The nature of Islam
Bookworm on Dec 01 2008 at 3:22 pm | Filed under: Islam, Muslim violence
Charles Martel left a comment to an earlier post about Islam’s core nature:
I used to ask myself how Allah is served by the grotesque torture of non-Muslims. How is the supreme deity gratified or honored by the sadistic disfigurement and dismantling of his creations?
Then I came to my senses and thumbed through my copy of the Qu’ran, where I came across description after description, all in loving detail, of how Allah intends to torture for eternity those who have dared to not submit to him. Who cares if his most devoted followers jump the gun a bit and start the torture before death?
Then I read further and came to understand that Allah has predestined all men for either Heaven or Hell. Even the good man who never lies, prays devoutly and treats all others with justice and compassion will go to Hell if Allah has predestined him to do so.
The violent, murderous, lying man who has left ruin and sorrow in his wake will go to Heaven, which apparently is a bordello, if Allah has preordained it so.
Mohammed could not have done a better job of creating a religion designed to make men both violent and despairing.
He’s exactly right. Several years ago, in the wake of yet another Muslim created massacre, my cousin, who works as a Christian prison chaplain, wrote to me about the way in which converting to Islam has become quite the thing in prisons around the world:
It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they similarly remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.
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Books, you know that I’ve got a sort of unusual position on this, having now been a Buddhist for 40-odd years; I’m also not going to claim great Biblical scholarship, having attended my last Baptist Sunday School class sometime in Nixon’s first term. But I’ve got to admit, from my somewhat-outsider point of view, it’s hard to see the crisp distinction you and Charles appear to see.
I used to ask myself how Allah is served by the grotesque torture of non-Muslims. How is the supreme deity gratified or honored by the sadistic disfigurement and dismantling of his creations?
That kind of sounds to me like the whole problem of theodicy. How do Christians justify it? Both by other Christians — after all, we do have the idea of a “just war” — and by God? Babies beaten to death drowning in a tsunami, saintly people dying in agony from renal failure, hell, even my chronically aching knee? It’s not like Christians have been exactly untouched by grotesque tortures of non-Christians, from the Conquistadórs to the Moriscos to the various persecutions of the Jews.
Then I came to my senses and thumbed through my copy of the Qu’ran, where I came across description after description, all in loving detail, of how Allah intends to torture for eternity those who have dared to not submit to him. Who cares if his most devoted followers jump the gun a bit and start the torture before death?
As opposed to Christians, with the “outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth”? Dante? Hieronymus Bosch? Innumerable illustrations (one rather cool one is on the north wall of the Sankt Stephens Münster in Breisach am Rhein, where I used to live. Hard to see in this picture, but it’s pretty much all tortures and agony.)
Then I read further and came to understand that Allah has predestined all men for either Heaven or Hell. Even the good man who never lies, prays devoutly and treats all others with justice and compassion will go to Hell if Allah has predestined him to do so.
This is distinguished from Calvinism how? And …
The violent, murderous, lying man who has left ruin and sorrow in his wake will go to Heaven, … if Allah has preordained it so.
So a violent murderous man can’t go to Heaven in Christianity, even if God wills it so? What about a deathbed conversion?
Then there’s this parenthetical: ” which apparently is a bordello,”. You’re saying that your objection here is that there’s sex in heaven? In any case, the Koran just says “splendid companions” for both sexes, and that people would be paired with them to live in eternal bliss. Everyone is reborn a virgin, apparently remains a virgin however the bliss is obtained. (Compare that to the naive conventional idea of Heaven as a place where you sit on clouds strumming harps. We all know that’s pretty naive allegory at best; why fall for it in Islam?)
The point is, to a relative outsider, this takes on rather the sense of Frank Gorshin telling us that it’s obvious Lou Antonio is “one of them” because, after all, his face is black on the opposite side.
Charlie (#1)
Charlie, you appear to see no meaningful difference between the ideology of Christianity and that of Islam. Is that the right reading of your comment? I ask because I don’t understand the Lou Antonio reference, which is supposed to make your point clear.
>> n any case, the Koran just says “splendid companions” for both sexes, and that people would be paired with them to live in eternal bliss. Everyone is reborn a virgin, apparently remains a virgin however the bliss is obtained. >>
This is the first time I’ve heard this interpretation that all Allah’s followers are virgins upon entry into the Muslim version of heaven. And that they remain virgins “no matter what”.
Whatever Christianity’s past, we face a resurgent hard-line jihadist religion, today, that demands conversion and converts at the point of a sword; that ruthlessly oppresses its non-believers (examine the plight of non-Muslim women wherever Muslim men are ascendant, and you’ll see a shocking rise in rapes). Violent jihadist Islam is to be resisted, and resisted with all possible strength. Regardless of the history of other religions in the distant past.
Hi, Charlie:
Thanks for your comments. Your comments are in bodacious quotes. (I just can’t get the clunky commands on the dialog boxes here to work for me.)
Your response does not answer my question, which we could apply to God, too. How could God be gratified by the suffering of his beloved creatures? The answer is that he isn’t. In Christianity, it is assumed that pain and death enter the world because of its fallen nature. But there is no Fall in Islam because Allah grants man no free will. Islam exists in a totally contingent universe in which Allah wills everything that happens in it from microsecond to microsecond. Therefore, all pain is willed by him.
“Outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” hardly compares with the literal descriptions of after-death sufferings for unbelievers (for example, Sura 44, 45-49). The darkness is being denied the light of God, and the gnashing of teeth is over the realization that one has cut onself off from God deliberately. There is no element of predestination in that decision. Contrast that with the seeming piss-offedness of a deity whose attitude seems to be, “I’ll get you!”
Also, Dante and Bosch are men with opinions. They are not the Qu’ran, which is the eternal, uncreated, irrefutable word of Allah. Neither Dante nor Bosch are considered fathers of the church or expert theologians.
You’re right, it is Calvinism. But Calvinism is a dying and discredited branch of Christianity which inspires, at best, a tiny minority of believers. In any case, I cannot recall when an irate Calvinist strapped a bunch of C4 around himself and took out a synagogue or nursery school.
Please read what I said more closely. If Allah has preordained a man’s fate, there is no such thing as a deathbed conversion. It simply wouldn’t matter. Also, you did not address what to us would be the grave injustice of Allah condemning a good man to Hell even as he is creating the man’s soul.
The “naïve conventional idea of Heaven” you cite is a straw man. It certainly is not conventional among knowledgeable Christians, who know that the glory of Heaven centers on the Beatific Vision, which means being in the presence of God eternally.
Contrast that to Allah’s promise of a glorified Ritz-Carlton suite, where you can shag, drink and eat forever, but NEVER in his presence. He is so remote that once he is done with you, the best reward he can come up with is a Bedouin paradise where, apparently, one’s genitals and taste buds are the chief instruments of joy.
(By the way, Muslim scholars have debated endlessly over whether erections in Heaven are eternal or just eternally recurring.)
I remember that episode of Star Trek, too. Its aim was to teach us that we are wrong to perceive differences because they divide. How could anybody seriously think that Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio were really different?
Well, it seems that the characters they played thought there were some real differences, despite the tut-tutting by the enlightened Federationists. (Ever notice how the Federationists despise Klingons, even though the Klingons are humanoid and speak perfect English?) If people see a difference between them, there usually is. The trick isn’t to pretend the difference isn’t there, but to either reconcile them or overcome them.
In this case, “overcome” means making sure that Islam’s bloody mindedness does not overtake Europe or North America.
Charlie, you appear to see no meaningful difference between the ideology of Christianity and that of Islam. Is that the right reading of your comment? I ask because I don’t understand the Lou Antonio reference, which is supposed to make your point clear.
Sorry, that was excessively geeky — he was the other half-black half-white guy in the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” In any case, no, that’s not a right reading of my comment: it’s a massive over-generalization. It would be more correct to suggest that in those areas Books and Charles are listing, I see a lot less distinction than they seem too.
This is the first time I’ve heard this interpretation that all Allah’s followers are virgins upon entry into the Muslim version of heaven. And that they remain virgins “no matter what”.
Well, the Wikipedia article on houri has a lot of the quotes, but it also stands to reason on Christianity; when people are “re-created” in the Resurrection, would God re-Create them flawed? I always heard that amputees would be made whole and the blind would be able to see, too.
The other part, about resisting Islamic fascism — while I agree with you — is a non sequitur, it doesn’t advance this argument.
As opposed to Christians, with the “outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth”? Dante? Hieronymus Bosch? Innumerable illustrations (one rather cool one is on the north wall of the Sankt Stephens Münster in Breisach am Rhein, where I used to live. Hard to see in this picture, but it’s pretty much all tortures and agony.)
You seem to forget the fact that there is something called reality and just because two people have similar literature doesn’t mean that the people that act upon it in the world today are somehow the same as those that refuse to do so.
it doesn’t advance this argument.
The “argument” is the nature of Islam as it helps to comprehend Islamic violence in today’s world. There is no such thing as “as opposed to Christians” since those Christians would necessarily have to be somehow connected to present Christian violence. It doesn’t matter what a religion has produced in terms of “tortures and agony” if it isn’t present in today’s world.
This is not studying a subject purely for academic interests. This is dealing with real human lives, today, which must be saved or damned depending on factors relating to religion, namely Islam.
This is distinguished from Calvinism how?
Certainly you must know about insh’allah.
Charles:
Well, that’s because I think the question is ill-formed; it wasn’t an attempt to answer your question, it was a challenge to the premises of your question.
I don’t necessarily expect you to resolve the question of theodicy in a Christian context; frankly, it’s one of the issues that turned me into a Buddhist when I was eleven. The notion that we suffer because it’s God’s Will that we have Free Will and so, through the Fall, end up suffering even though it doesn’t gratify God sure seems to have some problems, though, that could be summarized by asking if God is so poor a Craftsman that he would, though omniscient, build a universe in which things would go wrong, and what’s more wouldn’t actually fix things once they went wrong.
Please read what I said more closely. If Allah has preordained a man’s fate, there is no such thing as a deathbed conversion. It simply wouldn’t matter. Also, you did not address what to us would be the grave injustice of Allah condemning a good man to Hell even as he is creating the man’s soul.
