Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Poem....jeez so unislamic !!!
Peace Rocking vibes
Care to qualify your statement?
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
you have expressed your opinion but you have not cited anything that would give credence to that. anyway, it could be argued that morality is learned phenomenon. however our genes might have to do a lot with how we learn it. if a hundred people are given the same kind of education will they all turn to think the same thing? i think not. as an example i would like to cite the Pakistani system of education and our society. our education is backward and very bigoted and our culture is narrominded. yet some people who go through this educational system will turn out to be bigots, others are just liberal. and then there are some in between those two extremes. what I am trying to say is that people learn differently from their environments. we respond to stimuli and you know that. but all of us will react to the same kind of thing differently. some laugh at the scene of a murder, others will just laugh. given the same kind of circumstances we learn different things. and learning is linked with your genes. so morality, in a way, could be linked with the genes too. otherwise we will all think and feel and act in the same way.
Peace jaanaan
According to personality traits you are correct in that scientifically it has been demonstrated that certain genetic formation increase certain likelihoods of characteristic behaviour. There are three identified personality traits.
However, you have underestimated and over generalised the environmental factors. People living in the same town may have different environments if you consider the type of family you are from. There are a lot more factors to consider for environment.
Also being prone to a given personality only means that those people must try either more or less to emanate the required behaviour type. At the end the way we behave is and can be a conscious effort and that is what can be acquired through teaching and learning. If we conform to our basic makeup which most people do because they do not know any better then you will observe the behaviour that is expected based on the personality type.
... For the subject at hand it is important to note that people may not be able to rid themselves of belief per se, but established religion may be a thing of the past in years to come. Humans may think that is evolution and improvement but time will let them know that it is a step backward for the progress of humanity.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Do you believe the victims of the Salem witch hunt were able to miraculously fly on brooms? Do you believe that Uri Geller has miraculously found the Fountain of Youth? Do you believe that the Christian Scientists can pray away a broken bone?
If you do, you probably also believe that Jesus walked on water, Moses parted the Red Sea, and other such tales.
Take any prophet or miracle worker, or psychic or whoever claims to have supernatural powers, place them in a completely empty, unrigged room and then let's see them perform miracles at will. It has never been done. The James ***** Foundation is offering, I think 100,000 or 1 million dollars to whoever can prove psychic or supernatural powers. No one has won the prize, because as soon as they were taken out of their church or temple or whatever, and put in a room and asked to work miracles, they couldn't.
If I can not believe that miracle workers nowadays can perform miracles and wonders without resorting to trickery, how am I supposed to believe people who told people who told people who wrote it down in a book when they say someone did something wonderfully cool thousands of years ago?
"But, oh," you'll say, "We know they did it because we read it out of the Bible or the Quran. And we know the Quran can't be wrong because it was written by God, and God can't be wrong because it says in the Quran that God can't be wrong."
That's called circular reasoning.
I can't explain how they performed the miracles since I wasn't watching. However, since people were especially stupid and superstitious in those times, it's fairly easily to believe that, like most legends and fables, stories got passed around and exaggerated until you have the equivalent of Paul Bunyan running around and digging the Great Lakes.
I believe a lot of these fables began as coincidence. For example, yesterday, my wireless stopped working, just milliseconds before my hand touched the reset button, it came back on. Now, if I were a superstitious sort of fellow, I could make the utterly ridiculous claim that I have miracle powers. I could really persuade myself that that was so, and from then on, any time a coincidence or "lucky" event happens, it will fuel my belief that I somehow caused it.
Now imagine if I can get a few of my close friends to believe that I have miraculous powers. These friends tell their friends, and in order to impress their friends maybe my friends exaggerate a bit, so their friends will also believe. On and on and on it goes, until I build myself a church and start healing people who were never sick, or raising dead people who I paid to lie really still, or not even doing any of the above and simply saying that I did it, and because people want so badly to believe that I have God's power in my hands, they accept it by blind faith.
Now suppose I die. My followers remember the wonderful things that I did, and start to write them down. They write down everything, including the innocently exaggerated stories of how I killed twenty men by looking at them. 3,000 years later, it is 5007 A.D. and someone finds my followers writings, and really likes them, and also starts to believe that it's real and is the truth of God's spoken word and bla bla bla bla, until we have the Church of WorshipMe, and I have become the embodiment of God come down to Earth to save mankind.
Who knows, perhaps in the future some scientist will stumble across one of these incredibly stupid Chuck Norris fan sites, and believe that Chuck Norris actually did the things his moron fans say he did. Imagine what hell would break out on Earth, if he actually started a Chuck Norris religion.
