I don't know if it is a restriction so much as a choice. I suppose flaws/ drawbacks/ limitations go with the territory of spirituality - how would you differentiate between people in their faith if they are not tested?
Why does a god need to? If spirituality is not something that originates in the material world, and doesn't interact with the material world, how is our material life relevant? If our material lives do affect it, how?
So if you're an atheists you don't buy into the notion of spirituality and faith and therefore you definitely wouldn't buy into the idea of these things being tested. But if you're a theist then you would buy into the notion of spirituality and faith being tested.
Well, yes, as an atheist I don't buy into any of those, although I suppose there could be atheists who still accept some sort of spirituality - regardless, it's not so much about whether I accept it as much as just trying to understand what the purported system is supposed to be, or at least could be. It's not just that I don't believe it, it's that I can't see a way in which any of it makes sense.
Not so much change events as change our reaction to events - an event happens and we have no choice but to go through it but we can choose how we deal with it.
See, for me, our reaction is as much an event as the stimulus to which we're reacting - if nothing else, it affects our behaviour which is an event for others to react to.
CBT for example is about changing your reaction to events. And if you change your reaction it has a knock-on effect and could change some future outcomes.
With autistic children I have a love/hate relationship with CBT and its applications, but I do take your point.
Yeah - that's a fair question. And as I said above, as an atheist I wouldn't buy into any of it and I felt the same way you do on that point. As a theist you accept that faith and spirituality need to be tested. Tests may make your faith stronger or weaker. In Islam there is the idea that you can be tested by being given good fortune/ wealth/ health/ success etc because they can distract you and take you away from practising your faith and remembering Allah -
Which seems reasonable as an account of what's happening, but it doesn't explain why faith is important, or why it needs to be tested. Is there some sort of virtue to accepting claims without evidence? How is it somehow 'better' (is it better?) to continue to accept those claims, or to act as though you do, in the face of contradictory evidence? Because that's what things that 'test' your faith are, presumably - examples of things that seem to contradict the claims of a loving god?
You might start thinking that it was your own abilities that caused your success.
Surely it's implicit in the idea that, if my actions can be spiritually deleterious then it's equally my actions that are materially beneficial? Why does Allah get the credit if I do well in life, but it's my fault if I'm spiritually (or materially?) deficient?
Maybe because the messages reflect the time and context and audience they were delivered to, plus it's not possible to know what has been altered by people so a theist would have to take it as a matter of faith if they believe the text has not been altered. Even if it has been altered there is still a lot of interesting stuff there.
Oh, it's interesting
Some of the interpretations of it even more so! I can't see any other way you can accept it than to presume that, at best, it's been interpreted by the authors through the lens of their time and culture - my sense it that Islam holds to the textual detail more consistently than Christianity broadly, but I don't know if it has an equivalent of the sort of Biblical Inerrantists/Biblical Literalists that hover around the extreme fringes of Christianity and make a lot of noise.
I did English A'Level. My younger daughter is doing Latin A'Level. Studying English or Latin literature involves delving into the ideas behind the words of texts that may have been written a long time ago and I am often amazed by how much wisdom there is in the words of ancient Greek and Roman writers that could be applied to issues today. For example in Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” which sounds a lot like CBT to me.
I did English A-level. Shakespeare struck me as being a lot like the Old and New Testaments - they were so poetically constrained and twisted from clarity that you could interpret them to mean whatever you wanted. People raved about Shakespeare's insight, but he just seems to me to create a spectacularly busy blank canvas to paint their own picture on. I submitted a well-justified piece suggesting that Iago prompts everything because of his unrequited love for Othello, and his jealousy of Cassius' presumed place ahead of him in Othello's affections, which absolute nonsense but I got an A for it all the same. I am not familiar with Qu'ran to know if it's a similar situation, but there are enough drastically different interpretations of its expectations out in the public domain that it seems plausible that's the case.
Our brains interpret what we hear or read and then we convey our understanding to others, which may be completely different from the intended meaning of the person who spoke or wrote the words. I think the competing messages is inevitable because of the way our brains, language and communication works. As I mentioned previously, in the Islamic stories we have the characters who don't have the freedom to think or ponder - angels. Humans are differentiated from angels in that respect.
You'll have some on here saying that angels are just fancy computers if you keep that up
As a Muslim I can only comment on the Quran as my faith would say the Old and New Testament has been changed by people.
I appreciate that the Qu'ran is (often?) seen as an embodiment of ideas and 'worth' within Islam in a way that the New Testament isn't within Christianity, but do you feel that the Qu'ran is somehow a less interpreted work than its predecessor, that's in a 'cleaner' representation of the divine inspiration? Or is it that you think it's culturally closer to us in terms of time and influence, and therefore we've (or the Islamic world?) haven't drifted as far from that cultural setting to have lost the sense of it?
