Arguments for Resurrection – Part 26

Seedbed of Light (continuation page 61)

“Hear the strength of His Promise: God—there is no god but He. He will gather you to the Resurrection Day, about which there is no doubt. Who is truer in tidings than God? (4:87). But those who do not confirm the word of Him Whose truthfulness is confirmed by all creatures and is affirmed by the universe through its articulate signs, must be relying on illusions, lying, and Satan’s deceiving words and falsehoods. We seek refuge in God from being left without a true helper, and from the evils of the carnal soul and Satan.”

How do I get to know Satan’s whisperings?

That comes with training your human qualities. Human beings are always presented with dual options. That is, there is always an alternative to the option that one chooses. In order to choose the options, we are given freewill to exercise. Without options, no one can exercise their freewill. Satanic whisperings in the Quran is referred to as the alternative option which is presented but has no reality. This means that the choice is for us to investigate and accept or reject whatever makes sense to us. If one uses their human qualities to the best of their abilities, then they should be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

Most people turn blind to the alternative idea that is why they condition themselves not to question the reality even for a short time. Always question: what is the alternative and can it be true?

Quran emphasizes on the importance of reasoning. The circle of reasoning must always turn. That is the way human nature and the universe is and the scripture emphasize on reasoning, find out which one is true.

It is not difficult but the only obstacle is human laziness not wanting to act according to your reality. Just want to get rid of searching for the reality by claiming that “I believe.”

Do we have to question at every moment? Yes, until we die we have to question. I am sure that God exists and ultimately the alternative idea comes to you but at the end, this process of confirming becomes automatic. At first, it may take time to investigate and confirm and that is the principle. If someone asks you why do you claim that the Creator’s work is perfect, you must be ready to present your answer because you have gone through the process and you have thought about it. Without investigating and educating yourself, you cannot claim that I have no doubt about my religion. If someone keeps doing exercises throughout his life, at the end it becomes a kind of reflection where s/he reaches the conclusion frequently (hadth in Arabic). It means that you investigate on so many occasions in new condition when the alternative idea comes to you do not worry about it and do not give it a chance to take a seat in your heart because you have the answer to it.

Analogy: A nail and hammer is hard to use the first time. But by doing again and again, people become professionals. If the new users are not careful, they would not put the nail carefully. It seems that the nail and hammer experts do not have any other alternative i.e. they do not have to be careful. The new users have to be careful thinking about the alternative that if they are not careful they would not be successful. The experts do it quickly because they have been training for years.

Similarly, what we do without being trained is that we condition ourselves that I believe in God and I am closed to alternatives. That is not human! We have to go through exercises and training and at the end it becomes automatic. Some people take one day, several hours and after a few years of training, one hour, one minute and seconds.

We cannot think of any world where there is no Satan. That is, human being will be left without any alternative under any condition. Good and evil fighting is what the Quranic verses mention mostly. If someone says that they do not have any doubts, then they are cheating themselves. In order to put the nail properly with the hammer, you have to train yourself. Taken for granted belief cannot be real. Thinking of a world there is no Satan is impossible. Freedom is within human nature. If you do not want to use it, then you have chosen to reject it. Freedom comes before your conclusion. Belief is your conclusion. If someone does not use his choice, his claim to have belief is not real. You keep claiming that “I believe” and you may die without knowing any reality.

Comment: The ability to distinguish between true and false comes from knowing who you are, firstly. How can one get to know themselves knowing that that we are the same but at the same time unique? The ability for the seed to grow into a tree is the same for all seed.

