You’re free to believe what you want to believe, but I personally only found happiness after becoming an atheist and not having to deal with the various burdens of any religion. It’s a profoundly positive experience when you don’t have to worry about offending a nonexistent deity.
Then there’s probably nothing anyone can write to change your mind. But maybe you can amuse me and respond to my earlier post anyway.
If man doesn’t reside anywhere, then he is nowhere, but I wouldn’t apply those conditions to God, because God is not man, and man is not God. Allah is Al-Wahid - The Unique.
Allah describes himself in the Qur’aan:
“Say! He is Allah, the One! The Eternally Besought of all! He does not beget, nor is He begotten. And there is nothing comparable to Him.” Surah 112
Therefore, any instance where we try to apply the limitations of man to God, and try to understand him such, we mislead ourselves. I wholeheartedly agree that everybody has the right to believe in whatever they want to, and I never stated otherwise. Allah addresses this matter as well:
Say: O disbelievers! I worship not that which ye worship; Nor worship ye that which I worship. And I shall not worship that which ye worship. Nor will ye worship that which I worship. Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion. Surah 109
As long as there are muslims, there will be non-muslims. That’s just the way it is.
It isn’t my position or anybody elses to dictate who will enter the Garden or the Fire, that is the sole authority of Allah. I believe in Allah and who He says He is in His book, and if He says He is All-Just and All-Merciful, then I have faith that He will never oppress His creation and give everyone their just due. That is the point of Iman.
You may think that the punishment of someone with Hellfire for not believing in God/Allah is cruel and unjust, but have you ever thought of the flipside of that equation? In order to enter the Garden and benefit from His infinite Grace and Blessings, all Allah is asking from you is to believe in Him as your Lord and Creator - because Allah promised mankind that he would never eternally punish someone with the Fire if they believed in him with sincerity, no matter how many sins they may have accumulated throughout their life in this world. Even if they had to sit in the fire for a million years, if that sinner had an atoms worth of belief in his creator inside of him, he or she would eventually be with their Lord, because that is what has been promised to them.
Now what about yourself? If someone wiped out your entire family by murdering them in cold-blood, could you ever find it in your heart to have mercy on them, even if they sincerely repented to you and acknowledged their faults? Probably not, and that, in a nutshell, is the difference between the mercy of man, and the Mercy of Allah.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! I haven’t done anything so extreme to Allah! I’ve just refused to acknowlege him as my lord.
If someone refuses to acknowlege ME as his lord, I’ll let him live out his life unmolested. I won’t make him burn in hellfire for even ten seconds, let alone a million years. Every man has a right to rule himself in my book. None of this bowing down to someone else.
So clearly I’m far more merciful than Allah. From what you describe he seems like a pretty mean, vindictive dude. A million years of suffering for not submitting to his authority! That’s some stone cold shit right there.
You don’t see the circular problem here? How can I oblige a being with His request if I first haven’t been convinced He exists? If I come to the conclusion that there isn’t enough evidence for belief, can I force myself to believe? Should I force myself to believe if it were possible? How could a just God possibly punish someone so brutally for not coming to a conclusion and be just and merciful?
By his own admission Allah is not a just and merciful God. Therefore he is not worthy of worship.
Nothing at all wrong with criticizing religious beliefs. Happens around here all the time. The problem I see is in this statement
We’ve all heard the traditional arguments about the crusades and Islamic terrorists. IMO what we see is a race in the process of growth. Religion has overwhelmingly dominated the largest percentage of mankind for many generations. Still, with all that garbage, mankind has grown and our moral system has improved. Is that the garbage out?
I’d agree that for the sake of human growth Religion does need to be challenged and beliefs examined within the parameters of what facts we have. I think that’s a positive thing. The reality is that certain questions remain unanswered the main one being. Does God exist in some form? Or , does God belief still serve a useful purpose for mankind? I doubt there’s an obvious easy answer.
I wouldn’t call it trolling, but discussions of angels and pinheads always struck me as kinda pointless, as any attempt to reconcile religious fantasy with prosaic reality. If religion is kept purely in the philosphical sphere, debating big-issue questions like the meaning of life and whatnot, I’ve no problem with it. It’s when it starts sneaking into issues of science and law that I get uneasy.
It was a response to post #98
Well that would be an ad hominum argument, so not all that convincing. Perhaps you could take a moment to point out why it’s nonsense, or cite someplace in America Alone where he’s lying or even mistaken.
And it’s not Mark Steyn’s reputation that matters. He makes a pretty good case, with lots of statistics, that majority Muslim governments are not democratic and suck in general. If you can point out where the stats are wrong I’d be interested.
