Listen how desperate McCain has gotten. Get the last part where he says he thinks “his religion is a better spiritual guidance.” So much for politics, McCain. You are over long time ago. Like the war in Iraq you support, it only gets worse by time.
October 3, 2007
October 2, 2007
What is unique about human beings?
Is it language? Is it reason? Is it math maybe? It is utility? Is it longer term planning? Is it the realization that one will die at some point? Is it religious and philosophical inquiry? Is it systematic thought?
It seems to be all of that. But can we abstract one value to account for all of these? Yes, we can. We can because it is Abstraction itself that is unique about all these abilities and that is unique about us, human beings.
Here is a thought. If we–in our religious or materialist-reductionist-scientific thinking–are so committed to the idea that nature is united, wouldn’t it be just abstraction to believe it has One source? It can’t have many distinctive sources and it can’t come out of no source, both of these alternatives would not be sufficient to explain the unity in the extreme diversity of all existing phenomena.
The belief in One Creator is simply the outcome of the practice of what is so fundamental about human beings. It is being human, in other words.
Let there be light!
When you talk with postmodernists, a group of people I am destined to have as my intellectual peers for the past year or so, you hear them appeal to all kind of theories to justify their, what I call, neo-relativism :) Few days ago, one of them appealed to the General Theory of Relativity (the word “relativity” must be music to their ears). So, they say that Relativity proved that all information you can get must be relative to your point of view, to your speed and location, hence, you cannot get an objective view on, pretty much, anything.
Even though the theory of relativity says precisely this, it doesn’t follow from it that an objective view or a measure is unattainable. Physicists would laugh at this if they heard it. Indeed, Relativity is quite the opposite to the later claim. Relativity, contrary to some Quantum theories, is deterministic and precise. From where you are, you will have a limited view, but then you can define precisely where everything, including yourself, is and what is your exact speed and be certain and objective in constructing an overall picture that describes all relationships within any defined limits. In a sense, it takes some more utilization of reason and perhaps cooperation from others would be desirable.
But the interesting thing is that postmodernists, desperately appealing to Relativity, never mention the unique phenomenon of light, an essential part of the theory. Light, in a way quite hard to comprehend and in contradiction to all other forms of matter, has a constant speed. No matter what your speed is, the speed of light, to you and to everything else, will be the same.
I find it interesting that the bible mentioned that the first thing was created by God was this constant, non-relative and unique phenomenon–light. When you look up “light” in the Quran, quite interestingly, it always mentions light as a singular and “darknesses” as plural.
The first instance you encounter it is in the chapter of Al-An’am (The Cattle) which tells you that Allah created the heavens and the earth and “brought into being” the darknesses and light (6:1). Other verses emphasize that all prophets were sent to take people from “darknesses” to “light” (2:257, 5:16, 7:157, 14:1, 14:5, 33:43, 35:20, 57:9, 65:1).
As early interpretations of the Quran emphasized, the reason for that is that Truth is one and falsehood is many, perhaps unlimited.
The physical seeing and spiritual seeing–as is the case with everything else in the Quran, the foundation of the Unity tradition, so essential for humanity–are not separate or unique to each other. The are prerequisites for one another. They cooperate for the wellbeing, or “the humanity,” of the individual. To illustrate this, I think I will have to write another post.
October 1, 2007
What liberalism, freedom and multiculturalism have in common?
I remember in a class where I was assisting in the teaching in a course on Contemporary Problems in Religion and Culture, we were trying to define the Canadian culture. After going here and there, it seemed that what is distinctive about Canada is that it is multicultural! That sounded a little odd since this answer implies that there is no distinctive Canadian culture. While I don’t totally agree that there is nothing more than multiculturalism to Canadian culture, nor that multiculturalism can be a part of culture, this reminded me with the notions of freedom and liberty the United States and many Western states like to describe as what fundamentally define them.
If you think about it, what does freedom and liberalism say? They say that everyone is free to believe and do what s/he wants! Is that really an ideology? Yes. But it’s rather a negative ideology, a disengagement agreement, a peace treaty if you will. They don’t suggest what is right and wrong or what is a good life and so on, they only set the stage.
I am not saying that freedom and liberty are bad ideologies and I am not arguing for dictatorship, if that got you concerned. I am saying that these are not characteristics of cultures. They are necessary. But they are only prerequisites, fundamental conditions for social function, the only value of which is to go ahead and use this freedom to actually choose something!, have some positive statement, some idea on what is good and bad.
