Faith, Identity, and Other Human Inventions

This is a pretty long read. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading this blog entry as well. It's not necessary, but it touches on some similar ideas if you want to know my current views on religion, meaning, and the metaphysical, this is probably the closest thing I have to a summary. My beliefs on religion tend to change fairly quickly, so I can't promise I'll agree with everything here forever, but this is where my thoughts are at the moment.

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I am not convinced that human beings are fundamentally rational creatures. We flatter ourselves with the language of reason. We imagine that our convictions emerge from evidence, that our values are products of careful reflection, that our identities are self-evident facts waiting to be discovered rather than stories waiting to be told. Yet when one examines history closely, reason appears less like the architect of civilization and more like its public relations department. Long before we were scientists, economists, philosophers, politicians, or revolutionaries, we were storytellers. We stood before a universe whose scale rendered us insignificant, whose indifference rendered us anxious, and whose silence rendered us afraid. Faced with this abyss, humanity did what it has always done: it invented meaning. Every religion, every nation, every ideology, every economic system, every philosophy, every work of art, and every conception of identity is, in some sense, an attempt to answer the same unbearable question: what are we supposed to do with the fact that we exist?

This is why I have never found the distinction between religion and non-religion particularly convincing. The atheist abandons God but rarely abandons faith itself. The object changes; the impulse remains. One person devotes themselves to scripture, another to a political party, another to a nation, another to a philosopher, another to the market, another to progress, another to science, and another to a work of literature that has become so foundational to their understanding of reality that questioning it feels almost sacrilegious. Human beings seem incapable of existing without some organizing principle around which they construct their lives. We crave coherence. We crave certainty. More importantly, we crave community. We want to know that others see the world as we do. We want our beliefs reflected back at us. We want confirmation that our suffering means something, that our existence means something, that we ourselves mean something. Perhaps the true opposite of religion is not atheism but indifference, and indifference is a condition most human beings appear psychologically incapable of sustaining.

This is not necessarily a criticism. In many ways, it is what allows civilization itself to function. Communities cannot exist without shared narratives. The problem arises when those narratives become more important than the human beings who inhabit them. History is littered with corpses left behind by people who were absolutely certain they possessed the truth. The Crusaders believed they possessed the truth. The conquistadors believed they possessed the truth. Slave owners believed they possessed the truth. Fascists believed they possessed the truth. Colonial administrators believed they possessed the truth. The frightening thing about evil is not that it is irrational. The frightening thing is that it is often perfectly rational within the framework of a particular belief system. The greatest atrocities in history were rarely committed by people who thought they were villains. They were committed by people convinced that they were righteous.

For this reason, I find it difficult to mock religious belief simply because it cannot be proven. There are millions of people for whom faith is not a philosophical proposition but a lifeline. The mother praying for her child in a war zone is not engaged in an abstract debate about metaphysics. The prisoner praying in solitary confinement is not conducting a theological inquiry. They are attempting to survive despair. Throughout history, religion has provided comfort to those who possessed nothing else. It has given meaning to suffering, dignity to grief, and hope to circumstances that appeared entirely hopeless. I do not think one has to believe in God to recognize the profound psychological function faith serves. In a universe where death is inevitable and suffering is unavoidable, it should not surprise us that people cling to systems capable of transforming chaos into narrative.

Yet religion possesses another side. The same force that comforts the oppressed has repeatedly been used to justify oppression. European colonial powers carried crosses alongside rifles. Slaveholders distributed carefully edited religious texts that emphasized obedience while suppressing passages that threatened the legitimacy of slavery. Entire populations were informed that their suffering reflected divine will. Religion became not an explanation of reality but a mechanism for preserving hierarchy. What fascinates me is not that religion can be used for domination, but that virtually every system of meaning eventually can. The issue is not religion itself. The issue is power. Human beings possess an extraordinary talent for transforming beliefs into weapons.

The Abrahamic religions illustrate this tension particularly well. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam differ profoundly in doctrine, yet all emerge from a common desire to impose intelligibility upon existence. Judaism strikes me as deeply concerned with memory, continuity, and historical consciousness. Christianity often possesses a romantic quality, transforming suffering into redemption and sacrifice into transcendence. Islam appears grounded in discipline, principle, and submission to something greater than the individual self. Despite their differences, all three traditions confront the same fundamental anxiety: the terrifying possibility that existence may be meaningless. Their answers differ. Their question remains identical.