There's an equal lack of evidence for, and an equal amount of faith required to believe, in either THEORY. I disbelieve both, and I don't particularly care about where we came from. I was simply mentioning that he said theory as if it were a bad thing, which it isn't.
How did Socrates think the thoughts he did? How did Da Vinci come up with the ideas that he had? How did Isaac Newton discover gravity? Was it a miracle or was it a brain? To say that God exists because people knew things 1400 years ago that we are only now discovering is ridiculous.
We now know the Earth is round. But in 330 BC, Aristotle said the Earth was round. Does that mean that Aristotle is a prophet of God? No. It means Aristotle was simply using his brain.
Peace worshipyourself
I find your pattern of reasoning somewhat in the wrong order. You make claim to the dregs of history and performers as a basis for the belief in miracles and then you follow it up with established world religion beliefs regarding miracles that have been cited in scripture. Completely two different kettles of fish.
We have no reason to believe in the conjuring tricks that you cite about the likes of Yuri Geller et al. Nor does our faith require us to believe in them. It requires us to believe in miracles that have come from God, through the prophets of God. None of the people you cite from the contemporary world make claim to being prophets, and even if they did they would be liars due to clear evidence our finality in the person of Muhammad (SAW).
You are also misled about the source of miracles we don't believe Moses (AS) did the miracle from himself rather we believe it was God through Moses (AS).
You are also misled about the reason for miracles. Miracles you will find in scripture will never be performed for entertainment however the other people are just doing it for that. Miracles are meant for a reason either to provide evidence to support the prophet of his mission as one of truth, but that is the lesser reason, the other reason is to provide a defence mechanism when the plan of God must be completed. In some cases prophets were killed but that was wholly in accordance to the plan of Allah (SWT).
Miracle birth of Jesus (AS) = evidence of connection with God
Healing powers of Jesus (AS) = evidence of connection with God
The Ascension of Jesus (AS) = to save Jesus (AS)
The cooling of the fire of Abraham (AS) = to save Abraham (AS)
Spider and nesting pidgeons = To save Muhammad (SAW)
The list goes on ... you will find the miracles fit in these two categories.
When it comes to explanations ... That a miracle is not explanable then upon closer inspection nothing as a phenomenon that is occurring all the time can be explained either. Gravity exists because we measure it's effects how or why it exists is a question left unanswered by science.
We don't have to go far to understand that belief is an integral part of humans and without it we can't even work the science that most faithless people profess to.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
The only definition of God which was ever acceptable to me was "One in all and ALL in ONE"...and "Whoever knows God becomes God".
Peace ssingh
Muslims pray that we are protected from the path taken by those people who went astray.
Going astray means that they once had true knowledge.
Your first statement is similar to the Christian One in three and three in One. It doesn't make sense but they accept it like you have accepted yours. However, here is the reconciliation.
One has knowledge of all and all has been created by One ...
This can be an alternative meaning to your statement which is compatible with the sense and wisdom of Islam.
For your second statement ... knowledge is power ... to be powerful is to be God-like ... so all that needs to be done in your statement is the second God becomes god ...
Whoever knows God becomes god ... in that becomes powerful, because the knowledge of God provides the impetus to worship God and thus provides the worshipper to seek the help from God and thus whatever is done in the way of God will be backed by God.
It is your understanding of the statement that has led you to stray from the straight path of God, not the statements that you have written ... So ... care to accept this reconciliation as invitation to the Straight Path? You choose ... and let God be my witness.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Peace worshipyourself
I find your pattern of reasoning somewhat in the wrong order. You make claim to the dregs of history and performers as a basis for the belief in miracles and then you follow it up with established world religion beliefs regarding miracles that have been cited in scripture. Completely two different kettles of fish.
We have no reason to believe in the conjuring tricks that you cite about the likes of Yuri Geller et al. Nor does our faith require us to believe in them. It requires us to believe in miracles that have come from God, through the prophets of God. None of the people you cite from the contemporary world make claim to being prophets, and even if they did they would be liars due to clear evidence our finality in the person of Muhammad (SAW).
You are also misled about the source of miracles we don't believe Moses (AS) did the miracle from himself rather we believe it was God through Moses (AS).
You are also misled about the reason for miracles. Miracles you will find in scripture will never be performed for entertainment however the other people are just doing it for that. Miracles are meant for a reason either to provide evidence to support the prophet of his mission as one of truth, but that is the lesser reason, the other reason is to provide a defence mechanism when the plan of God must be completed. In some cases prophets were killed but that was wholly in accordance to the plan of Allah (SWT).