Please think about what you’re saying more closely, then I won’t end up pointing out inconsistencies. Like it or not, exactly this notion of predestination is part of at least one major mainstream thread of Christian theology; logically, it follows from the idea of omnipotence. And note that it’s phrased in the subjunctive: IF Allah wills that someone be damned, THEN nothing they can do will change it. Yes, we would find that morally objectionable, but it is logical: if God is omniscient and omnipotent, and wills that someone be damned, then they won’t be able to change it.
Since Christianity and Islam derive from pretty much exactly the same roots, the fact that they are similar in this doesn’t seem all that surprising in any case.
You’re right, it is Calvinism. But Calvinism is a dying and discredited branch of Christianity which inspires, at best, a tiny minority of believers. In any case, I cannot recall when an irate Calvinist strapped a bunch of C4 around himself and took out a synagogue or nursery school.
Charles, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. There are something over 2 million Presbyterians in the US alone, and they explicitly base their tradition on Calvin. The “C4″ part is a red herring and unworthy of you.
“Outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” hardly compares with the literal descriptions of after-death sufferings for unbelievers (for example, Sura 44, 45-49). The darkness is being denied the light of God, and the gnashing of teeth is over the realization that one has cut onself off from God deliberately.
See, you’re more than willing to allow for metaphorical meaning in the Bible (and I’ll point out that being cast into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur (Rev. 19 et seq) seems pretty explicit.)
There is no element of predestination in that decision.
So, then, there are things in the universe which God neither wills nor controls? Seems like you have to back down on omniscience here.
Contrast that with the seeming piss-offedness of a deity whose attitude seems to be, “I’ll get you!”
As opposed to one who sends bears to rend 30-odd children for calling a prophet “baldy”?
The “naïve conventional idea of Heaven” you cite is a straw man. It certainly is not conventional among knowledgeable Christians,….
Come now, you really should be ashamed of yourself on that one. If it were a sophisticated knowledgeable idea, it wouldn’t be naive, now, would it? But you make exactly my point: this notion of the Islamic Paradise as a “bordello” characterized by endless carnality is just as naive and ignorant as the notion of sitting on clouds with halos. It’s a poor translation at best (or so I’m told by Arabic-speaking friends I trust, and it certainly seems confirmed by scholarly translations that are said to be reasonably authentic and authoritative.)
I could go on picking at nits, but I don’t think it would advance the general argument: my point is, simply, that to someone educated and immersed in a wildly different tradition, the notion that there is something inherently more xenophobic and more inclined to violent suppression of competitors in Islam than in Christianity seems pretty difficult to credit. The Star Trek allusion was chosen for just that reason: sure enough, the left-or-right distinction was important to them, important enough that it led to self-destruction. It took someone from outside to say “what, are you nuts?”
I rushing through this, Charlie, but I want to make a few of my standard points when it comes to comparing Islam to the Judeo-Christian doctrine. You’re correct that the Bible has some pretty bloody stories, but there are differences. Here are my two favorites:
1. The bloody stories are not doctrinal; they’re historic. Even the Exodus, which saw the death of the first born in Egypt, didn’t lay a perpetual commandment on the Jews to kill Egyptians. God was the actor. Other killings reflect the Jews’ belief about God’s will, but the Ten Commandments definitely don’t include “You shall kill all the [fill in the blank] as a precondition for entry into Heaven.”
2. Both Judaism and Christianity have tempered the message, Jews through the rabbis and Christianity through the New Testament. Again, neither states as doctrines “You shall kill all the [fill in the blank] as a precondition for entry into Heaven.” Jews certainly haven’t since the Roman conquest. And Christians, to the extent they did so, were twisting Christ’s teachings to mesh with statehood. Again, Islam is different, because it’s not just a religion, it’s also a political plan. You don’t twist the doctrine to mesh with the statehood. They are one and the same and they demand conquest and death.
Gotta run, ’cause work calls, but I throw those ideas out for what they’re worth.
“If God is so poor a craftsman” is an interesting thought. It puts the person making the observation into the position of second-guessing a being who is smart enough to create a universe, but apparently not smart enough to meet the standards of the person trying to understand why there is pain and suffering in it.
But let’s say we could have a god who meets your criteria for craftsmanship. In that case, nothing could ever go wrong anywhere. Not only would your knees never hurt, or Hitler have never killed, but the sky would be blue every day and Bookworm would get along totally well with every leftist she ever meets.
Wait, I forgot: There would be no leftists. There would be no conservatives. We all would. . .just. . .get. . .along. . .so. . .perfectly. . .well.
And the point of living in Pleasantville would be. . .what? No more than to fulfill the desire of a god to create a well-oiled machine. Nothing else.
Or perhaps this god of yours could be brought to address just the major bummers, like earthquakes and mosquitoes? But what happens if there are people who happen to like both? Or does craftsman god breed those unseemly preferences out of us?
No, sorry, Calvinism is not a mainstream thread of Christian theology. Two million Presbyterians constitute 6/10ths of 1/1000th of the 3 billion Christians on earth. Not that your predestination horse is exactly dead; let’s just call it residing in a severely vegetative state.
