Today's the 1st of Ramadan. Yay? Eh, I still despise this month as much as I have in previous years. Here's a list of reasons:

- I have a history of going unconscious if I don't eat for long
- We're expected to spontaneously become ultra-pious Muslims, with absolutely no good reason for it.
    - Indoctrination and whatnot. I don't really have any faith for this reason; all my prayers are empty words.
        - Working on this. I do believe in God, kind of. I don't want to force the belief, but you also can't "get" belief either, can you? Either you have it, you don't, or you delude yourself into having it.
    - My dad will call us over to yap about the Quran. Like, HOW do you expect us to get ANYTHING out of this when we have no reason to believe it to begin with??
- The guys do fucking nothing whilst the girls are expected to cook food and stuff.
    - My mum does most of this, I help around when she asks. Men are, I think, obligated to attend the mosque for congregational prayers but most don't do that. Funny.

I am, technically, deluding myself into belief just to have the comfort that there's nothing "deficient" about me and that I fit in. It's another matter that it comes with some positive side effects that make it look slightly less insane:

1. Any standardised ideology is probably better than any moral code I can come up with.
2. Helps you see the bigger picture of things, even if it's skewed in a certain direction.
3. Gives you some grounding (and some-deity) to rely on.

That's about it. Yes, they are kind of poor reasons, and a philosophy like Stoicism would do the same. The way I think of it now is:

- I believe that there is SOMETHING that made the observable universe, and that SOMETHING exists outside of it.
- I also believe that, since SOMETHING created the universe, SOMETHING would know/understand what's going on in it.

I'm not even really sure about that. It's quite vague, and you could call it a God. I guess. I would like the comfort of organised religion, so I want to practise Islam whilst not being a pushy, holier-than-thou asshole. Does that make sense?
I also don't want my sense of morality to be distorted much, some of Islam's laws look *kind of* misogynist. Maybe. Haven't read very thoroughly into it, so that's just my current thought.

I'm a (3) on the spectrum described below, the "Leaning towards theism" one:
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God#Positions

Some of Stoicism looks neat, and most of the core literature is in English. Islam has English resources, but I have a hunch that many sugarcoat and deviate from the stuff from classical scholars. The tone when you read the Quran's translation versus most teachers is such a large gap. 1400 of whatever years is long enough for things to get iffy and grey.

- - -

Another things that pisses me off is my parents. Sometimes. They are pretty old, so it's normal to expect a gap between the way we think about things. The thing that grinds my gears is that when they make any sort of commitment, one of two things happens:

- Everything's delegated to other people with little to no explanation, and they get cross when it's not done exactly as they liked.
- There's so little planning put into it that it just doesn't happen to begin with, then they complain to me about it like they have no idea why it didn't work out.

I may be seeing this now because I've put in a lot of time into learning to make plans that are actionable and realistic myself (David Allen's GTD), and they have other priorities so they just haven't done that. Which is fair. Still annoys me though.

Speaking of GTD, I have to review that. And study.

bye! :D