As an Egyptian, I have often found Western discussions of religion somewhat strange. Many of them assume that religion exists primarily as a private belief, something separate from culture, history, language, and identity. Yet in much of the Middle East these categories bleed into one another. Religion to Egyptians, at least, is not just a collection of metaphysical claims about the universe. It is embedded within memory, tradition, family structures, customs, and collective history. Even those who reject religion frequently find themselves inhabiting social worlds shaped by it. This does not place faith beyond criticism, but it does complicate the conversation. Religion is rarely just about God. It is also about how communities understand themselves, preserve themselves, and situate themselves within history.

What interests me even more, however, is the relationship between belief and identity. Consider race. Race is often treated as though it were a timeless biological reality, yet history reveals something far stranger. The categories themselves have shifted repeatedly. Entire groups that are now considered unquestionably white were once viewed as alien, inferior, or fundamentally different. Race functions less like a scientific fact and more like a social narrative, one with laws, institutions, myths, and rituals attached to it. It is a story that became so powerful people forgot it was a story. The consequences of that forgetting have shaped centuries of human history.

This is why I have always found certain conversations about racism intellectually frustrating. There is something deeply revealing about a society in which accusations of racism often generate more outrage than racism itself. "It hurts to be called racist" may very well be true, but it remains a curious response in a world where actual racial discrimination continues to shape material conditions, opportunities, and lived experiences. The discomfort of being associated with prejudice is frequently treated as more urgent than the reality of prejudice. Power possesses a remarkable ability to redirect attention away from itself.

One phrase that has always unsettled me is the claim that someone "doesn't see color." It is often presented as a virtue, a declaration of equality, but I have never found it particularly convincing. To say that one does not see color in a society that is still profoundly shaped by race is, in many ways, to refuse to see reality. Equality is not achieved by pretending differences do not exist. Equality is achieved by recognizing how those differences have been treated historically and continue to be treated in the present. A society in which people are affected differently by race cannot be understood through a philosophy of selective blindness. To ignore race is not necessarily to transcend racism; sometimes it is simply to ignore the conditions that allow racism to persist.

What interests me is that these categories rarely exist independently of one another. Ideas about race, culture, gender, sexuality, morality, and civilization are often treated as though they emerged separately, yet history suggests otherwise. In many societies, religious traditions, colonial projects, and racial hierarchies developed alongside one another, reinforcing shared ideas about what was considered normal, respectable, or desirable. The norm was never merely a neutral description of reality. It was something constructed. Those who existed outside it, whether because of race, culture, sexuality, or gender expression, were often positioned not simply as different but as deviations from an imagined standard. Questions of identity therefore become inseparable from questions of power.

This is why conversations about culture often become so contentious. I remember watching a TikTok video by a Black woman who argued that culture should be shared freely and that white women should not allow what she described as the "fragile ego of the Black community" to prevent them from participating in cultural practices often associated with Afro-Americans. She referenced things such as church fashion, bonnets, edges, braids, cornrows, and other cultural expressions. Some people agreed with her (white people). Others strongly disagreed. I am not Black, nor am I interested in positioning myself as an authority on what Afro-Americans should or should not find acceptable. What interested me was the underlying philosophical question.

Too often these debates are treated as though culture exists in a vacuum, detached from history, power, and material conditions. It does not. Culture travels through societies marked by conquest, segregation, slavery, colonialism, exclusion, and resistance. The exchange of culture is never merely an exchange of objects, aesthetics, or traditions; it occurs within a larger social landscape. A hairstyle, a garment, a musical genre, or a dialect carries with it a history, whether people acknowledge that history or not.

This is why I am skeptical whenever people reduce these conversations to simplistic slogans about sharing. Sharing between equals and sharing within a hierarchy are not necessarily the same phenomenon. When power is distributed unevenly, cultural exchange becomes entangled with questions of recognition, representation, ownership, and respect. The issue is rarely the object itself. The issue is the social context surrounding it.

White supremacy is not a relic of the past preserved in history books. It continues to manifest itself in visible ways, whether through organized extremist groups, racial discrimination, structural inequalities, or the persistence of ideologies that many would prefer to believe disappeared long ago. To discuss culture without discussing power is to discuss only half of the picture. Before asking whether culture should be shared, one must first ask under what conditions sharing occurs and who possesses the power to define the terms of that exchange.

Ultimately, I do not claim to possess the answer. My interest lies less in telling people what position they should hold and more in questioning assumptions. If there are Black readers, particularly Afro-Americans whose communities are most directly implicated in these debates, I would be far more interested in hearing their perspectives than asserting my own. What concerns me is not arriving at a comfortable conclusion but understanding why these conversations remain so difficult and what that difficulty reveals about the society in which they occur.