Miracle birth of Jesus (AS) = evidence of connection with God Healing powers of Jesus (AS) = evidence of connection with God The Ascension of Jesus (AS) = to save Jesus (AS) The cooling of the fire of Abraham (AS) = to save Abraham (AS) Spider and nesting pidgeons = To save Muhammad (SAW)
The list goes on ... you will find the miracles fit in these two categories.
When it comes to explanations ... That a miracle is not explanable then upon closer inspection nothing as a phenomenon that is occurring all the time can be explained either. Gravity exists because we measure it's effects how or why it exists is a question left unanswered by science.
We don't have to go far to understand that belief is an integral part of humans and without it we can't even work the science that most faithless people profess to.
My point is that there is no need to believe a seemingly miraculous event is proof that a God exists, when we can find other explanations as to why something happened.
Many religions use "miracles" as proof that their God exists. If we are going to accept that miracles are possible, then we must accept that all miracles are possible, which leads to a wonderful conflict between the various True and One and Only religions.
I take it you believe the Aztec religion is false. But how can you say the Aztec religion is false when it is backed by claims very similar to the ones your religion is founded on, ranging from Creation of the Earth to giving miracles to its followers to providing a lovely afterlife for them when they die?
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
My point is that there is no need to believe a seemingly miraculous event is proof that a God exists, when we can find other explanations as to why something happened.
Many religions use "miracles" as proof that their God exists. If we are going to accept that miracles are possible, then we must accept that all miracles are possible, which leads to a wonderful conflict between the various True and One and Only religions.
I take it you believe the Aztec religion is false. But how can you say the Aztec religion is false when it is backed by claims very similar to the ones your religion is founded on, ranging from Creation of the Earth to giving miracles to its followers to providing a lovely afterlife for them when they die?
Peace worshipyourself
You see that is where you fault yourself. You say we can find other explanations as to why something happened. Of course you can but that is conjecture not science. The other explanations need to be ratified with evidence. The parting of the sea happened by this such and such phenomenon, okay demonstrate it!
Okay for the things you can't explain or demonstrate you either say ... we haven't worked it out yet ... there goes our evolutionary development we can't even work out age old tricks they used to call miracles but that 'yet' statement is one of belief or you abandon the sciptural statement as false; as a myth again without proof.
So how does one explain how the Isralites escaped the Pharaoh from Egypt finding their way to to the promised land across the water? You will have to come up with scientific proof that they travelled by boat, if that is your claim etc. Otherwise you are making blind statements of disbelief.
Then you have to contend with all the historical and archaelogical evidence in favour of the miracle. Such as the lungs of the Pharaohs body being filled with water and that was the cause of his death. He was not found in the water he was found embalmed in a chamber, so the people took his body and buried it, after he drowned ... how so ... read the Qur'an and you will find out.
You need to start comparing apples with apples and you need to think through your arguments more constructively sweeping statements like 'can be explained by other means' shows the lack of research you have done regarding miracles.
Also read up in a dictionary the meaning of the word phenomenon ... that is a good starting point.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Do you believe the victims of the Salem witch hunt were able to miraculously fly on brooms? Do you believe that Uri Geller has miraculously found the Fountain of Youth? Do you believe that the Christian Scientists can pray away a broken bone?
Again you are confusing miracle with other things. Miracles are feats performed by only Prophets (who otherwise have no extraordinary powers), and God enables them to do it. Miracles as Br. Psyah stated fall into the two broad categories i.e. prove the truth in Gods message or defend it. Every example you are quoting has nothing to do with religion or serve its purpose. None of those people claim Prophethood.
Anyway, I am not aware that the suspects in the Salem witch hunt ever flew on brooms and Uri Gellar is also controversial and admits that his tricks can be performed by magicians. The prophets who performed miracles never even took credit for it, interestingly.
If you do, you probably also believe that Jesus walked on water, Moses parted the Red Sea, and other such tales.
I believe it when it served the purpose of spreading Gods word.
Take any prophet or miracle worker, or psychic or whoever claims to have supernatural powers, place them in a completely empty, unrigged room and then let's see them perform miracles at will. It has never been done. The James ***** Foundation is offering, I think 100,000 or 1 million dollars to whoever can prove psychic or supernatural powers. No one has won the prize, because as soon as they were taken out of their church or temple or whatever, and put in a room and asked to work miracles, they couldn't.