Forgive me, “pretty much exactly” is not a phrase I’m familiar with. Something is either exact or it isn’t. You could call both Xianity and Islam successor religions to Judaism. (Some scholars even claim that early Islam was a form of restoration Judaism that was hijacked by more mercenary and bloody minded successors to Mohammed.) The problem with Islam, of course, that in almost every major respect it distorts or totally misses the point of Jewish (and Christian) texts. At least Xianity has the advantage of having joined its new testament with that of the older Jewish testament.
The Christian concept of God is almost totally at odds the Islamic concept. Your attempt to enlarge Calvinism’s role or influence in Xianity just doesn’t fly. No more so than pointing a finger at Unitarians, which Muslims are, and saying both sects come from “pretty much exactly” the same roots.
Not really. I defy you to show me a Calvinist who has done that. If you’re going to say that the “mainstream” Calvinism of Christianity is “pretty much exactly” like Islam, why haven’t they brought about the same murderous outcomes?
Again, you’re not reading what I said. Allah condemns (or saves) you before you are even born. You have no choice. The punishment of Xian hell is the result of choice. (Please, I’ve already taken care of the Calvinist canard—Catholicism, Orthodoxy and most mainstream Xian denominations do not believe in predestination.)
I don’t recall using the word omniscience in my argument. Thank you for not only making an argument on my behalf, but refuting it for me!
Charlie, were those children predestined for Heaven or Hell?
Charlie, I wish I could agree, but even the most cursory reading of the descriptions of the afterlife in the Qu’ran say otherwise. There are no descriptions in the New Testament of harps and cloud sitting, but in the Qu’ran there are plenty of references to a “garden” (there is no word for paradise in the Qu’ran) where the afterlife is, apparently, totally sensual and lacking in any spirituality or union with God at all. Even the most sophisticated Muslim believes that paradise is a place with lots of sex, wine and good food—the Qu’ran is explicit about it.
Another thing, Charlie, be careful about the twin fallacies of appeal to authority and begging the question. The appeal to authority is your “Arabic-speaking friends I trust” and “seems [!] confirmed by scholarly translations that are said [!] to be reasonably [!] authentic and authoritative.”
Again with the tentativeness. Something is either authentic or it isn’t. Kind of like unique—it doesn’t take a modifier. (Did I say “kind of like?” I meant LIKE!)
You begged the question by not addressing my comments on the different natures of God and Allah, and the vast, vast difference in outlook that the nature of each creates in his followers.
“Seems pretty difficult to credit.” You rely an awful lot of “seems” and “are said.” Charlie. As much as I respect your Buddhism, I don’t see how it could possibly educate you in the 1,400-year history of Islam’s intolerance toward others.
Perhaps you could ask some of your Hindi or Urdu-speaking friends how they interpret the recent actions of devoted practitioners of the Religion of Peace in Mumbai. Then read up on how many times Muslims have slaughtered Hindus in India over the past 800 years. Then hit Wikipedia and try to come up with similar figures for Xianity.
“I don’t necessarily expect you to resolve the question of theodicy in a Christian context; frankly, it’s one of the issues that turned me into a Buddhist when I was eleven.”
I guess age-11 is when your understanding of Judeo-Christianity was nipped in the bud.
I would go on about your understanding of God and the nature and purpose of pain and suffering, but Charles Martel did such a great job of addressing this that I bow to his eloquence. Otherwise, I recommend C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” for a good discourse on the subject.
I confess to being perpetually amazed by how many people seem to believe that their mere existence on earth entitles them to a life free of pain, worries, suffering or discomfort and that the absence thereof argues against the existence of God (as a perpetually generous and loving parent figure). Such perspective could only come from a super self-indulgent upper-class lifestyle, not unlike that enjoyed by the young Siddhartha, perhaps. At least in the young Siddhartha’s case, it sparked a life of deep introspection on the problem of pain, poverty and deprivation. Not so with our modern Lefty friends, who seem to confuse introspective enlightenment with masturbation.
My bad.
In my answer to Charlie above I said there are 3 billion Christians on earth. The correct figure is 2 billion.
That means that Presbyterians, at 2 million strong, acount for 1/1000th of Christianity’s members, not 6/10th of 1/1000th.
Charlie (Colorado)
I read your post several times, and am unable to decide exactly what your point is.
Are you saying you rejected Christianity at age 11 because you couldn’t reconcile the concept of a loving God condemning sinners to hell?
I think the point that a world without pain wouldn’t work too well has been made. I’m not sure if you are complaining because God gave you free will and wish you didn’t have it and we would all be better suited living our lives in strict obedience to God’s will– in which case you wouldn’t be complaining at all, and would be extremely happy, though you might not know it.
As to any similarities between God’s sovreignty in Christianity and Islam, I see similarities between your criticism of God and how you would define him if you had the opportunity, and how Mohammud defined him through his “revelations”. I see some similarities by the fact that you seem to misunderstand the central theme of the Bible. The Old Testament points to the Messiah, the New Testament reveals the Messiah in the person of Jesus. The Jews at the time were looking for the Messiah to cast off Roman oppression, not understanding that Jesus came to cast off the oppression of sin.