There are endless professions in the world, right? Everyone takes one way of training themselves, not conditioning. If you want to be a doctor, there is training for it. Because human nature is full of potentialities, every potentiality is a seed and you have to water the seed in order to have the plant to grow. People say that everyone has different talents but in our own reality everyone is given the same seeds but from the first day of birth, we start feeding one seed more than the others. The ability is developed based on the potentiality we are watering. If you think that you are not talented in something means that you have not developed yourself in there. The discipline of psychology goes back to childhood experiences of people to explain their shortcomings. They are not absolutely wrong but they reduce the results to the root cause as if human freewill is not there because they do not want to burden anyone by saying that from the very beginning you were subject to this condition but you did not use your freewill and you carried on feeding that potentiality. Freewill is one’s own choice because no one has to follow one way over another. We all have free will and no one denies freewill! When they look at the root of the problem, they accuse the life conditions that people have been subject to. They deny the freewill saying it was not your fault as it is the environment you grew up in. Example: You grow up in a culture where the family cultivated a certain potentiality and you did the same. That is why until a certain age, the Creator says that you are not responsible for anything because your freewill is created in a way that it does not freely act because the freewill is not developed yet. After reaching certain age when the freewill has developed, it is your responsibility to start questioning what you have been doing? Society has been doing something and my family has been doing something. Now I am free to think and make decisions and let me re-orient myself! You can do that. As a parent, you should allow your child to freely think and come to a conclusion. S/he may come to a wrong conclusion, does not matter, and let him/her experience how s/he is exercising his /her freewill. First time s/he is making decision on with his/her freewill. You can guide but do not condition the children. Guidance is different from conditioning. Leave the option to the child himself/herself to decide and educate if s/he wants to take the parental teachings. Mostly parents condition their children with their teachings. As far as parents are concerned, that is wrong. As far as the child is concerned, he has to make a choice after a certain age. First, family environment has influence on the child which cannot be avoided. If they want to carry family environment, they form a community i.e. like minded families get together because they cannot leave the child to decide for themselves. It is not the healthy way of educating the new generation. First we have to teach them how to decide by themselves.

Everyone grows his/her potentialities in one way or another. That is quite normal because we are given multiple ways to find the truth. Whatever way we take enables us to go to the right conclusion. No one can say that because I have studied biology in this century, I ended up being a secular man. Study biology and question, your human qualities will lead you to a conclusion that “secular sciences have no base”. If your ability does not allow you to find the truth while you are studying biology, then it means that you are not responsible for it. Anyone who uses his freedom to think can understand what is right and wrong. Otherwise, the creation will be meaningless because if I am not going to educate myself based on my choice why am I here then? If everything is directed by the One that creates and I have no freewill within the order of creation which is established by the Creator, then what’s the point of me being given existence? Within the order of the Creator’s will, I have freewill to operate within the general order. We can make use of the following analogy to understand the difference between human freewill and the One that gives freewill. Analogy: A house has 40 rooms. The house is given and within the house, you are given the options to choose amongst the room you want. All the ways go to the truth i.e. the way to reaching God is endless. Every way has the potentiality to attach you to the Source of your existence which is called the Creator of the universe. You have to use your freedom. The problem is laziness and taking responsibility of being in this world lightly. If you do not want to train yourself, you do not use your freedom to think, reflect and choose.

The Quranic verses such as “Don’t follow your ancestor’s way” pushes one to investigate everything for themselves because you do not know whether the ancestral way is right or not. How can you guarantee they are right? If after investigating, you find their way as being right for you, then that is belief. Otherwise, without investigation and coming to a conclusion, no one can believe. Let’s say you were born in a region with the majority of the people following a certain religion, why are you following that religion? Everyone says that my ancestors were right. People do not question and do not practice their freedom. I am a free human being and I should consider the alternate idea to make an analysis of which one is wrong. We are given the alternative way to choose which may be laziness.

Why do you believe that Jesus is the son of God some may ask? Well, accepting or rejecting such a claim without using human qualities is the same. Not thinking about it is also using your human qualities to choose laziness!

Comment: Since we are questioning to reach answers, where do we draw the line that I have found the truth?

No one can claim to hold the “Absolute Truth.”

