Idinraha unshackled...

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January 08, 2006

Merits of God within the terrains of Reason

Yesterday, I wrote a rant ,THE WAY I SEE IT, about my vision of the life on this lonely planet. In the rant I also had many praises for Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, and his role in the peace process in Middle East. I also mentioned that as a Moslem I do pray for his well being and recovery. My friend Fereydoon, asked me in a comment why I call myself a Moslem, and how as a self claimed(I don't remember such claim though!) intellectual I could brand myself a Moslem.

Any body who has read my rants for the last year knows how I am wrestling with the presentation of my religion Islam in the world, and how I am desperately trying to hold on to what I have or Have had. These days more than ever the whole idea of religion and the necessity of it in our lives is on the attack. Again to some extent, the attack is coming from the conscious mind of the writer than any other source. The abstract ideas of religion has always been moked by the factual doubts and the intelligent inquiries of all, but now more than ever because of the rise of fundamentalism and the terror it has brought to the world, we feel the need to examine the whole phenomenon of Religion even further.

I have the habit of saying prayers under lips, while driving for the first ten minutes of my ride , no matter where I am going and I did that last night too. I had dinner with my In-laws, as we do every Saturday night, and then went home. Put on my pajamas and turned on the TV. What came up made me believe that they might be a divine order in making me think about my doubts further. On C-span, there was a speech and Q&A session with Sam Harris, He is a PhD in Nero science, who is studying to find the origins of the beliefs in human mind (Heavy)! He was talking about his new book, The End Of Faith: religion and terror, and the future of Reason. I felt ambushed, but he is a capable speaker, and he sounded good. There was no way avoiding it, so I sat and watched.

Afterward I did ask myself, so now what? There was no way to avoid his reasoning, and to any intelligent being his ideas had merit. On top of it all, Last week watching TV, I caught the tail end of a movie. What The Bleep Do We know. It was most interesting, filled with testimonials of PHD scholars, challenging the depth of our knowledge, and the rise of the consciousness in relation to study of Quantum Physics(Heavy again)!. I was guided to a site on the Internet by the movie credits, and there I logged in and found the sight also most interesting. You see as a contemparory man I do crave learning, knowing , as the most of you do. We all want to know: What are we doing here: What is the purpose. Sam Harris's reasoning for creation of religion by men, was that- we have to be honest with ourselves and our fellow men about our emotions and reality of our death, and since we have been shy about this, we have created religion to ease us through , and the interesting part is also that creation of the religions have made us lazy in pursuit of the ultimate truth.

Sam Harris thinks, we have a lot to do to find out, and he is pursuing his goal by more research in the Nero development of human brain to find out the origins of Beliefs. He does not claim to be a heretic or an atheist, since he does not believe in religions and God, he does not sincerely believe in anti God either. He thinks as intelligent people we have the capacity to use the tools of reasoning to find out the truth of our origins, and God. He also praises the rise of studies in Consciousness, the state in which we become more than all we are as a self. more than a unit, and mostly parts of a whole we are. It is the realization of this stage that has been hard for us, we have labeled it Spirituality, another abstract term, and have tried to reason our way through it. Sam Harris sees religion as a stepping stone that has barred us from reaching the consciousness, since contrary to religions, there is no difference in consciousness and no bigotry, no Jihads, Heretics, Crusades, Fanatics, or any other schools of thoughts that are embedded in Religions.

Mr Harris, sees all the religions, as means to divide the masses, and differentiate amongst them. with ultimate cruelty of inhalation for any one or sects that would not believe in that particular religion. I do admit that this particular part of religions is egotistic, and divisive, and religions, or any schools of thoughts we adhere to should not be devisive since they do not better our lives by dividing us. Now lets look at it differently. I have seen in Quran, and it is on the first page of most of the Quranic sites that Islam does not condone terrorism, or killing another human beings for any reason but in defense of one's life. However we have heard through Hadises(proverbs), credited to Mohammad, our prophet, that anyone who does not believe in God is a heretic and If we can not pursue them to become believers, they can be killed. That is the same in Christianity, and Judaism. They only believe that their own believers can be accepted to Heaven, and the rest are only worthy of Hell. That is the most troublesome part of any religion to me.

So what to do, read more, pursue different venues of reasoning, and try to understand the meaning of our little adventure on earth, while holding to some of what we are brought up with, the part that points to kindness, generosity, truth, and happiness. For the time being I do tell myself that the ultimate sign of God is the consciousness, and because of lack of understanding and limited intelligent of the audience and their imaginations, we have been represented by the whole idea of God, Evil, Heaven, and Hell, although I am not at ease with this either.

Posted by Idinraha at January 8, 2006 12:43 PM

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Posted by: LiveLife at January 9, 2006 12:12 AM

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