The scriptures say, “God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. Since love requires action, this is the demonstration throughout time for all of creation, that God took on the sins of the world for us. We may tell people we love them, but only by action do we prove it to be true.
If we follow the timeline, Christianity had been well established with the final book of scripture written about 100 AD and the New Testament had been settled on by the late 4th century, well before Muhammad’s time.
Now you have two choices, Muhammad, beginning in 610 AD, used the existing New and Old Testament as the basis for this new scripture embellished and modified by Muhammad to suit his purposes or the Koran is God’s exact words.
Calvin came along 900 years later and came up with his five tenets. His conclusions in no way impugn God’s word or his love. I was raised in a calvinist home, and while I have come to understand scripture differently, I can see how a reading of the Bible would lead one to Calvin’s conclusions.
But there is certainly a distinction between a teacher’s interpretation which led to a movement, and Mohammad claiming direct authority from God.
It was explained to me that the Old Testament is descriptive, and the Koran is proscriptive. No one suggests that the God of the Bible is calling for us to kill unbelievers today, while the Koran is still proscribing that.
Robert Spencer has a lot of good information about Islam.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/islam101/
Charles, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.
Anybody that thinks the predestination of Calvinism is the same as Islam’s inshallah, may very well have been born last night.
The Star Trek allusion was chosen for just that reason: sure enough, the left-or-right distinction was important to them, important enough that it led to self-destruction.
Anybody that uses Star Trek and then wants me to believe they have based their stuff on scholarly sources is… not very credible one may say.
I was raised a Presbyterian, and the version of Calvinism I was taught was not that we were predestined for heaven or hell no matter what we did. Rather, I was taught that all humans were unworthy of heaven. We would be saved by the application of God’s grace, not by earning our way to heaven through our works. However, and this is a critical however, I was taught that God would extend his grace only to those who believed in Him, placed their faith in Him, and tried (however failingly) to do God’s will. Essentially, our actions could never prove we were worthy of heaven; those acts would be imperfect because we were imperfect and the imperfect were not worthy of heaven. However, our beliefs and our faith and our actions could influence God to forgive our imperfections and extend His grace to us.
This always struck me as a rather artificial and illogical distinction, and I ended up a non-believer. But it is a far cry from saying that where we go is predetermined, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what we do and it’s pointless to even try to live a righteous life.
By the way, I don’t know enough about Islam to understand but can anyone tell me why it is important to the Islamic followers to follow any rules (bowing to Mecca several times a day for example) if none of it makes any difference?
Finally, my own uneducated impression,for what it’s worth, is that there is not a great deal of difference between Islam today and Christianity in the Middle Ages. But Christianity has evolved into a much more humane religion, and Islam has not. That doesn’t make either one of them any more true or false, but it certainly makes one more dangerous to non-believers. I suspect that is the key distinction Bookworm and Charles are discussing.
One observer of Islam, Serge Trifkovic, says that the best way to describe Allah’s relationship with men is that of a master who has absolute control over his slaves. He may do with them as he wants, deciding at one second to esteem them and in the very next second to destroy them. Muslims sense this relationship and spend their lives toadying to him, never sure if they are saved or condemned.
However, even though Allah has predestined each man’s fate, you have to remember that he is total, absolute will, accountable to no thing but himself. He can make it up as he goes along, and there simply isn’t anything, such as moral law embedded in existence itself, that can hold him in check. If he wants to make the sun rise in the south, he can. If he wants to change the law and make, say, adultery not only licit but compulsory and holy, he can.
So, it is possible, though unlikely, that Allah could change his mind and “un-predestine” somebody. (One sure way around his predetermination is to die as a martyr. Young men and women who go around killing Zionist babies in suicide missions are granted instant entry into paradise. A common description of martyrs in glowing Arabic newspaper accounts is “he went to join the ‘black-eyed’ in Heaven,” a reference to the ever-virgin houris that await them.)
In a way, Muslims act out a weird variant of Pascal’s Wager. Though a man might be fated for Hell even before his birth, he can wager that the capricious god he worships might change his mind. One way to get him to change his mind is to scrupulously observe all laws that his god has told him are necessary for salvation.
Or, go blow up a Jew.
Thanks, Charles. You point up a nice inconsistency. What happens to the fellow who is predestined for hell but blows up himself and a bunch of Jews? Does he go to hell anyway, or does he, by his actions, reverse his predestination?
This always struck me as a rather artificial and illogical distinction, and I ended up a non-believer. But it is a far cry from saying that where we go is predetermined, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what we do and it’s pointless to even try to live a righteous life.
The Catholics believed in good works as being the way to salvation and the Protestants (Lutherans) believed that Faith itself was the only means to salvation.
Does he go to hell anyway, or does he, by his actions, reverse his predestination?
Like I said, the Arab’s inshallah is not the same thing as predestination in Calvinism.