You keep questioning and making decisions until you die. Every question leads to investigation and reasoning which executes an answer. Then from this point on, there is the emergence of another question which lead to reasoning and an answer and this process keeps going until you are given death. This process of training is called “belief”. At first, the time elapsed between the question and answers maybe longer than usual but as you get more and more away from your date of birth (i.e. closer to death), the time elapsed becomes shorter and shorter but never a straight line because you are always choosing between options. Please refer to the graph below for a visual representation of what is being discussed here. (Question is denoted by “Q” and Answer is denoted by “A”)

Just as the heart beat meters at the hospitals shows a straight line when a person dies, similarly, the majority of the people’s questioning and answering meter looks the same while alive i.e. when not questioning and looking for answers. Heart beating as per the heart meter analogy refers to how human qualities need to be functioning.

Growing up, you developed a certain patterns of thinking. At this age, things become clear and alternate idea comes to you. Process of decision becomes longer. Before maturity, everyone is potentially submitting to the truth, it means that you have no responsibility. The Creator has not given you fully fledged freedom to think and make a decision. That is the Creator’s choice, you are not responsible about it. At every stage of your life, you always have two things: question and answer.

People celebrate birth day to get ready for death day ideally. We have to train ourselves not for the past but for the future. Our responsibility does not go back to the past. At every moment from now on, I have to think of from now on what I am supposed to do. Past is experienced and finished; you have no responsibility anymore as far as the rest of your family is concerned. Think about the future. Don’t say I was born in a Muslim background so today I am a Muslim. It is in the past, gone. Get ready for your death day i.e. what am I going to do from now on until tomorrow. This must be our habit. If you made a mistake yesterday don’t be upset from it, take lesson from it and don’t do it and develop your human ability for death day. That is human perfection.

Comment: How do you evaluate historical claims? Should you even concern with them?

Babyhood is in the past. How much does it bother you? What can you do now as you are now? We have to learn how to live momentarily. From now and look at the future. Every moment has right and wrong debris from the past. But we have to clean it by making decisions again. Question and Answer. It never ends! No one has a straight line with no vibration. If you want to analyze history, you have to decide about its truthfulness or wrongfulness.

Comment: Where does my belief come in in the question and answer cycle?

Every answer is your belief. Science studies how this laptop is working. Since I did not put the laptop’s power supply properly, do you think the plug is generating electricity to the laptop? Don’t you think that we have to question the Source of existence of electricity rather than how electricity is coming?

Comment: How can I know that my belief is right?

You are what you are. You cannot say that you are right or wrong at a particular moment. I am a human being and I can make decisions for myself. Your conclusions are subjective to you. Belief is your conclusion at every moment. We are creatures of momentary existence. If you say that is my conclusion and it is wrong, it means that you made a decision about the case to be wrong. You cannot make sure whether your conclusions are right or wrong although the truth is objective but it is external to one’s choice. Objective truth exists but no one can claim that my conclusion fits the objective truth.

Atheist says: Since there is no absolute truth (that I can claim), why should I bother about the truth?

Believer says: I have got the absolute truth.

Both are wrong. No one can claim that they have reached the absolute truth because every claim is subjective to oneself. Any claim declared by human beings is bound to be subjective!

Comment: Can you be subjective and wrong?

No. How can you know for sure that something is wrong? No one can claim that they got the absolute truth including the Prophets.

As far as my humanity is concerned, I have to decide the Source of existence of anything. My responsibility is not to find out how much a person lived without water for example. Instead, I need to question: Who put this order out there? Who am I and what is my responsibility between this reality and how am I going to explain the existence of this reality (the existence of the order)?

• Belief is the explanation of the reality of what is going on in this order of the universe.

Some may say there is no order in the universe, it is the result of settled down chaos. Problem is that we need to question how the order of the universe is coming into existence. Our responsibility is to question the Source of existence of this order? That is belief. First, you need to question and then when you get the answer that is your belief.

• Belief is not separated from your answer. It is your answer.

No one can claim the absolute truth really means that everyone is open to question and answer. There is no moment in anyone’s life that we are not open to question and answer. Every answer is the source of another question. Otherwise we are dead. We need to train our minds and try to understand this reality so that our lives are always vibrating between the question and answer. If someone says I have found the truth, or “my truth is that there is no truth” they are declaring their death. If someone is given death on their way to seeking answer to their human questions, then they are on the right way as far as belief is concerned.