A Brief Reflection on Going Astray

For those who don’t believe, I argued before: there is such a thing as holding God in awe.  It is closest to us, to our heart and reason.  We forgot it.  This is our pain, we are forgetful.  However, we know well that we can’t ground ourselves—and we are inclined to forget this too or seek to ground it in some metaphysical, nature-worship, or scientific assumption.  We don’t know why we are here.  All our theories are guess-works and the best of them guide us to God.  God is the horizon which is the most real, as the biosphere that sustains a singing bird is more real than the singing.  But we are shortsighted and like a baby in the womb take the nearest—amniotic sac, as the most real, not seeing the mother, the father, the environment around mother that are even more real and don’t see that what is seemingly the farthest is the nearest—Being and God.  The surah Ta Ha continues with the story of Moses:

“Has the story of Moses come to you [Prophet]?  He saw a fire and said to his people, ‘Stay here––I can see a fire. Maybe I can bring you a flaming brand from it or find some guidance there.’  When he came to the fire, he was summoned, ‘Moses!  I am your Lord. Take off your shoes: you are in the sacred valley of Tuwa.  I have chosen you, so listen to what is being revealed.  I am God; there is no god but Me. So worship Me and keep up the prayer so that you remember Me.  The Hour is coming––though I choose to keep it hidden––for each soul to be rewarded for its labor.  Do not let anyone who does not believe in it and follows his own desires distract you from it, and so bring you to ruin.’” (20:9-16)    

Moses meets God in the sacred valley of Tuwa and God asks him to keep up the prayer so that he remembers God.  God warns him of the “Hour of Judgement” when our soul will be responsive to what we did.  We have again here the theme of forgetfulness.  What is this?!  Given that our ancestral Adam met God and prophets encountered God (for example, in the case of Moses) or God’s angels (most prophets of religions of the Book), why do we forget God?  In contradistinction to faith in God, that God exists and created us, whose seed is within us, and in the second creation we will come back to life and be judged based on our actions, the surah sharply posits only one option: following one’s own desires.  God exhorts Moses “do not let anyone who does not believe in it and follows his own desires distract you from it, and so bring you to ruin.”  

Why did I forget God?  The memory of God is within us.  “[Prophet], remember your Lord inwardly, in all humility and awe, without raising your voice, in the mornings and in the evenings– do not be one of the heedless.” (7:205)  We can’t help it.  If there is any sense of goodness or conscience is us, we experience God within us.  But we forget and follow our own desires and get lost.  “Being lost” is a general theme in the Quran and in each prayer, we ask God to "guide us to the straight path, those who incur no anger, and who have not gone astray".  

When I walked away from God, I found no one to help and guide me.  I lost guidance.  Then I resorted to worldly guidelines, to scientific understanding of the world.  But this was a faith, not investigation and observation of the world and nature, not rational criticism that in a healthy religion ought to be revered and promulgated.  We know now even seemingly disinterested scientific verification and theorization can go astray in what Heidegger calls “framing”—where only the quantifiable is real.  In another refection, I will discuss the falling state of natural sciences and technological advance and how while they are so powerful and can be used for life, have become destructive to life. 

I followed a metaphysical doctrine wrapped up in scientific jargons: materialism.  The delusion of scientific materialism is that only the causal interaction of dead atoms and particles can explain the world and our existence here.  Consequently, social relations have to be strictly grounded on economic exchanges of material and calculable parameters.  But I realized soon that reducing all ideas and social interaction to economy is one dimensional and fallacious. So, I looked for other “grounding” elements such as social function of superstructure, religions and ideologies, or relations of power in addition to economic factors.  I was enchanted by the partial heuristic explanatory power—not their quantifiability—of these theories and totalize them into a faith, as if economy, culture, relations of power, etc. have complete existential explanatory power.  So, in my reaction to religious excess, I throw the baby out with the bathwater, and brought faith in my disbelief in God and turned a blind eye to thousands of years of scriptures.  

Western Enlightenment is a double-edged sword.  “Release yourself from the tutelage of authorities: Think for yourself and decide for yourself”—can be a valuable guidepost in socio-legal-political decision making.  It can be a guidepost for spiritual investigation too, as the Buddha said “Be a lamp to yourself”, and as Sufism and all mystical traditions encourage believers to seek and desire God so deeply that instead of blind imitation (taqlid), they arrive at the experience of God through investigation (tahqiq, ejtehad), under the guidance of scriptures. 

But when Western Enlightenment became a faith in the metaphysical assumption of “autonomous subject”, it turned into what the Quran says: following one’s desires.  In reaction to religious bigotry and excess, Western Enlightenment gave rise to a new religion: scientism.  This new religion has faith in atheistic and secularized reason.  You can find the same faith in secularized reason in postmodernism despite their declaration of “the death of autonomous subject”.  There is no scientific ground for this faith, as Popper, Kuhn, and others rightfully acknowledged.  This is another “fiction” as Foucault said about his own philosophy.  All these emergent ideologies of displacement of faith from God to a worship of self, from Marx, Nietzsche, Dawkins, Wilson, Pinker, Harris, to even Chomsky and Foucault, are based on an impassioned disbelief in God and worshipping “humanism”.  In modernism, this faith in human in its random and arbitrary existence is disguised under faith in what is quantifiable and calculable, while this very faith can’t be grounded in any rational calculation.  And in postmodernism, it is dissolved into a wild and veiled relativism.  Now, we all can see that faith in “humans” rather than God ended up to the rise of empires, destruction of nature, and to nihilism and hedonism.  In this way, we came to a full circle and back to see clearly what would be the consequence of disbelief in God and lack of prayers: following our own desires.