A Brief Reflection on Abraham's Rebellion

The surah Marayam (Mary, 19) continues with a passage on Abraham.  The encounter between Abraham and his father is telling.  I couldn’t understand and relate to it before God’s grace set me straight—and I hurt my body/soul in the path of ignorance, as whatever we do, we do to our own body/soul.  Our body registers every single moment, thought, word, and action and creates duality and chasm between our original purity and defilement.  And, I have had to take the reverse path to undo the evil with good, to restore my body and soul:

“Mention too, in the Quran, the story of Abraham. He was a man of truth, a prophet. He said to his father, ‘Father, why do you worship something that can neither hear nor see nor benefit you in any way? Father, knowledge that has not reached you has come to me, so follow me: I will guide you to an even path. Father, do not worship Satan– Satan has rebelled against the Lord of Mercy. Father, I fear that a punishment from the Lord of Mercy may afflict you and that you may become Satan’s companion [in Hell].’ His father answered, ‘Abraham, do you reject my gods? I will stone you if you do not stop this. Keep out of my way!’ Abraham said, ‘Peace be with you: I will beg my Lord to forgive you– He is always gracious to me– but for now I will leave you, and the idols you all pray to, and I will pray to my Lord and trust that my prayer will not be in vain.’ When he left his people and those they served beside God, We granted him Isaac and Jacob and made them both prophets: We granted Our grace to all of them, and gave them a noble reputation.” (19:41-50)

1)       Abraham is the man of truth.  His clear unapologetic reasoning overcomes the shadow of defense mechanisms to see clearly and set his energy free to attend God.  Hence, God gave him the knowledge that had not come to his father.

2)       “I will guide you to an even path.  Father, do not worship Satan.”  I have met people who endorse Satan’s rebelliousness and interpret it as a desire for “freedom from tyranny”, a rebel against “patriarchy”, as a promethean rebel against Greek gods.  So, they drink, do drugs, or take refuge in the principle of pleasure and at most in an uprooted humanism, or worship sciences and arts.  Satanic rebelliousness is childish and [self]destructive, like a teenager who might think he or she rebels against the tyranny of parents to do drugs and sleep around.  Abraham rebels against his father too, but there is a difference between satanic rebel and the divine rebel.  To conceal satanic rebel under the banner of “freedom and autonomy” is Satan’s trick.  And where will this fake freedom, which is the worst enslavement to our low desires, take us?  To nihilism, annihilation, to a canceric disconnection from the source and sustainer, and this delusion of “autonomy” will kill us in body and soul, following the principle of pleasure, and worshipping our aesthetic and reason.  Hence, we will become the companion of Satan in Hell.  Our freedom is to abandon worshipping anything in this world or in ourselves.  Our freedom is to understand lovingly our essential and necessary connection to God, to love-abide God knowingly and with understanding.  And this is the purpose of creation and the respite we have been given until the Day of Judgment.

Where is our absolute freedom?  Look at the strings, you are wired into the biosphere.  You have nothing of your own.  You can’t ground your own existence.  With all your genetic engineering and delusion of absolute autonomy, you can’t escape vulnerability and death.  Die before you die—this has been Sufi Rumi’s advice and all spiritual sages since the time immemorial. 

3)        Abraham rebels against his father too but how and why?  He rebels against Satan and calls his father to the right path.  Abraham said to his father: “Peace be with you” and asked forgiveness from God for him.  And as his father—entrenched in the “identity-mask” which was permeated into his countenance—threatened to kill him, Abraham left his father and his idols.

4)       The path is steep.  One ought to let go, to abandon one’s comfort zone, painfully to take the “identity-mask” off one’s face, by loving God, the Source, through right thoughts, words, and deeds.  Satan took me away from unity of my thoughts, words, and deeds and extricated the integrity of my body and soul into blasphemy and principle of pleasure—the “love” of an atheist and materialist can’t fathom the real meaning of sacrifice.  Only when Abraham left his father and his idols, he was more immersed in his trust in the knowledge that God had given him, and thus he trusted his prayers will not be vain.  And only then God granted him righteous sons: Isaac and Jacob, noble prophets.