Inshallah means by the will of God whereas Calvinism tends to have a retro-active feedback loop where personal wealth means God has predestined you for greatness and status. This is retro-active since “wealth” can be earned via good work ethics, which is why Calvinists worked hard when they came to the US. Some of that probably has faded by now into more abstract theology. Inshallah, however, allows anything to happen, so long as it is Allah’s will. If Allah wills it, he can send giant black spiders to Fallujah and help the mighty and faithful of Fallujah to fight off the US Marine infidels. Which is exactly what happened, if you listened to Arab commentary during those times.
So anything that happens in Arabia is by the will of god. Including suicide bombing and what not. And if the Koran says to do so, then it is both by the will of god and it will also reward the bomber.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The US bombing the shit out of terrorists and killing them by the boat load definitely isn’t “Allah’s will”.
Actually even the setbacks that the religionists of peace endure at the hands of the U.S. military are considered Allah’s will. They are a sign that Muslims have displeased Allah and are not trying hard enough or being holy enough.
In a way it’s like the excuses offered for the inevitable failures of communism: You just didn’t do enough (i.e. kill enough people) to make a good idea work.
It’s also like when God whupped Israelite butt whenever the Jews slipped back into Baal worship.
Y,
Calvinists certainly do not believe that salvation comes through works, and the Catholics I know don’t believe that either.
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast.” – Ephesians 2:4-9
Here’s a passage that admonishes Christians, including Calvinists and Puritans, to work hard. The inheritance will come at a future time. The current fad of “prosperity theology” is at best a misunderstanding of scripture.
“Work hard and cheerfully at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.
Remember that the Lord will give you an inheritance as your reward, and the Master you are serving is Christ.
But if you do what is wrong, you will be paid back for the wrong you have done. For God has no favorites who can get away with evil.” – Colossians 3:23-25
What is difficult for most people to accept in the Calvinist perspective is “limited atonement”. Most Christians believe “whosoever will”, that God’s call to salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is available to whoever believes, that it is a gift freely given. Calvinists believe that only the elect will be saved, and Christ’s death on the cross was only for those predestined to believe.
Of course, no one, including Calvinists knows who those people are, so whoever accepts salvation is one of the elect.
Brian, Roman Catholics of today have changed due to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Regardless, Faith vs good works became a sticking point for theological differences between Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-it is by grace you have been saved.
As far as I know, on the theological grounds, Christ saved humanity from Original Sin and wiped the slate clean. That means babies are innocent until free will leads them into sin again. “You have been saved” does not mean you will be saved regardless of what actions or sins you will do in the future.
The current fad of “prosperity theology” is at best a misunderstanding of scripture.
Are you referring to Joel and his mega churches?
Calvinists believe that only the elect will be saved, and Christ’s death on the cross was only for those predestined to believe.
Of course, no one, including Calvinists knows who those people are, so whoever accepts salvation is one of the elect.
That means the Calvinist religion and those that have been influenced by Calvinism have a social upward mobility factor once their beliefs are applied.
Because only God knows who is “predestined” in one way as opposed to another, this leaves mere mortals without the ability to judge or condemn. They can only use their faculties to make a judgment with the acceptance of human fallibility. Which is, of course, one reason why they didn’t recognize the Pope’s authority to speak for God.
Islam, to use one comparison, has a history of prophets, mullahs, and clerics telling the rest of the believers what God means and what the Koran (itself the word of God through Mohammed) said.
I doubt that many of the radical followers of Islam, the militant ones and the fundamentalists, would be able to interpret complicated points of theology the way they have without having been told, beforehand, by the Islamic clerics in the madrasses what God has or has not decided.
So, in a sense, the “moderate” Islamic Arabs are those that use inshallah to mean “I don’t get to decide so why bother” and the militants believe “I get to decide for God through active works” instead. The moderates are acceptable, since they have a sort of laissez faire attitude towards Islam. Whatever happens is whatever happens and there’s no real reason to do anything proactive to change it: fatalism. THen there’s the Islamic JIhad which says you will go to heaven if you kill Jews and Americans.
Since wealth was seen as a blessing in the days of the reformation (not dying of disease or hunger), it became an interesting paradox to the Calvinists. Was someone blessed by God, already, if he was wealthy? And if someone acquires wealth from a poor beginning, does this mean he was predestined to do so and be saved? Either way you cut it, getting wealth (meaning doing hard work) became a pretty good motivation.
Still, it never got to the point where Calvinists could believe that just because someone had wealth that they could tell other people that the will of God was for them to kill so and so people. It wasn’t that hard to convince some people that they could get salvation by giving money, though, but that’s no more different than Nigerian scams. It works not because of religion but because humans are fallible. The Spanish Inquisition did more witch hunting than Protestants in the end.
The Protestants didn’t like how people could simply buy their sins off by paying the Church a fee. Nor did the Protestants like the concept that if you accept Roman Catholicism, the Church, the authority of the Pope, and the rituals of the mass, you will be saved. Protestants believed that a person must have an intimate connection with God, through Faith, and not simply the outward works and rituals of the Church, for salvation of one’s sins.
Al Gore, for example, with his “carbon credits” or “Green technology portfolio companies” is the perfect example of what Protestants launched the Reformation to fight so many centuries ago. THe idea that you could be saved through “good works”, meaning paying somebody off cause you had money, was not an idea Protestants agreed with.
