God is Not Great

[Ghost14]

Re: God is Not Great

@BarbieCue

Tussi saray great ho, God di khair hai.

He’s Al-Ghani, the self-sufficient and the fact that people do worship him is because he’s Al-Hamid, the praiseworthy, not because he depends on our sajdas.

If one worships him falsely just to save his butt from hell, that ain’t going to work. Even the infamous Pharaoh, when he was about to drown, said “I believe that there is no god except Him whom the children of Israel believe in: I am of those who submit.” His last minute lame apology wasn’t accepted because he was being insincere just to save himself. So yeah you gotta have imaan. I might be praying 5 times a day because I’m scared of the azaab in the hereafter but if I didn’t have any imaan in Allah and His Rasool saw, none of the prayers would be qabool.

So people like the author with no imaan who will even question why God let someone scratch their lamborghini and break their heart are really doing themselves a favour by just being truthful and not bothering with religion. Why are they on a dawah mission of their own though I fail to understand.

In Hitchens’ mind, religion causes a lot of unnecessary conflict and divisions. He’s unquestionably unfair against Muslims, but that’s because he’s an imperialist.

@psyah

Peace Ghost14

Rather than considering it in temporal terms at a given instance in time … Consider it in perpetual terms … Man chooses, God Knows, man changes decisions, God Knows, man changes decision, God Knows, and on and on … Take this to infinitum and the result is both man has free will and God has full Knowledge … For God the past present and future is the SAME … If we can’t even rationalise this, we can’t possibly learn to understand the dynamics of the free will vs Divine Knowledge debate … But we can conclude using analogy that such is possible.

Alternatively, one can say that at each juncture or decision point, we become aware of alternate realities … Factor up all of the possible junctures and you have exponential growth of possibilities, God Knows them all … We merely choose one path to get to our end point … So one may imagine that a new ‘me’ comes into being upon each new decision that we make, but we are only aware of the ‘me’ that we are associated with in this consciousness.

I can’t accept “it’s not possible for us to understand it” as an answer. You say that God can see beyond our understanding, so what seems illogical to us is logical to him, but this is based on the presumption that God exists. The other explanation is that this is a genuine paradox in religious writings, and one can use this to conclude that religion (not God) may be man-made or influenced.

Your second explanation, the multi-verse theory, seems more logical and I’m more inclined to believe that, but this is something we are extrapolating from religious writing and recent scientific theories, not something that Medieval Islam talks about.

I’m not refuting anything, I honestly don’t know and would like to “Believe”, but I can’t ignore inconsistencies. As always, it is interesting talking about this with you psyah.