5)       Connecting the dots, what this passage tells me now is striking, compared to the time that I was lost.  It tells me “you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”  Only those who believe and abide in truth can release themselves from false “truths”—the power of the first truth, in unraveling the false one, resides in dying before dying.  The truth that shall set us free is the divine grace and power to destroy the spider webs of entrenchment in position, fame, name, honor, wealth, ambition, and pleasure—in one word in “identity” or the delusion of fallacious autonomy, in worshiping false gods and goddesses, and this transient world or body.  The truth teller and the truth doer will heed the Truth, and thus will be heeded and guided by the Truth-God.  And this is just the beginning of walking the steep path to unify my body and soul and to restore the integrity that Satan, through following my low desires and whims, has afflicted upon them.  I ought to move out of my comfort zone, and to walk towards light, and to die before dying, if I hope my prayers won’t be in vain. 
  
The theory of Erving Guffman and "performed self" is somehow realted to the reflection above on Abraham. A rebel against false selves, if not grounded in God, will take take us to Satan. This is a case that we create falsity from partial truths. The Axial Age thinkers (Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, the mystics of Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides) were indifferent to mere "beliefs" (theological or otherwise), or in our modern term "subjectivity". They all recognized a transcendence within which is ineffable and calls for reverent silence. Indeed they declared that the light within shines only or is "how one acts or behaves" or "how one should live", the ethical, wholeheartedness, mindfulness, care--connected to Heaven, Tien, Nirvana, God. And they didn't impose it on other people (read Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation), whenever their ethics became obligatory it shows the Axial Age has lost its momentum. The self for them was not a thing; it transforms for better or worse through a course of action and dissolving in or taking off mundane and fictitious "masks". Fast forward to our time: Taking off the "mask" is a movement for Heidegger from inauthentic self to an authentic one. Heidegger invented the famous statement that "Existence is the "substance" of human-being (Dasein)", which roughly means the self is not a 'thing' or 'no-thing', whose kernel is ‘care’. Sartre turned this into "Existence precedes the essence." Most of contemporary perspectives that take "meaning" and "the self" to be purely subjective, or the self is merely performative, or Nietzsche’s “life is only justified from an aesthetic point of view” (see the Picture of Dorian Gray below) are variations of modern nihilism, in which anything goes, because it is only "you" who assign meaning to it. They take it as a sign of being “tolerant”. So many are confused whether rape or Hitler can't be justified, because there is no essential self, which to them it means you "create" yourself. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Foucault say the same thing, it is all arbitrary, no meaning, one creates or wills forth one's meaning and "create" oneself (or at the disposal of genes and reductive/mechanical evolutionary biology of Dawkin and Pinker); it is a common current. It is painful to hear that death from drug overdoses are reaching levels similar to the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak: in 2014, we had 125 death per day from drug overdose and mostly white, which cut across rural-urban boundaries (New York Times, Jan. 19th 2016). One may say, this is when we take a self-destructive path with half-truths. And you can see this sense of being lost in new trends in philosophy too:

A Brief Reflection on "When God Decrees Something, God Says Only, ‘Be,’ And It Is"

There are some important points to reflect on in the following passage:

"This [is] a statement of the Truth about which they are in doubt: it would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that: when God decrees something, God says only, ‘Be,’ and it is. ‘God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him: that is a straight path.’ But factions have differed among themselves. What suffering will come to those who obscure the truth when a dreadful Day arrives! How sharp of hearing, how sharp of sight they will be when they come to Us, although now they are clearly off course! Warn them [Muhammad] of the Day of Remorse when the matter will be decided, for they are heedless and do not believe. It is We who will inherit the earth and all who are on it: they will all be returned to Us.” (19:35-40)

1) Truth is with God and it IS God, and the fact is that we can't bring metaphysical doubts to certainty by speculations, human guess work, assumptions, and application of reason to the phenomenal world.  We are not equipped to know the truth that is beyond us and we ought not to bring faith in our guess-work about that which has not been revealed to us by God.