If Allah was truly merciful, he would not punish people for disbelief. Forgiving all atrocities as long as you worship him just means he is self-centered.
Indeed it was. My humble opinion on the fellow, probably inappropriate of me to bother intejecting, since I really have no interest in debating the matter. I’ve done the arguments over the relative merits or lack thereof of Islam in one fashion or another on this board enough times in past years that I’ve long since lost interest in continuing to do so ( though never say never, I guess ). But then I’m not always as rigorous about resisting the temptation to state opinions in GD as perhaps I should be. Character flaw, I’m sure.
I was mostly bemused by this thread, which as phrased by the OP seemed just a little disingenuous to me, as I stated. But I will remove myself from it with my apologies for the disruption.
I don’t think so. You generally display an exemplary self-restraint when it comes to expressing your opinions (as opposed to discussing factual matters).
First, the question was "how many angels can dance on the point of a needle?", not on the head, (and, apparently, not on a pin).
Second, it was never a serious issue. It was a joke lampooning philosophical, (not theological), thought games that happened to rely on a concept taken from religion. The Master speaks.
I know, but the “head” version has become more familiar and what difference does it make, anyway?
This particular discussion may have had a satirical origin, but it’s not really any different than any speculation on what the physical nature of God might be, or how God interacts with or brings about physical changes to the universe, or how the afterlife “works”.
It’s easy enough to simply cast God as an intensely personal thing that exists solely within the soul of each individual, etc. as at least one Doper has done repeatedly. It gets a little more complicated when any attempt is made to increase God’s reality.
blinkthrice, how do you feel about the apostasy issue? In reading up on it, it struck me pretty hard as an obvious disincentive to converting to Islam: you can’t convert back. Sure, not every former Muslim gets judged apostate, and every apostate doesn’t get beheaded. But as I understand it, whether it’s enforced by an Islamic state, righteous neighbors, or not at all, it is a Muslim belief that death is the appropriate punishment for apostasy.
I’d have a hard time buying into this for two reasons: 1) thinking of my own ass, and 2) it doesn’t seem right.
In fact, the wikipedia page on apostasy in Islam cites discouraging those who aren’t truly commited as part of the justification of the death penalty for apostasy. There seems to be an attitude of “you practice your religion, and I’ll practice mine, but if you start practicing mine and then renounce it, I’m not going to be so tolerant.”
Just barely missed the edit window, but I should add that I know this isn’t a universal Muslim belief, but it is a common enough one that people do get killed for it, whereas (for example) Christians face no real danger of being stoned to death for working on Sunday.
Okay, let’s say there is a Source of Everything, and call it “God.” I agree that such an entity would be no more understandable to us than calculus is to an ameoba. Our brains just aren’t capable of understanding such a thing, though we try.
I always want to ask, WHERE was this Source when it decided to create the universe? What environment did it exist in? How long did it exist before creating our universe? Either this Source lived in some sort of incomprehensible hyper-dimensional setting (in which case, where that THAT come from?) of which our universe is a small offshoot. Or the Source just “always was,” somehow, in which case we’re talking about a thing so interwoven with the fabric of everything that it’s closer to being something like, say, electromagnetism than it is to being the person-type god depicted in books like the Koran or the Book of Mormon.
I just can’t believe that the priority of such an incredibly complex “Source” is to keep women in scarves and long-sleeves at all times, regardless of how hot the weather is or what sport or activity they’re engaged in, while men are free to wear pretty much whatever is practical or convenient. I can’t believe such a Source wants people to line up in rows and stick their butts in the air five times a day. That all just seems too silly for words. I can’t believe that such a Source would need something as clumsy as a book communicate, much less a book as repetitive and poorly structured as the Koran.
If it’s important for you to believe in one God, then why not just believe that there’s one God, and that books like the Koran and Book of Mormon and Bible are the naturally flawed human attempts to understand what we can’t understand? Why saddle yourself with the sexist and tribal baggage that any one specific faith may have picked up over the centuries?
Well of course mankind is going to grow in knowledge and advance throughout the ages, religion or not. The question is, is religion making the world a better place? Look at virtually every problem in the Middle East, and what the problems stem from (religion). Look at how religion has halted scientific advancement throughout the years. We still have a ridiculous amount of people in this world who thinks evolution is a farce, all due to their silly religious beliefs somehow invalidating modern science (the same science they accept for medicine and technology, but refuse to believe when it comes to biology).
The hypothetical is, how would the world be without religion? Would we be even better? I tend to think so, because when you’re not hating on homosexuals or hating on people of differing beliefs etc., you tend to get a lot more productive shit done.