I am not sure there is an ethical problem with penis tips - it seems to be an badge of identity but I could be wrong.
And that tribalism is important why? And as a badge of that tribalism, that's a strange choice, too.
Enslaving people is something some humans do - because they can and because in wars there would have to be some kind of state funded welfare system to look after prisoners of war if there wasn't slavery. So slavery will always exist, where the mechanisms and resources humans have to eradicate slavery are not sufficient to prevent it.
I'm not sure I agree, there is a difference between putting restrictions or controls on people because of things they've done (punishment, imprisonment) and the ownership of people. You can be a relatively benign owner of slaves and the practice is still wrong.
It's up to societies as to how they manage their resources and collect funds for a state to maintain mechanisms to look after people. For example, with migrants or asylum seekers we can see the system the UK has is not able to process applications quickly due to lack of resources, and people are prevented from legally working while their application is being processed and there are plans to house them on barges or in army barracks for however long it takes or to send them to Rwanda. Those who work illegally in the black market are open to exploitation and some possibly become victims of human trafficking and slavery. Different groups have different views on the priority of competing claims for funding and the morality of how to deal with the migrants or asylum seekers. It's an issue for societies i.e. us to figure out.
But some of those systems and methods are objectively morally better than others, don't you think, and yet the Old Testament explicitly recommends one of the worst, and implicitly condones one of the others. All whilst making dietary choices an 'abomination'. I get that there are cultural effects at work there, but this is the word of God, surely you can manage to explicitly prohibit slavery, or forced marriage? Even if you leave the unconscionable prohibition against bacon!
If the word is intended for that particular cultural milieu, and is to be updated when the culture has changed sufficiently, how can Islam be so confident that Mohammed was the last prophet, that the message won't need updating again for the digital age, or if/when we venture out into the stars?
Yes agree it is foreseeable. I am not seeing the special problem with religion though. To me all ideas, words and human communication can be actively dangerous in the wrong hands - that just seems to go with the territory of being human.
It's not that I'm suggesting religious people are, in general, any better or worse for that than anyone else (although perhaps there are facets of religion that make it easier or worse when they do) but rather that if this is the inspiration of a divine, perfect being, why is that message not somehow clearer or less prone to misinterpretation. How can it be so clear and so absolute on some things - Thou shalt not steal - but completely fail to address so many other horrors that have been consistently perpetrated through history, how can it be such that a divine being could pass along a message that is not even interpreted as 'this is the circumstances in which slavery is acceptable' but 'this is one particular way in which you must not mistreat slaves'.
I don't think it's supposed to be an indication that the disabled person specifically needs to spiritually develop. From my understanding of how it works from the perspective of Islam, it may be the people who get closer in faith to Allah who may have harder tests to bear because of their stronger faith, and the disabled person's disability will be taken into account in any judgement to award them more good deeds to counteract any wrong they might have done than an able person would receive who had lived a similar life in all other aspects. I think the idea is that the people around a disabled person and wider society are tested in their faith and spirituality in how they deal with and look after the disabled person.
See, I just can't see how that works. There are disabilities that make life harder, but they don't directly affect how you think - is that harder life because you're starting of more spiritually developed so you need to be tested harder? Why, why do you need to be tested at all, why are some people inherently more spiritually aware? Or is that harder life not 'for' anything, and you'll have a lower bar when you're judged, in which case it's the subtle discrimination of low expectations all over again. Or if, because it's not a direct influence on spirituality, it's spiritually neutral then we just come back to why is it a thing at all?
And on the disabilities which are cognitive, the learning difficulties and the like - how are they dealt with? Do you get a free pass if you're born without the capacity to understand any of the spiritual instructions?
The Islamic story is that Iblis (equivalent to Lucifer) is a jinn not an angel.
My ignorance, there, I'd apparently misunderstood, I though that the jinn
were the fallen angels. So they're a different 'supernatural' group - do you know if they have a Jewish equivalent?
I feel the impact of seeing someone's else's life compared to my own - whether it generates compassion and empathy and what I do about it, so for me that is the rationale for differences in our individual struggles.
Empathy and compassion are good, let's assume that they are something that's spiritually beneficial - it's going to be easier to be empathic if you've been through things than if you've had an easy life so it's just a different version of why are there different starting points?
Thanks and agreed - I have enjoyed this too and your questions make me think. I don't claim to have all the answers though.
English A level again, and I remember a quotation from somewhere about being wary of anyone who thinks they have all the answers, but I progressed from there to Engineering and left that cultural nourishment behind!
O.