2) Having a "child" is a human notion belonging to procreative world of mortals.  If there is no "being" [existence] and "becoming" [change], as we mortals understand, in God, then although it is intuitively intelligible, it would be ineffable for us to understand it fully that "Being" as such comes from God's word or will--and the Quran says Jesus is the Word of God.

3) The relation between God and us is the relation of originator, sustainer, and worship, not father and mother, to essentially dependent creatures, not son or daughter, whose whole survival in body, heart, and soul manifests itself in "love", "worship", and "belonging" to God--and understanding this point is the straight path.

4) the root of factionalism is when we take our own guess-work and inclination as truth.

5) Following our own inclination and politics of identity rather than resorting to God would obscure the truth.

6) I always found the psychological description of encountering the Day of Judgment painfully accurate and real in the Quran: how clear we shall see and hear on that Day, because the whole truth opens up in front of our eyes and heart and our whole attention will be devoted to it.

7) Everything perishes but the Face of God, nothing belongs to us.  Understanding the poverty of our existence and its complete dependence on God is Enlightenment: "It is We who will inherit the earth and all who are on it: they will all be returned to Us.”

A Brief Reflection on The Beginning of the Surah Maryam (19) in the Quran

I read the Quran in English—the wonderful translation of Abdel Haleem—with fresh eyes and ears and heart. The last one, ‘heart’, is the most important. I was a disbeliever and with God’s grace I came back to religion. I will surely go back one day and read the Quran in Farsi and I know some Arabic words, but for now reading the Quran in English has been so illuminating to me. It creates that sense of distance to look at it with fresh eyes, as if I am reading it for the first time. Now, I realize that how misleading it is to glorify words of scriptures without relating to the content of what they are talking about. The youths need to relate to the content of scriptures, without being lost in empty glorification. The magnitude of message is in the content.

The surah “Marayam” (Mary, 19) starts with the story of Zachariah. He supplicates to God to have an heir, even if he is old, God grants him a son, John. Zachariah says:

“‘Lord, how can I have a son when my wife is barren, and I am old and frail?’ He said, ‘This is what your Lord has said: “It is easy for Me: I created you, though you were nothing before.” ’

He said, ‘Give me a sign, Lord.’ He said, ‘Your sign is that you will not [be able to] speak to anyone for three full [days and] nights.’ He went out of the sanctuary to his people and signalled to them to praise God morning and evening.

[We said], ‘John, hold on to the Scripture firmly.’ While he was still a boy, We granted him wisdom, tenderness from Us, and purity. He was devout, kind to his parents, not domineering or rebellious. Peace was on him the day he was born, the day he died, and it will be on him the day he is raised to life again.” (19:8-15)

It is strange and interesting to me now that the sign that God gave to Zachariah is not being able to speak for three days. The characteristics of a divine disposition also are truly these: wisdom, tenderness, purity, devotion, being kind to parents, not being domineering or rebellious. This is a guidance for me personally and as a father how to raise my children. I have lived enough to know what these characteristics are and why we need them: human excess, self-centeredness, excessive craving for pleasures, and desire for power is canceric and [self-]destructive.

The surah moves to the story of Mary. Miracles happen to her as to Zachariah. Zachariah was too old to bear a child and God granted him John. And Mary was a virgin and chaste and God granted her Jesus. But why? What does this “anomaly” mean? Why should God wait for Zachariah to get too old and to let virgin Mary have a child, Jesus? We are unable to fathom some of God’s actions and these miracles. The closest that come to my mind is that for Zachariah, he had to arrive at certain spiritual growth to have John and for Mary—human beings were not and are not yet ready for the great leap: not to be reactive, to be able to overcome the reptilian brain, to distance themselves with wisdom, not folly, from constant fear of survival and desire for power. If John was humanly conceived for heralding Jesus, human beings had not been ready yet for emaculate conception of Jesus—the one who does not react but acts. Human beings were not ready to let go of the domineering ego, so that to become fruitfully righteous and tender. In a strange loop, we go back to the divinely given dispositional characteristics of John: wisdom, tenderness, purity, devotion, being kind to parents, not being domineering or rebellious.

