Tom Facchine – The Comment Section #08 – Guilt Tripped By Family For Accepting Islam

			If you're a new Muslim, and you feel like your family is trying to guilt trip you about leaving your
previous faith or your previous theological commitments, then this is common because for most people
belonging to religion is just about your social relationships. It's not really about your
relationship to God. And so if you're looking at it as like, well, this is our family's religion, or
this is our tradition, this is our lineage, our heritage, in our culture, that's the only situation
in which guilt makes sense. But if you realize that your religion is actually your allegiance, and
your relationship to the Creator, then the primary concern becomes following the truth and not
		

			following what you were doing yesterday, or what your ancestors were doing. Or, you know, I come
from an Italian family, my family's Catholic, Christian, they have certain sort of associations and
culture and et cetera, et cetera. And every single holiday has this suite and that sort of thing
that they make and different foods and different, you know, commemorations and rituals and things
like that, if my relationship to faith is just about the social, then I might feel bad, leaving all
that behind, what are people going to think, but that's not what religion is, it's a latent benefit
of religion, it's a secondary benefit. You have all this social fabric and this kind of, you know,
		

			community and things like that. But that's not what it's really about religion. First and foremost
is about your relationship with your Creator, doing things, living a life that your Creator is going
to be happy with. Okay, so who cares if you get the approval of your family and everybody else, if
you're doing something that's making your Creator angry with you is this is an inversion of the
right priorities, it should be the other way around, we should be willing to do whatever makes our
Creator happy, even if it's going to get us blame from other people, even our families. And that's
not to say that you should be you know, belligerent or aggressive towards you know, your family or
		

			people of other faiths, but you need to explain to them that it's not about you. I didn't leave the
religion that I used to believe in because of you or anything that you did or to make you feel a
certain way I left it because I believe that this is what my creator wants, and that's a higher
priority.