If I can not believe that miracle workers nowadays can perform miracles and wonders without resorting to trickery, how am I supposed to believe people who told people who told people who wrote it down in a book when they say someone did something wonderfully cool thousands of years ago?
As you say it yourself, these people are entertainers but not representatives of God. Infact Islam differentiates between miracles and magic. So it is not wrong to sya that some tricks are performed though original magic and some are illusions. Miracles have never been performed in lieu of entertainment, you seem to blend the two together. Magic is not the precursor to faith in a religion and even in religion miracles are not precursors to believing in them but rather a warning. The miracles worked by Prophets to defend the faith were not show business but preludes to destruction of nations once they demanded such proof. I don't see any nations getting destroyed for questioning todays magicians if they were performing miracles to spread Gods word.
So why is it that these miracle workers have only been associated with spreading the word of God on earth and history does not remember them as entertainers?
"But, oh," you'll say, "We know they did it because we read it out of the Bible or the Quran. And we know the Quran can't be wrong because it was written by God, and God can't be wrong because it says in the Quran that God can't be wrong."
That's called circular reasoning.
Yes it is circular reasoning the way you present it. However if it isn't in the scriptures then CAN GOD BE WRONG?
I can't explain how they performed the miracles since I wasn't watching. However, since people were especially stupid and superstitious in those times, it's fairly easily to believe that, like most legends and fables, stories got passed around and exaggerated until you have the equivalent of Paul Bunyan running around and digging the Great Lakes.
I believe a lot of these fables began as coincidence. For example, yesterday, my wireless stopped working, just milliseconds before my hand touched the reset button, it came back on. Now, if I were a superstitious sort of fellow, I could make the utterly ridiculous claim that I have miracle powers. I could really persuade myself that that was so, and from then on, any time a coincidence or "lucky" event happens, it will fuel my belief that I somehow caused it.
Now imagine if I can get a few of my close friends to believe that I have miraculous powers. These friends tell their friends, and in order to impress their friends maybe my friends exaggerate a bit, so their friends will also believe. On and on and on it goes, until I build myself a church and start healing people who were never sick, or raising dead people who I paid to lie really still, or not even doing any of the above and simply saying that I did it, and because people want so badly to believe that I have God's power in my hands, they accept it by blind faith.
Now suppose I die. My followers remember the wonderful things that I did, and start to write them down. They write down everything, including the innocently exaggerated stories of how I killed twenty men by looking at them. 3,000 years later, it is 5007 A.D. and someone finds my followers writings, and really likes them, and also starts to believe that it's real and is the truth of God's spoken word and bla bla bla bla, until we have the Church of WorshipMe, and I have become the embodiment of God come down to Earth to save mankind.
Who knows, perhaps in the future some scientist will stumble across one of these incredibly stupid Chuck Norris fan sites, and believe that Chuck Norris actually did the things his moron fans say he did. Imagine what hell would break out on Earth, if he actually started a Chuck Norris religion.
There's an equal lack of evidence for, and an equal amount of faith required to believe, in either THEORY. I disbelieve both, and I don't particularly care about where we came from. I was simply mentioning that he said theory as if it were a bad thing, which it isn't.
How did Socrates think the thoughts he did? How did Da Vinci come up with the ideas that he had? How did Isaac Newton discover gravity? Was it a miracle or was it a brain? To say that God exists because people knew things 1400 years ago that we are only now discovering is ridiculous.
We now know the Earth is round. But in 330 BC, Aristotle said the Earth was round. Does that mean that Aristotle is a prophet of God? No. It means Aristotle was simply using his brain.
Aristotle and Socrates were not illiterate people. And none of what they said was given as fact but as proposed theories based on observations. And his observing that the world can be round is no miracle because he stated his observations. Interestingly, you are pressed against the same argument you gave i.e. muslims will say so because it is written in the Quran and now you are professing beliefs about Aristotle because history books say so. How am I to believe that this information about them was not interjected later on into the original sources.
Give me examples of where people are not life long researchers of a field or practitioners of a certain art and then they achieved something miraculous in your argument. Aristotle a scientist/philosopher, Socrates a philosopher, Uri Gellar a magician, Salem witch hunt suspects were afflicted with unexplainable epileptic seizures (whats the miracle here), Chuck Norris a martial artist.