And then again, the same strange sign: silence:

"And so it was ordained: she conceived him. She withdrew to a distant place and, when the pains of childbirth drove her to [cling to] the trunk of a palm tree, she exclaimed, ‘I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this!’ but a voice cried to her from below, ‘Do not worry: your Lord has provided a stream at your feet and, if you shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you, it will deliver fresh ripe dates for you, so eat, drink, be glad, and say to anyone you may see: “I have vowed to the Lord of Mercy to abstain ["sawm" can mean ‘abstinence’ from food or from speech.] from conversation, and I will not talk to anyone today.”’ (19:22-26)

And silence, sometimes we need silence to ponder and to let the miracle happen.

A Brief Reflection on Idolatry

The surah The Cave in the Quran comes to end with the story of Dhu ’l-Qarnayn and Gog and Magog.  Dhu ’l-Qarnayn is a prophet-king who helps people and follows God’s commands in different ways.  The last thing he does is to help the people living between two valleys, whose language no one understands, to defend themselves against an aggressive people, Gog and Magog, by building an iron barrier between them.  The Quran predicts that the destruction of this barrier is the sign of the coming of the Hour of Judgment:

“Their enemies could not scale the barrier, nor could they pierce it, and he said, ‘This is a mercy from my Lord. But when my Lord’s promise is fulfilled, He will raze this barrier to the ground: my Lord’s promise always comes true. On that Day, We shall let them surge against each other like waves and then the Trumpet will be blown and We shall gather them all together.  We shall show Hell to the disbelievers, those whose eyes were blind to My signs, those who were unable to hear. Did they think that they could take My servants as masters instead of Me? We have prepared Hell as the disbelievers’ resting place.” (18:97-103)

For the ears who can’t hear the “word” punishment as the effect of disbelief in God, the message above and below, at the end of surah The Cave is difficult to bear.  Only those who have reflected long (and I am just a novice) can have a clear understanding of monotheistic message.  Why did the God of monotheism insists that we shouldn’t worship any imaginary god, goddesses, idols, or humans, or in turn, turn the God of monotheism into a revengeful idol in religious bigotry?  Where does the danger reside?

Turning Monotheistic God into an Idol

“Control of the heavens and earth belongs to God; God has power over everything. There truly are signs in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, for those with understanding, who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose– You are far above that!– so protect us from the torment of the Fire. Our Lord! You will truly humiliate those You commit to the Fire. The evildoers have no one to help them. Our Lord! We have heard someone calling us to faith–“Believe in your Lord”– and we have believed. Our Lord! Forgive us our sins, wipe out our bad deeds, and grant that we join the righteous when we die. Our Lord! Bestow upon us all that You have promised us through Your messengers– do not humiliate us on the Day of Resurrection– You never break Your promise.’ Their Lord has answered them: ‘I will not allow the deeds of any one of you to be lost, whether you are male or female, each is like the other [in rewards]. I will certainly wipe out the bad deeds of those who emigrated and were driven out of their homes, who suffered harm for My cause, who fought and were killed. I will certainly admit them to Gardens graced with flowing streams, as a reward from God: the best reward is with God.’” (3:189-195)  

Let’s start from the idolatry of seemingly monotheistic rigidification and reification of God as a jealous possessive revengeful God, the one who punishes whoever doesn’t bow down to God’s might.  The ramification of this idolatry is cruelty.  But is God cruel?  All the surhs in the Quran, except for one, starts with “in the name of God, the most merciful, the giver of mercy”—and mercy is the attribute of the chosen in the Quran, those who let go of eye for eye and retribution and forgive:

“Who speaks better than someone who calls people to God, does what is right, and says, ‘I am one of those devoted to God’? Good and evil cannot be equal. [Prophet], repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness. If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing.” (41:33-36)

If we read the Quran closely, we see that ethically God repeatedly prioritizes forgiveness to qesas (lex talianis, eye for eye):

“Far better and more lasting is what God will give to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed. Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things.” (42: 36-43)