Also, time is getting short, one modern interpretation of predestination by a theologian I correspond to amounts to this: that if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he could predestine you for what you already would have chosen with your free will because God would have known which way you would have chosen given different situations. So free will (social mobility and total atonement) becomes compatible with predestination (God’s will).
I’m not going to try to convince anyone of my “sense of God” – I can’t say “belief” because I lost that, and faith, as a teenager, and have never recovered it.
But we’re really discussing the nature of God, and His relationship to us, here, so I guess I’d enjoy contributing.
First, Christians rely on the Bible. I think two people can pick and choose any, say, twenty quotes from the Bible, of your preferred quote length, and arrive at vastly different religious belief systems. From a deeply racist, slaughtering, violent, vicious belief system, to a peaceful, free-love, float through your day with a dreamy smile, sit and rock in the meadow belief system. True religions attempt to take the Bible as a whole to reach a deeper understanding of God and how we are to worship. But even there, as can be seen in these comments, there’s wide disagreement.
God is apparently unknownable, and the Bible doesn’t make it easy to know God. So I’m sticking with God as a Great Mystery, and since it makes sense to me that he exists, though I lack faith, I approach the question of my Creator’s nature with great humility.
Predestination doesn’t make sense to me, and one reason I abandon it is my answer to this question: Could God have created a non-deterministic Universe? My answer is: Of course! It would then make sense to me that our Fates are non-deterministic as well.
It could be that the weather on Earth is entirely deterministic, by God’s intent. Does that mean that God would know every moment of weather from now until the end of the Universe? Perhaps… but *why* would He bother? What an incredibly worthless waste of effort, is how I view it. God must have far more interesting and enjoyable things to ponder. As I type this, behind my computer is a stucco wall. I could spend hours memorizing every stucco edge and crease on that wall, and form a perfect picture in my memory of it. *That* much is attainable to me. But I’m not going to waste the days of effort it would take. That’s why, if weather is deterministic, it *still* doesn’t prove to me that God would bother to determine every moment of weather forever. Perhaps it simply isn’t worth it to Him.
If God is as powerful as we believe he is, why would he create a simple Universe that would be easy for us to comprehend? The glory and the magic of existence might be so complex and wonderful that it may enthrall even Him.
Interesting comment, Mike.
I’m not sure you don’t “believe”…at least in a sense. To me, there are two concepts of God – the first, as creator of the universe, is not hard to believe but I’ve reached the point where I think that a real comprehension of God the creator is so impossibly beyond my ability that it _has_ to be a matter of faith. The second concept is one of a _personal_ God – the God that created the world and human race, and Who cares that we should follow His rules for living our lives. That One is both easier to comprehend and at the same time sort of beyond belief because of the magnitude of the first concept.
It’s easier to simply have faith because we want to comprehend, and we have a certain unwillingness to accept that we might be unable to comprehend the enormity that is God. In other words, our unwillingness to simply accept is a sort of intellectual pride that demands we _understand_, and lack of belief is a sort of recognition that God is beyond our understanding.
Not sure if that makes sense – I don’t have it all figured out. Quelle surprise!
Hi, Mike and suek:
If you want to smell ozone wafting around your head, try thinking of how something can be uncreated and have always existed. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Hindu talking about the universe, or a Christian or Jew talking about God: How can there not have been a beginning?
I used to ponder that question from time to time, and even imagine what eternity is, but I realized I was driving myself crazy. My mind can comprehend many things, but it cannot comprehend this.
So, I don’t think about it anymore. I’m not designed for the task.
I can, however, perceive those aspects of God that are open to my apprehension: His intelligence, goodwill, personhood, creativity. I realize I know these things from revelation, which is the case of God reaching out to us first so that we may reciprocate and reach back. (The Latin root for religion is “ligio” — binding –and “re ligio” is a binding back, whether to God or to the actions and habits we are told will bind us to him.) Like you, suek, that’s the only level I can deal with and am content to leave it at that.
Another way I keep myself sane is to remember that although I (we) may ascribe certain powers to God, such as omniscience and omnipotence, the only way I can deal with those attributes is from a human perspective.
In other words, I can only speculate on the privileges and limitations of omnipotence from a creaturely point of view. It’s easy for me to ask, “Can God create a rock that even he can’t lift?” while forgetting how an actually omnipotent being might manifest that power. My question is one asked by a decidedly unomnipotent being, but from an omnipotent being’s point of view, it probably is pointless.
I’ll be sure to ask when I see God. I suspect that he will have to share some of his powers with me if I’m ever going to understand all of those ozone-inducing questions.
“Unless ye become as little children…” maybe applies, eh?
Mike, you still tend to see God as a person. Is that vestigial remnants from your early religious experiences or do you believe God has the same basic psychology or desires that a human does?
Actually I shudder to think of God as a person. If Man was made in God’s image, then that means that God is fascinated by every detail of Britney Spear’s life, that sometimes He isn’t as smart as a fifth grader, especially when He wants to be dancing with the stars, and that perhaps He created earth as a reality show where every thing really is fake, arranged when the cameras are off, so that when the cameras are on, there’s something interesting going on to ensure that He gets good ratings from His angels.
