It’s one thing to have an idea of where you’re heading but lose your way. It’s another to travel without any notion of your destination. If you don’t know where you’re headed, all your movements will be wasted efforts. Outwardly, things may seem to be going well in your life. You have a good job. The bills are paid. You can buy what you want. You have a “significant other.” But certain questions won’t go away: “Why am I here?” “What am I supposed to be doing?” “What happens when I die?” “Is there life after death?” “If there is, what should I be doing to prepare for it?” If you don’t have satisfactory answers for these questions, they will gnaw at your heart, no matter what other trappings of success you achieve. “Too much of nothing can make a man feel at ease.”
Science claims to provide a system for finding out what is real. The scientific method provides a very powerful tool for telling us how things work. But by its nature, it can’t answer questions like “Why am I here?” and the others above. Religions claim to answer these questions. They provide “maps” of reality. Having an accurate map is crucial to getting where you need to go. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that government made a policy of printing inaccurate maps. They figured accurate maps would help invading armies. A person trying to navigate by a Soviet map would see on the map that a certain highway went straight to his destination. But as he was driving along, he would find that it actually ended suddenly in a cornfield.
What if you were trying to pass through a piece of ground that has been planted with landmines? Trial and error would not be a good strategy. An accurate map becomes essential under such circumstances. Life presents us with constant choices. Some of the choices we make might be disastrous, but we may not find out until years later. When radium was first discovered no one knew it could cause cancer. Marie Curie, who discovered it, handled it constantly. More than thirty years after she won the Nobel Prize for physics, she died from leukemia, “exhausted and almost blinded, her fingers burnt and stigmatized by ‘her’ dear radium.”
Our Map, being the Qur’an (Book of God) and Hadeeth!
Without an accurate “map,” there are some choices that a person will only realize were wrong after dying.