The point of monotheism is revelation.  Scriptures are not man-made guess work and assumptions, though with divine grace, we should be able to recognize where they might be manipulated by human whims, as God will help us to purify our hearts and our scriptures from distortion.  Because inside human heart and intuition is a divine measure and scale that can distinguish the real from the fake, and the divine from man-made.  Not strange then, that Judaism, Christianity, and Islamic scriptures were validated by and cultivated billions.  And each scripture and prophet came to rectify some excesses and distortions in the previous one.  Mohammad said he was the last prophet, and after him we had so many false prophets but none of them last, because we might lose our way for a while, but eventually we can discern fictitious from authentic.

The revelation of God consists of one major point: don’t create an idol for yourself out of anything, any object, any other creature, imaginary or real, but only worship the ineffable invisible God.  Why this insistence?  We needed thousands of years of wars and genocides to understand this message.  When the wall of identity disconnected us from mercy and we lost our way from penetrating the hearts to religious wars and bigotry, when we were trapped in the idolatry of zealous identity to undo faith through faith, we resorted to what ought to be the last as the first, to hostility and a system of exclusion and wars without due process.  This was the idolatry of distortion of scriptures themselves, undoing a faith through the faith. 

As I said before, this is the idolatry of reducing monotheistic God to a revengeful God.  But God could punish and destroy Adam and Satan in a blink of eye after they disobeyed.  Why did God not do that?  Why did God give us respite and thousands of years of scriptures and growth to teach us to understand our internal connection to God?  After all, if God is merely forcefully punishing us for our insubordination, what is the purpose of creation? 

“He created the heavens and earth for a true purpose; He wraps the night around the day and the day around the night; He has subjected the sun and moon to run their courses for an appointed time; He is truly the Mighty, the Forgiving.” (39:5)

God has a purpose and it is clear if we just think straight and, on the one hand, let go of the false assumption that we are purposeless and accidental bubbles who, self-contradictorily, are self-grounding ground [bubble] of our existence.  And on the other, reflect on the fact that all religions of the Book tell us that God brought us to the earth to “test” us—indeed to “teach” us, otherwise God’s omniscience already knows the outcome of the test.  Understanding this point helps us to overcome religious bigotry and intolerance and irreverent hostility in the name of religion: a non-idolized God is forgiving and a teacher.  When we turn the ineffable and invisible God of wisdom and mercy into a tyrant, we turn monotheistic God into an idol.  God has created us for a reason and despite our weakness and shortsightedness, God sees the sparkle of growth and divinity that God sowed in us, and asked Satan (Iblis) to bow down to it.  God teaches us to cultivate this seed in us:

“It was not without purpose that We created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. That may be what the disbelievers assume– how they will suffer from the Fire!– but would We treat those who believe and do good deeds and those who spread corruption on earth as equal? Would We treat those who are aware of God and those who recklessly break all bounds in the same way? This is a blessed Scripture which We sent down to you [Muhammad], for people to think about its messages, and for those with understanding to take heed.” (38:27-29)

The logic of punishment and heaven and hell is this losing the chance of growth and awakening from the barren idolatry of images and following our unbridled desires in worshipping false gods and goddesses, or on the contrary, connecting to the source of our existence and bringing fruits of unity in our soul, body, and heart, in our thoughts, words, and deeds and pray for unity-with/belonging-to God, to the invisible horizon of all of events, the source of peace and power:

“[People], do you not see how God has made what is in the heavens and on the earth useful to you, and has lavished His blessings on you both outwardly and inwardly? Yet some people argue about God, without knowledge or guidance or an illuminating scripture. When they are told, ‘Follow what God has sent down,’ they say: ‘We shall follow what we saw our forefathers following.’ What! Even if Satan is calling them to the suffering of the Blazing Flame? Whoever directs himself [his face] wholly to God and does good work has grasped the surest handhold, for the outcome of everything is with God. As for those who refuse to do this, do not let their refusal sadden you [Prophet]– they will return to Us and We shall tell them what they have done: God knows all that hearts contain.” (31: 20-23) 

