Hebrew/Aramaic versions.
The Quran
however… all the same. No alternate versions. When the Torah is uploaded
into software designed to analyze text and tell us if there are more
than one author (usually used to spot plagiarism in student papers)
The software shows us clearly what any 5th grade student would ask his religion teacher
If Moses wrote the Torah, why is it written from a third person’s perspective?
Why doesn’t Moses call himself “me”
Why does Moses say, “And then Moses went up to the top of the mountain and died and was buried there”
Why do we have to believe in stupid things?
So
I sat down with a glass of wine and began to read the Quran in the
order of revelation, starting with Surah 96 (AL-ALAQ), 68, 73, 74, 111, 1
I read maybe 40 Surahs that night. I felt almost as if I was Muhammad, alone in a cave wondering if this could really be.
Could God have actually have given humanity a book? in his own hand
And surely enough he had.
I got to a verse
EAT AND ENJOY YOURSELVES A LITTLE LONGER, FOR YOU ARE INDEED THE EVILDOERS
Well
let me tell you. I was an alcoholic. I used to drink everyday for
years. I had tried to quit for 2 years. I had gone to AA meetings and
always ended up leaving thinking I had it under control. I would stick
to just beer and find myself finishing bottles of Whiskey on a Wednesday
night.
I knew what the Quran said about
alcohol, and thinking about it now I probably was reluctant to accept
the truth because I did not want to stop drinking, I did not want to
believe that God had said I should stop drinking.
But there I was, 27, DRUNK, reading THAT verse.
I put the book down and it dawned upon me that I was now a Muslim.
In 2 weeks I was sober and I have not touched alcohol since. I didn't need anymore signs.
… But I got more signs!
Mathematical Structure in the Quran
Later I discovered some of the newly found details about mathematical structures in the Quran.
I will just put a link here, as this answer is probably longer than most people would like.
Basically. It became obvious to me that there is no way that Muhammad or any human being wrote this book.
It
would be impossible for a man in the 7th century in Arabia of all
places… to have written this book with all these details that nobody
could have known.
It would be more likely to
believe that Muhammad had a time machine, went to the future, studied
Cryptography at MIT and then went back to Arabia and wrote the Quran
secretly, then slowly revealed verses and kept the entire mathematical
structure a secret, and told NO ONE. And nobody figured it out until
1973…
Sounds crazy because it is.
God wrote the Quran.
Quran is the holy grail. No doubt about it.
Becoming a Muslim was the best thing that ever happened to me. I pray that God will let me die a Muslim.
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