Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The Wrong Approach

The problem with people nowadays in relation to God and religion is the way they work it ‎out; more often than not people start the wrong way around. People have the habit of first ‎looking around them at things they comprehend and see and then trying to work out what ‎they cannot see. Let me explain, people always look at the world around them and from it ‎try to deduce the spiritual world beyond, so they look at the earth and try to deduce if ‎heaven exists. This method usually does not provide good results, because whatever the ‎deductions seem to be, they’re always incomplete. Starting out with what you see can lead ‎you anywhere. The better approach would be to assume that there is God and see what the ‎results will be, or assume there is no God and deduce how things should be, then perhaps ‎match it with what you have and from it determine what you’ve assumed wrong.‎

Of course some people claim they have made the assumptions I stated above, but have ‎failed to work in that direction. Let’s take for example how people approach religion, first ‎they take the words of any religious book as the absolute truth, and from it they work what ‎God is like. This is a very dangerous approach because when assuming there is God, there ‎can be no absolute guarantee that the book they’re reading is His word, and so the word of ‎God gives a wrong impression about God to those assuming he does exist, and totally ‎disproves the existence of God (in some cases) to those assuming he doesn’t exist.‎

‎(A very good example of people saying unreasonable things can be found here)‎

All this might be getting boring and a bit complicated.. I think it’s a bit too dense but here’s ‎what I mean, it would be much simpler to assume that God doesn’t exist and then reason as ‎to how the world will be like. It would be much simpler to assume that God does exist and ‎reason what the world would be like in his existence and what His words will be like. If we ‎try to imagine what God would do if he did exist it will save us a lot of trouble, and perhaps ‎then we can reason His words.‎

A debate struck up between me and a friend of mine in which I asked him about something. ‎So the first thing he answered me was “God said so”. Now I don’t know about you, but this ‎word infuriates me a bit, because at a time when people are claiming God said so many ‎things, you can’t base this as a source of your argument. I mean with so many books and so ‎many theories, let’s use that brain God gave us, he must have given it to us for a reason. ‎Perhaps not to understand everything but just enough to understand whether what we’re being ‎told can be true. So I told my friend, don’t explain to me by telling me God said so, explain ‎to me why God said so or would say so, let us reason why God would say this and let us ‎reach through the little logic we have why God told us this. So we sat down and examined ‎the issue from a social point of view, psychological point of view, scientific point of view ‎and we reasoned that God has a reason for saying this and that.‎

You see that’s the problem I’m talking about, people keep telling you because God said so.. ‎and while I know God must have said some things, I know that there are some means of ‎understanding part of God’s wisdom. It’s all about working the right way, sometimes ‎working backwards can give you an illogical god or even a contradicting god. ‎

I’m not going to get to detailed examples of what I mean but let me try to show something. ‎Let’s assume there was God, and there was a devil. Now what would God do to help ‎humans and what would the devil do to counter that plan assuming as well that we had free ‎will. I suppose that God would probably give people instructions on how to live and what ‎would be good for them, but the devil’s technique would be to cast doubt on those words, ‎and the best way for people to get lost is to be confused and not know what’s right from ‎what’s wrong. It’s like psychological warfare I suppose, each country releasing a set of press ‎releases and you can choose which to believe. Of course there are signs that tell you which is ‎true and which is not. ‎

I remember the war in Iraq, there were many statements made by the States regarding the ‎battles and there were statements made by Information minister Saeed Al Sahaaf of Iraq ‎regarding the same war. They were both conflicting and yet one was true and one was not so ‎true. I guess at some point people choose which they want to believe, what they wish to be ‎true, or what they were raised to believe.‎

So the point is simple, it’s all about the approach. Whenever people reason as to what God ‎might say, someone comes in and just says: No you infidels, God said so and so and so and ‎so as if it were definitive. ‎

To top this all off, I must add these excellent links for both believers and non believers. It’s ‎just a few things to show that theology is not that trivial.‎

If you think believers are naive click here.‎
If you think non believers are idiots click here.‎

Many people approach God and religion in what I view as a wrong way, but hey.. it’s my ‎blog and the only opinion that really matters is my own.‎