My point is that just as multiculturalism would sound odd as a characteristic of culture, freedom and liberty are odd for a nation to identify with as its fundamental principles. It is as if you are saying: my principle is that I can choose a principle! You hear the word “We are a free nation,” or anything of the sort, and you feel like: isn’t free means free to do something?! If you haven’t used this freedom to actually choose, what value does freedom has?!
While I am a big admirer of multiculturalism, freedom and liberty, I am aware that the recent rise of relativism, represented in postmodernism and others, is a side effect of such a misunderstanding of what these notions were meant to do. If you take those principles as your main identification and think they are enough, or are reasons to be proud, this will ultimately lead to relativism and the loss of Truth, so fundamental to human function on all levels.
The human struggle is always one of balance. We are always trying to find the fine line between the two extremes of an equation, in this case between fundamentalism and relativism. And that line, with new information and communication, is constantly getting finer and finer. You can believe and be certain (if you have a justification) but still tolerate and cooperate for the common good.
September 30, 2007
Unity
In my study of religion, scholars have a very hard time trying to define what is religion and whether such a thing exists distinctively from its sociological, psychological and political surroundings. It occurred to me that there is a principle that is shared by all religions, at least the ones that I know of. It is the principle of Unity. Islam, for example, is perhaps the most rigid of these religions in this regard. The most basic principle of Islam is Tawhid, or Unity. To be a Muslim, you only need to utter the word that God is One and that Muhammed is his Prophet. Because of this, something that Karen Armstrong said in her Islam: A Short History, Muslims find it hard to separate politics from religion, reason from faith, science from spirituality, and so on. Al-Mu’tazilat, a major theological school in Islam, were famously known to be the people of Unity and Justice. Since Allah is the only source of everything, Muslim philosophers used to ague that all sciences, natural ones, morality, politics, etc, are interconnected, complimentary and constitute integrated pars of one united system of existence.
All far Eastern religions, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, share the beautiful idea that everything is interconnected, something that was later proven to be the case by the General Theory of Relativity, I guess. Of course, all other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, by their very name, have one God that created everything else.
If you think about it, the principle of Unity of existence is something that even scientists cannot escape. Science does only two things: Unification and Simplification. Physicists for the past forty years have been working on that project to “unify nature” by trying to discover the “Law of Everything,” LOE is what they call it! Now, why would scientists want to do that? Think about it. How do they know that this has to be the case? Keep in mind that only 40% of scientists believe in God (a Jeadue-Christian-Islamic personal God by the way, not a philosopher “first principle” God), and keeping in mind that among the physicists, only about 20% of them believe in God.
The principle of Unity seems to be a good solution to the malaises of modernity, to use Charles Taylor’s term. If we manage to connect spirituality, morals, politics, and natural sciences all together in one integrated and plausible synthesis, we will overcome much of the spiritual crisis of modernity.
It seems that Western civilization had the problem of this dichotomous view of the world seeded in its very beginnings. I wouldn’t blame the Greek philosophers since they had integrated all their knowledge in the “philosophy” or love of wisdom. Aristotle thought that the question of the purpose of material things is essential to truly knowing it. But later on, Christianity had dominantly held the view of Fideism, the notion that religious beliefs cannot be supported by conclusive evidence and that one has to willfully make a step to overcome the gap between evidence and the belief held. This doctrine is volatile to the question of why holding this particular belief rather than another. Later, natural scientists abandoned the question of “why?” or “what’s the purpose?” and even “what is?” to rather “how much?” This is why even though “design” or at least intentionality is an idea that almost everybody holds, and even though order in nature is the very premise of science, all science, it is rejected as a non-scientific theory, which is true according to the new scientific paradigm. Little bit later, Descartes dropped his bomb of Dualism, mind and body, which profoundly impacts both scholarship and popular culture in the West until today.
September 26, 2007
September 22, 2007
September 20, 2007
September 18, 2007
Muhammad Asad Quran Translation in Spanish
Download: El.Mensaje.del.Coran.-.Muhammad.Asad.(Traduccion.y.Comentarios).doc
I love Muhammad Asad’s translation, especially its footnotes! Been looking for it for a while. It is best presented by the Islamicity interface, but am still looking into someway to directly link to a specific verse and maintain the Islamicity intriguing side frames. Anyhow, while doing extraordinary search (by extraordinary I mean using networks like eDonkey!), I found the Spanish version (i.e. a translation of the translation). Should be a great da’wa tool for Spanish speakers.
If you happen to have Muhammad Asad’s translation (in any language) with footnotes actively linked in an HTML or PDF format, let me know.
