Sovereignty of God & No Free Will: Islam

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Thanks for providing that information.
I live in 90% republican country.

Not a place where Islam can exist as an organized
religion inside a structure of building.

That is the great thing about the internet. Dropping by
and seeing the kind way they treat each other with respect
and always focusing on their way to the light, as a main focus
rather than something to talk about on Sunday.

Some (maybe most) of the groups I listed have long-distance memberships, such as the Golden Sufi Center. The guy who runs it is a very nice person. I have personally corresponded with him.

...not strictly monotheist or even theist, but Stoics do not believe in free will (they are soft determinists). Stoicism, as a rule, is a whole lot more rational than Islam...

Thank you all very much for some really interesting replies. Am mulling them over.

I answered "I don't know" to this yesterday, and went and read about the reasoning at a few websites, and the only attempt at an answer that I was able to find was that many/most "punishments" under Sharia Law are actually intended as *deterrents*, ( shaping behaviour ) , which is why they are so often so shockingly severe ... but this still didn't explain why need law at all if all human behaviour is God's will ...

But the real answer seems to me, after some thought, to be that Sharia Law is God's will too ... :lol ... and *I* don't understand why God does this!


I don't think that belief in no free will has to mean "no responsibility"; we are all each of us responsible for what our body does, whether we put it down to alcohol or food opioids or serotonin deficiency or childhood abuse or lack of education or hunger or x, y z ... or to the influence of the whole universe, every single part of it acting on your body, every single cell and chemical and electrical signal of it ... ie. not fetishising any particular aspect of that unimaginably vast whole, not pretending that an individual human is capable of detecting exactly which bits of that immensity caused which effects etc ( or even that there *is* such a thing as "cause and effect" other than the narrative based on it ).

I have a tendency to hubris, to believing that x, or y, or z, or a combination of them all, caused this or that, and to believing that by manipulating a, b and c I will change effects in x, y, and z ways ... and to recurrent despair when what I wrongly perceived to be a CEO with decision-making powers over behaviour, my "I"/"eye", turns out to yet again, for the n'th time, to have no power over the future, not even over my own behaviour ... and what I "prophecied" ( "I will not eat any gluten from tomorrow onwards" ... or ... "I will do some painting every weekday" etc ... and which seem like commands from God in their majestic good-intentions ) does not come true, for the thousandth time ... so I am full of anger like Jonah because what I prophecied ( to the "people"/my body/behaviour/friends etc ) has not come to pass!! ! Grrr. :lol

I need to believe that something v powerful, omnipresent and omniscient, is in charge of absolutely everything, so that my "I"/"eye" is less inclined to believe that *it* is, and is more able to simply observe and "enjoy" the "story"/the action taking place around/in front of it.


And albedo asked something similar. I do think that I "had" to believe in free will to make what felt to me like a meaningful decision to "believe in god" ... but within less than a month of doing so it was as if scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that free will simply did not exist, not if the God that I was believing in was to be anything more than another kind of gluten or food opioids or early childhood experience or single environmental factor, or social construct of some kind ( like justice, or science or love or truth etc ) which I believed "contributed" to my behaviour in some way ... This God I had chosen to believe in had to be a "meta-social-construct", greater than all the rest/others, containing all the others, ... and if God was that great then free will was just another one of those social constructs, definitely not above or outside God.

Now lets see if I can post this without a ********************** Captcha Test! :lol ... Nope!! ! Grrr.

Edit. PS. Having read some more about Islam since my OP yesterday I find that it seems to be almost as prone as Calvinism to trying to introduce free will by various backdoors, which is disappointing.
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In that case the "non-Islamic Westernized Sufi groups" and the quasi-Islamic Golden Sufi Center may be more to your liking. None of them practice Shariah law.

The other ones I listed have very liberal interpretations of Shariah law.

They are kufr then, no?

Muslims call each other kufr much as Christians call each other heretics. Those accusations are not taken seriously by anyone outside of the particular Islamic movement making them.

I've never, ever heard a Christian use language like "heretics". Not ever (and I'm no fan of Christianity). That kind of language is redolent of the 16th century. To me, it's like someone demanding that Catholics be burnt at the stake.

No-one talks like that here. In fact, most Christians here don't care whether you're Christian or not, because we're mostly secularist.

That just ain't the case with the ROP.

Try going to the "Great Debate: Who is Jesus?" room on the Paltalk chat service. Christians call each other by that term all the time. It seems to be a hobby.

Seriously, the heresy charge is alive and well among conservative Christians - even if it cannot be politically enforced anymore.

God, these people must be nutters. But I've never met people like this in real life. I remember that bloke at an Orange march that got a bit huffy when I said I was an atheist, but I said it to piss him off.

I know many, many people that lobby for religious schools to remain. Church attendance is falling through the roof here in Britain. Hardly anyone I know goes any more. In general, with Christianity it seems to only be the Afro-Caribbean and Polish Catholic communities (often as a result of recent immigration) that still bother with it to a decent extent. It seems to be that non-white immigrant communities are far more religious than the white majority.

But I've never heard the sort of language you describe, and I despise organised Christian religion. Even being in a church makes me feel a bit ill.

But then again, and as for the morons you describe, I don't live in religiously conservative parts of the U.S. If I did, I would laugh at these a***holes too.

In the UK, no. However, in the U.S. and Australia, those sorts of accusations are common. Christian fundamentalism began in the U.S. (early 20th century), and Australia became its second home.

Last edited by nominalist on 20 Jul 2013, 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Is it being in any house of worship that makes you feel ill or is it being in a Christian house of worship that makes you feel ill?

ruveyn

No. Christian fundamentalism had its day 500 years ago when they used to be burn people at the stake for not agree in biblical literalism. Ever since then it's been in decline despite the occasional upswing in various locales. That's in large part because of various social reform movements such as the Enlightenment. Islamism on the other hand is very much still on the rise, and with in brings Sharia, lots of Bin Ladens and lots of Al-Quedas. As for those reform movements? Well, they never happened and since that runs contrary to cultural undercurrents in Muslim societies I don't see them happening any time soon.

That is too simplistic. Are you talking about the Roman Catholic Inquisition?

Christian fundamentalism started about 100 years ago in the U.S.

The movement was named after The Fundamentals:

The Fundamentals

That's not true at all, in fact its just plain ridiculous. I'm Muslim and my religion emphasizes the presence of free will in humans as being granted by God. In fact, free will is said to be the reason why a human who obeys God is higher than an angel, because a human obeys God while resisting temptation, while an angel is "programmed" to obey God. And that's also why, we believe, that humans were granted with an intellect to question everything around them, and our religion tells them that reason and faith in Islam are compatible, and that they SHOULD question, because the thing that sets them apart from the animals is their free will.

I'm talking about in general. Christianity is not a unified entity and hasn't been for over a thousand years, if ever. What you're referring to is one of the upswings I mentioned, however that's still in the context of a massive overall decline in political and social power in most Western countries. If you don't believe me, consider that in France under the Ancien Regime the Church was an integral part of the state itself and compare that with religion in contemporary French politics. It isn't too simplistic, it's the social trend in the first world.