Mike:
I’d shudder, too, to think of God as a person if he were a person like us. But being a person doesn’t necessarily mean being self-absorbed, easily bored and into gossip.
Being made in God’s image, as observant Jews will tell you, means sharing the power of creation (or at least creativity) — the interest in and ability to make joy and delight out of the power of one’s mind. Think back to all the great jokes you’ve ever heard, fantastic food you’ve ever eaten or glorious music you’ve ever heard. In that respect, we are like God: No chimp, dolphin, dog or cat could have ever offered you such.
It’s also interesting that when Moses asks God what his name is, Moses is waiting for a proper name like Osiris or Jim. Instead, God’s answer is the most personal one ever offered: I AM. A non-person cannot be an I.
So, there are persons and there is the Person. I hope the Person does pay attention to Britney, one of his beloved creations, but I doubt that he is entertained by her or cannot wait to see the next tabloid item about her.
Shiny happy dhimmi – #4…
Blogs to read while watching the crocodiles eat.* 1) A letter to the editors. 2) Apparently the Holzbergs were not tortured. Does that mean that their brutal murders weren’t antisemitic? 3) Deferring to Islam at the UN. Deferring to Islam at YouTube. …
Actually I agree with Ymar and you, Charles, that when I ponder the nature of God, I can become (quite) anthropomorphic.
And I shouldn’t be unfair to Britney (and Paris). The problem is the people who devote vast portions of their time to her every action, not her. If they didn’t pay attention, her undeserved fame wouldn’t matter.
An aside: There’s going to be a lot of eye candy – special effects – in ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’. But any movie containing these lines is probably going to irritate you no end:
Man: “Why have you come to our world.”
Keanu The Wise One: “YOUR world???”
Sheesh. Luckily, they let me in as screenwriter at the last moment. How this scene continues:
Man steps up and roundly slaps Keanu across the face. “Yes… OUR world. What part of “God gave Man dominion over the Earth” don’t you understand.”
Keanu: “Ow. I have come here to save the Earth from the evils of your buildings and your farms, and your-”
Man slaps Keanu again. “When a beaver builds a dam, is he despoiling the Earth? A bee with his hive? An ant with his anthill? Is the entire rest of the Universe stuck on stupid? You certainly are.”
Keanu: “Dude, I am like going to totally blow everything up now.”
Man: “Well, that’s why the audience pays the bucks. Go for it. It’s a shame, though, that they’re going to get this ridiculous, false, insipid, vacuous climate-change programming about the evils of Mankind hidden behind all the pretty explosions and chase scenes. How many pro-American quotes are in this movie? How many pro-freedom, pro-individual-responsibility messages are in this movie?”
Keanu: “Not one. The foreign box office market is more important than yours, you know. Besides, half of your country’s people believe the lies anyway, so it’s a no-brainer, dude.”
Man: “No-brainer, coming from you, makes everything suddenly quite understandable to me.”
Mike:
A neat coincidence, your discussion of “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” It’s one of my all-time favorites, so when the trailers of the remake started showing up on TV I was delighted.
But I smelled a rat. The “Your world?” comment coupled with all the scenes of destruction of manmade things told me this was going to be a special-effects indictment against humanity.
So I went online last night to see what the buzz about was and, sure enough, it’s yet another attack by the self-haters on almost everything we’ve struggled to build over the past 6,000 years.
The special effects will draw the credulous. Still, I hope it flops.
PS: Props on your imaginary comebacks to the Keanu!
I saw the “old” the Day the Earth Stood Still. The black and white one, the one with the “robot” that was Will Robinson. Either that, or it was a Twilight Zone episode. Not sure.
that when I ponder the nature of God, I can become (quite) anthropomorphic.
It is just that that particular view of God is sourced from Revealed Truth, meaning things like the Bible and what not. It was interesting to me that while you did not profess belief and faith in something like Christianity, you still tend to see God the same way Christians do. (Not Christian theologians, just most average people, those who don’t go to church or think about theology much)
The Greeks, for example, viewed Gods as vain, jealous, and corrupt humans. The Greek Gods doing cruel things and bringing on evil was expected. Yet, one of the most common arguments you will hear against God and Christianity is “if God is all powerful and all merciful, then why does evil exist?” This is based upon seeing God as a person, like your everyday neighbor, who, if good, would wish to remove evil. The concept of free will, of course, is forgotten. After all, how many people now a days would give up their liberty and right to choose in favor of the “government” saving them from problems and evil?
Shoot, Y, I always wondered why the sea was always so “wine-dark”, and why Athena always had “flashing eyes”.
I wrote a novel for the SE Michigan high school competition back in those days. My God in that novel was a rotating blob of light. His most notable characteristic was wiping out failure, including failed races (of aliens). Three humans convinced him he was wrong, and at that point God realized there was an even higher dimension than himself to explore. He quit exploding the stars and killing the races (just in time to avoid slaughtering all of us – remember I was quite liberal back then, and Man was Bad). Then God disappeared (apparently went off exploring).
It was a groan-worthy effort that I can’t read today, but it won back then. Must say something about its contest competition…
It had an interesting premise from what you have said about it.