Now prophets (I don't think this is even worth the comparison but ...), Moses PBUH a farmer and couldn't even speak right parted the sea with a staff, could cause a lifeless piece of wood come alive into a snake, Jesus PBUH a peasant spoke as a new-born infant, walked on water, raised the dead, Muhammad PBUH conveyed a message with knowledge that they could not have possibly ever had in the middle of a desert i.e. stages of embryionic development, fresh water and salt water divide, rain is formed from between two clouds (electrostatic discharge between them), could tell what people had conversed in secret while he was in different city or dwelling, augment food and water etc. Tell me how many of the magicians or entertainers of today can do that without having studied or spent their lives in their respective disciplines do that. Man walked the moon after years and years of technological development and research or did Neil Armstrong just get up one day and beamed up there like he was on an episode of star trek.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Br. Psyah very nice answers.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Talk about apples vs. apples.
This whole discussion of relating phenomenon or man made achievements vs miracles isn't relevant. The things worshipme is bringing up are part of recorded history with artifacts and tangible proof that can be proven scientifically. Miracles from holy books are unsubstantiated beliefs based on nothing other than faith. From a non-believer's POV, they amount to nothing more than fairy tales.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
The only definition of God which was ever acceptable to me was** "One in all and ALL in ONE"**...and "Whoever knows God becomes God".
he is not one of the three musketeers:)]
ps: i know the wording of the three musketeers is a little different.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Talk about apples vs. apples.
This whole discussion of relating phenomenon or man made achievements vs miracles isn't relevant. The things worshipme is bringing up are part of recorded history with artifacts and tangible proof that can be proven scientifically. Miracles from holy books are unsubstantiated beliefs based on nothing other than faith. From a non-believer's POV, they amount to nothing more than fairy tales.
And no one is asking non-believers to have faith because of these miracles. We have faith that these miracles occured because we believe in God, not believe in God because we think these miracles happened.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
he is not one of the three musketeers:)]
.
Ha ha ha....this has to be the cleverest funniest rejoinder! (I'm not kidding)
Unless you think god is a candy bar
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
you have expressed your opinion but you have not cited anything that would give credence to that. anyway, it could be argued that morality is learned phenomenon. however our genes might have to do a lot with how we learn it. if a hundred people are given the same kind of education will they all turn to think the same thing? i think not. as an example i would like to cite the Pakistani system of education and our society. our education is backward and very bigoted and our culture is narrominded. yet some people who go through this educational system will turn out to be bigots, others are just liberal. and then there are some in between those two extremes. what I am trying to say is that people learn differently from their environments. we respond to stimuli and you know that. but all of us will react to the same kind of thing differently. some laugh at the scene of a murder, others will just laugh. given the same kind of circumstances we learn different things. and learning is linked with your genes. so morality, in a way, could be linked with the genes too. otherwise we will all think and feel and act in the same way.
Sigh! I replied to this post earlier but because of network connectivity issue, my reply got lost. I just managed to gathere courage to reply back AGAIN.
Anyway! As it is only my opinion, behind which though I have put a lot of thought effort, I don't expect others to agree to it. I might very well be wrong in my understanding of things, but this is what I think.
Education is, but one, phenomenon which contributes to personality development. Genes do have effect on personality but they way you are presenting its link to morality does not make much sense to me.
In the last 1000 years (an infinitesimally short time for gene evolution), our moral standards have changed from black to white to grey. If morality was related to genes, we wouldn't have changed anything. Human response to simple natural stimuli (like hunger, pain, sex, etc) will always be the same . However, ones response to complex situation depends on ones learned behavior. To me morality is an effort by the society to prevent humans to respond to their natural stimuli.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
In the last 1000 years (an infinitesimally short time for gene evolution), our moral standards have changed from black to white to grey. If morality was related to genes, we wouldn't have changed anything. Human response to simple natural stimuli (like hunger, pain, sex, etc) will always be the same . However, ones response to complex situation depends on ones learned behavior. To me morality is an effort by the society to prevent humans to respond to their natural stimuli.
Peace WitchDr
Islam defines for Muslims the existence of two natural stimuli categories ... The good and the bad ... The fitra and the selfish desires (nufs 'Ummara).
So yes ... morality can be a form of subduing the nufs in to a conformance with only those aspects of out natures that are in our higher interests defined to us by God and ratified by us in our spiritual, physical and mental walks of life.
Re: In the year 2507 - there will be no religions
Science is a self correcting mechanism. As new discoveries emerge, older theories are tossed away. Religious scripts are fixed, however their interpretations seem to change with time. I think religion is following science., not in its enterity, but just to pick up some pieces, to satisfy its audience.