 The Idolatry of Worshipping Images and Humans

The other variation of idolatry is the idolatry of fictitious whims of gods and goddesses without any valid scriptural pathos, ethos, and logos, unbridled and hedonistic, with an empty veneer of sentimentality and “love”—this nature-shaman or goddess worship has been in the air for the whole history of human beings up to now.  Then the idolatry of worshiping saints and prophets, or kings and the powerful, the plutocrats and bourgeoisie, commodity fetishism and principle of pleasure, honor, nation, or wealth took hold on us.  We had wars for nationalistic chauvinism, capitalism by our scientism and technological advance, or creating heaven on the earth in the name of dialectical materialism of Marxism.  I was one of them.  When I had the chance to ponder the meaning of a life and death under the worshipping of “matter” and “human consciousness and sciences”—an oxymoron—nauseatingly I woke up from my slumber.  A world of contingency.  To be a bubble of accidental interaction of particles.  Taking human self-consciousness as the groundless ground of self-worshipping autonomous self, like ouroboros. What a nihilistic horror!  This is the punishment for those who forget the poverty of their existence and dependent origination in God.  Like a canceric cell, I was rebellious to establish heaven on earth in the delusion of absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency.  Humanity had to come on its knees to understand the need, the existential necessity and poverty, to worship God. 

Similar to religions, Western Enlightenment, is a double sword.  When religion loses its balance and turns into fanaticism and fundamentalism, it acts against its principles.  By the excess in which evil takes over the gaze that sees evil all around itself, the good turns into evil.  Western Enlightenment as well had a wonderful lesson for humanity: look at yourself and the world with an open eye and trust your reason to make sense of the world.  Religious bigotry and excess pushed Western Enlightenment to the other extreme and the effect has been the emergence of idolatry of scientism and worshipping of “autonomous subject”—a strange meaningless metaphysical take, as if our reasoning per se can ground itself. 

This has been the dream of twentieth century philosophy and sciences.   Around the midst of century to our time, philosophy gave up the dream of grounding logic in mathematics, or mathematics in logic, or to make language strictly logical or to solve all metaphysical questions by logical positivism or by elucidation of language.  On the contrary, philosophies such as Heidegger’s phenomenology basically problematized the whole Western tradition of philosophy and its subjectivism and reductionist attitude—its Cartesian assumption that “intellect” or “thinking” is prior to “being”.  Postmodernism pushed this direction to its excessive point and in rejecting autonomous subject and the centrality of consciousness and “I”, declared the death of subject and reduced human self into “discourses” of knowledge or savoir, the text, or relations of power and class wars.

Now we are living in the last phase of idolatry of scientism and different golden calves of sociobiology and psychological and biological evolutionary theory and the worshiping of “genes”: the key to all human puzzles!  This is the time of “self-creation” of technological advance, genetic engineering, cloning, and microchips.  Heidegger had predicted this stage as "Enframing ['Gestell'] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological." ("Question Concerning Technology") In another word, our scientism and technological advance at the disposal of idolatry of worshipping human sciences turned humans into robots, objectified animals and forests into “resources”, and took us to mass extinction through the instrumentalization of the world.  The sciences that potentially could save us now are destroying us because of our idolatry.  Now the Quran’s consistent message that we ought not to worship anything but God makes a lot of sense.  In another article on divine punishment, I wrote:

“Through disconnection of the ethical from God and the heaven, we fall into variations of hedonism and humanism, at best. Our modern ears can’t substitute anything else for the contingency of our lives. If there is only this world and no necessary divine Law governs our lives, if we are the result of random selections and genes, then survival is the only clue to ethics, now egotistic, then altruistic, no matter what, the telos (aim=purpose) and the kernel of this ethical behavior is pleasure or Nietzsche’s will-to-power at the disposal of survival or again in a circular way at the disposal of Nietzsche’s will-to-power.