The same pattern emerges in discussions of queerness. One of the most curious features of contemporary conservatism is its tendency to reduce queer existence to sexuality alone. Entire lives become collapsed into a single dimension. Love, companionship, loneliness, friendship, family, culture, aesthetics, self-expression, and identity disappear beneath an obsessive fixation on sexual behavior. It is as though queer people are denied the complexity routinely granted to everyone else. Yet queerness has always been larger than sex. It concerns one's relationship to norms, expectations, and systems of social organization. It concerns what happens when a person exists outside categories that society insists are natural and eternal.

History repeatedly demonstrates that many supposedly eternal truths are neither eternal nor true. Ancient cultures often possessed understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity that refuse to fit comfortably into modern categories. The more history one reads, the more apparent it becomes that "normality" is often little more than a temporary arrangement mistaken for a universal principle. Every era imagines its values are self-evident. Every era eventually becomes a chapter in a history book.

Perhaps this is because certainty is among humanity's most seductive illusions. We desperately want reality to be simple. We want clear categories, definitive answers, and permanent foundations. Ambiguity makes us uncomfortable. Contradiction makes us anxious. Yet the deeper one investigates almost any subject, the more unstable everything becomes. Philosophy reveals uncertainty beneath certainty. Physics reveals uncertainty beneath matter. Psychology reveals uncertainty beneath identity. History reveals uncertainty beneath tradition.

One thing that has always irritated me is the growing tendency for people to boast that they independently arrived at ideas similar to those of famous philosophers when they were children. I have seen countless people, usually young women, proudly declare that at the age of ten they were already thinking about mortality, consciousness, existence, free will, or the possibility that reality itself might be an illusion. These statements are often presented as evidence of unusual intelligence. Yet I have never found them particularly impressive. Of course they thought about those things. Every child does. Every child eventually confronts the same fundamental mysteries that have occupied philosophers for thousands of years. The beginning of philosophy is not genius. It is curiosity. The remarkable thing is not that a child asks profound questions. The remarkable thing is that most adults eventually stop.

This is why I find it amusing when people boast that they had philosophical thoughts as children. Of course they did. Every child is a philosopher. Every child eventually confronts questions that have occupied humanity's greatest minds for thousands of years. Why do people die? Why do we exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does suffering exist? The beginning of philosophy is not intelligence. It is curiosity. The difference between a child and a philosopher is not that one asks questions while the other does not. The difference is that the philosopher refuses to stop.

The more philosophy I read, the less interested I become in answers. Answers have always struck me as strangely overrated. Every answer eventually becomes another question. Every certainty eventually encounters an exception. Every intellectual system eventually reaches its limits. Socrates understood this. Nietzsche understood this. Kierkegaard understood this. Camus understood this. The deepest thinkers rarely emerge with perfect solutions. They emerge with a heightened awareness of complexity.

Perhaps wisdom is not knowledge at all. Perhaps wisdom is the capacity to remain intellectually honest in the face of uncertainty. Perhaps maturity consists not in discovering the correct ideology, religion, or philosophy, but in resisting the temptation to worship one's own conclusions. Human beings have spent millennia searching for the final answer, and the result has been an endless procession of competing certainties. Religions rise and fall. Empires rise and fall. Ideologies rise and fall. What remains is the question itself.

Beneath all of these discussions religion, race, culture, queerness, identity, politics, and philosophy I suspect there exists a deeper metaphysical anxiety. Human beings are unique in that we are aware of our own existence while simultaneously being unable to explain it. We know that we are here, yet we do not know why. We can describe the mechanisms of reality with increasing precision, yet the existence of reality itself remains stubbornly mysterious. Every system of meaning, whether religious or secular, appears in some sense to be an attempt to negotiate this contradiction. We are creatures condemned to ask questions in a universe that rarely provides definitive answers.

And perhaps that is the most profound realization of all. Beneath every religion, every political movement, every philosophical system, every work of art, every revolution, every nation, and every identity lies the same small word. The word that children ask instinctively and adults spend their lives trying to suppress is "why." The word that has haunted humanity from the moment the first person looked into the night sky and wondered what they were seeing.

Why?

Perhaps the question is older than every answer. Perhaps it is deeper than every doctrine. Perhaps it is the closest thing humanity has ever possessed to something sacred.