We might manage to develop the seemingly best practical reason and live long. What we lose is the meaning of life. Life as such has no universal meaning for any modernist and postmodernist, from Chomsky to Foucault. This loss of meaning, no matter how well and long we live registers itself in our body and soul. This is a common-sense clue: our body is extremely receptive to the world, biosphere, rays of light, drops of water, and intractable rays and particles. A major difference between us, human beings, and other living beings is that we “think”, and what we think, the way we think, the way we perceive our existence in the world, the way we act based on seeing ourselves contingent (accidental) or essential, it all affect our psychosomatic disposition in minute details. If I see myself as merely a natural animal and a contingent bubble in the universe, the internal and external arrangement of my cells and the actions emanating from them--which are mutually cause and effect of my self-interpretation—will be qualitatively different from a person who believes one’s ethical comportment is related to the spiritual realm and God. In this context, “punishment” follows the law of karma. For God, punishment is not retribution and revenge, but the effect of our own actions.  And as the Quran repeatedly asserts, through our own belief and good actions we can repel evil and reverse the law of karma.”

In the penultimate paragraph in the surah The Cave, God says:

 

“Say [Prophet], ‘Shall we [This ‘we’ presumably refers to the Prophet and his community of believers.] tell you who has the most to lose by their actions, whose efforts in this world are misguided, even when they think they are doing good work? It is those who disbelieve in their Lord’s messages and deny that they will meet Him.’ Their deeds come to nothing: on the Day of Resurrection We shall give them no weight. Their recompense for having disbelieved and made fun of My messages and My messengers will be Hell. But those who believe and do good deeds will be given the Gardens of Paradise. There they will remain, never wishing to leave.” (18:97-108)

I end this reflection with my thesis on idolatry in Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and leave its elaboration to another reflection.

In Hinduism, we have verses in Vedas and Upanishads that are revelatory; however, distortion and excess turned this revelation into having 33 gods or 330 million gods all manifestation of one Godhead.  This variation of idolatry, even if in its philosophical dimension it holds to non-duality of God and the universe and the self--which is itself fallacious--ends up to the same confusion and suffering as other variations of idolatry.  

The quest is to stay in the zone of God’s revelation, not human conjectures.  According to revelations, we belong to the imageless, invisible, ineffable creative awareness who transcends the limits of thoughts, as God is the originator of the universe, living beings, and consciousness, not identical to any one of them.  There is no becoming and being in God.  Our human vocabulary of essence and existence can’t fathom it.  Nor is it the inertia of Dao or dark matter or dark energy or impersonal and unaware origin of universe.  God converses with us through scriptures and guides us.  God is the creator and the teacher.

Taking the Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu as gods or worshipping them is another version of idolatry.  It is famous that Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don’t believe in the creative God.  However, none of them in their original sense declared to be a god or have any access to anything beyond phenomenal world, except for Lao Tzu who in poetic words talks about an impersonal source of all beings as Dao.  Lao Tzu and Confucius relate their ethical practices to Tien or Heaven but never elaborate clearly what Tien is.

  

Buddha never declares there is no creative God.  He was silent about the source of life.  He admitted that his philosophy is a meditative-spiritual technique to overcome suffering. 

In Zen Keys, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:

“The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples toward practical efforts. Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity of the world, the Buddha said, "Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same." Another time he said, "Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first." Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow

My thesis about Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha is that they were sages whose ethical practices were inspired by divine wisdom but they were not prophets and never could exceed phenomenal world in their explanation of the world.  What makes so much sense to us in Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha is their acute observation and interpretation of the phenomenal world and their ethical connection to the divine.  But it is utterly misleading if we forget that phenomenal world is only the tip of iceberg.  The world of revelation reveals worlds beyond our observation and perception and tell us the truth about the universe, ourselves, our ethical comport, and connects us to our origin, that which we can’t grasp by our own wits.

“Say [Prophet], ‘If the whole ocean were ink for writing the words of my Lord, it would run dry before those words were exhausted’– even if We were to add another ocean to it.  Say, ‘I am only a human being, like you, to whom it has been revealed that your God is One. Anyone who fears [Or ‘expect’ (one of the meanings of yarjuna)] to meet his Lord should do good deeds and give no one a share in the worship due to his Lord.” (18:109-110)