What is life? (a personal view)

If that was the salient thing you took from my last post, you missed the principle I was addressing.

But I understand your wonder at my POV.
I feel exactly the same way about virtually the entire population of Earth.
I wonder every day why it is that only I see the obviousness of intelligence behind the reality we live in. And that there is nothing natural about ' Nature'. I'm not talking about faith here.

Yes, I'm painfully aware of how 'insane' that sounds. I stopped caring though.

I agree with you 100%.

Kind of like the ultimate reality version of “Westworld”, a host trying to understand their emerging consciousness and where it came from, before the others are aware.

Let me ask you why some parents put their kids to do through rigorous routines in schools and in sports? Are they not inflicting pain and suffering on their kids by demanding too much from them? The answer is no, they are doing thing for their kids to be a better and more disciplined person when they grow up. They want them to succeed in their life and that why they want their kids to go through a tough routine which to some of us may be like torture on kids.

Now let’s say if a kid in having leukemia in the childhood, how do you know that Allah is not wanting that kid to develop certain traits such as increased empathy towards other? We see that many kids who go through cancer treatment in the childhood, come out as strong individuals.

We forget the pain we go through most often. Try to remember the pain caused by anything 10 years ago and I guarantee you that you will have forgotten most of the pain but what you will remember is the lessons ( positive or negative) you learned through that pain. This clearly shows that our pain is only to benefit us. It helps us to build our character and strengthen our faith. It can also result in people loosing the faith because they actually never believed in reality.

I don t agree to mix disease with sport and school , sport and school are fun and makes you healthier and intelligent . Disease makes you suffer with pain for just a little benefit that maybe you will be a bit prepared for the next pain periods you will experience.

With cancer they come out stronger ? No , they die , they suffer for nothing and it s very bad thing .

The pain it s only there so you do something about it , always if it is cure able and to make you mad , after a long term of pain people get crazy , believe me .

Either everything is a series of random events or there is some purpose to it all.

It's hard to look at all the pain and suffering in the World and believe that if there is a God it's a kind one.

Religious people will try to come up with all sorts of analogies or reasons, but none of them are that satisfactory. It boils down to one thing. They believe that the end result is so beautiful it makes all the pain and suffering worthwhile. We can't really see that because we're only human beings and can't appreciate the mind of God.

So you can broadly decide what you want to believe based on three options.

There is no purpose or god, or there is a god, but it's a cruel god, or there is a kind god but we can't fully appreciate it yet.

What you are saying is the most probably true version of all.

Yes it s true it very hard to believe with all this disaster, I know a person that was like saint all her life but on her dead bed she turned to atheist with all the pain she had .

The only interest of nature in us is only that we reproduce , what negative things come with that nature does not care .

In Quran Allah says that the day of Judgement will be equal to 50,000 years. Now you take average life of human beings and divide that with 50,000, you will see that the life on earth is nothing compared to day of judgement alone. The pain we go through in our lives is nothing compared to the pain in hereafter. If pain in this life can save us from pain in hereafter, it is worth it.

Let me give you another simple example, we all get vaccination for our kids. Now we do get the pain when doctor is injecting the vaccination into the body of infants but is not it worth to save us from diseases afterwards?

Whether you deny God or accept God, it does not make any difference to God. It will make a difference to the life you will have in this world and hereafter.

All we are sure is the pain you can have here , that is too much, the pain of the after or what you believe is just an assumption . So it s very bad situation and desparate.

I practice religion as you do , but we have to admitted that we believe in a book that they say they found because I never saw it .
Even if I see it , it s a book written by people , and you know how people are , they can be liars , selfish, love money and control other people so they have better life .

The only thing that I see is this world is hell because a kid with just a simple small needle and you just insert it in his hand , it s a storm of pain in his brain , imagine with all things that can happen to us going up with worst disease or violence from other people .

This is perhaps the biggest reason I cannot accept Islam. You have this in common with mainstream Christianity. God as I have come to know him would never fit your statement here.

I grew to love God with all my heart, mind and soul after He revealed just how he felt about me. I used 'me' and not 'us' because it was personal at that moment. To know that 'I' mattered to God himself was the most humbling experience of my life.

You are taking my response in the wrong context. There are people who reject God and God still provides for them, does not He? He still gives them ample opportunities to back on the right track. He still shows them the signs everyday so that they can recognize Him. If people still reject Him, they failed their test in this world and they should not expect any reward in Hereafter. Why should they because they denied God, they never believed in God and Hereafter.

Quran is preserved by God and it has not changed. Just do your research and you can see the difference between Quran and other books you are talking about. Many scientific facts which scientists have only recently discovered are mentioned very precisely in the Quran 1400 years ago.

Anyways I am not going to push for it unless you want to look into Islam yourself. We all know about Quran and Islam but how many of us have actually read Quran at their own? If we are rejecting Quran just because media tells us to do so then that's our fault. Should we trust in media or on our own un biased judgment?

...in order to deny you have first to know. I can't deny what I don't know!
I don't deny nor confirm...when I see a compelling argument I gladly bow to evidence.
Atheists and agnostics are not bad people by definition.

That's precisely right and I know many atheists who are very good people. What type of evidence you are looking for existence of God? I am pretty sure you have already read all the evidences which theists put forward.

There are plenty of possible objections but for me, the two biggest are the problem of what a mind is and the problem of free will.

Some axioms for me:

1 - Minds must have needs and God doesn't have any. (Minds are problem solvers)
2 - Minds cannot have free will in a naturalistic world, where either, Causation or perfect correlation is at work.

...so for me, it follows, conscient minds are more akin to a great illusion even in humans and animals...they cannot be the ground of Being.

When we are not even sure what a mind is in a human, go figure a mind in a God who does not have any needs nor any problems to solve. To quote Penrose a view of a God that thinks or speaks like us is a view that degrades the idea of BEING.

When you say naturalistic world, do you refer to the world we live in? I think that's what you mean but I just want to be clear before answering your post.

I mean the Universe/Multiverse. What else?

God is nothing like us. Quran says this multiple times that there is none like God or none comparable to God. One should realize from this the transcendent nature and majesty of God, whose reality the meager intellects of man cannot fathom. Thus, the Prophet Muhammad PBUH said:



Based on the prophetic dictate above, we should steer clear from trying to grasp the reality of Allah. We should suffice by understanding that the human intellect is very limited in its reach and see our inability to fully understand Allah as being from our weakness and imperfection as humans. This weakness and imperfection is only reaffirmed when we look at created things around us: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the sky, and so forth, seeing thereby the greatness of Allah and His power.

This is exactly what you just did in your post. Your are amazed on the capability of human mind an dthe fact is each and every part of human is so complex and complicated that it can't come into existance by itself by random selection. God has given us our senses and intellegence to reflect on things around us and this will result into only one conclusion that we and everything around us has a creator. The complex nature of human shall also leads us to think that we must have been created for a purpose. I am sure you would have come to these conclusions.

Islamic view of free will is that humans have free will to commit good or evil, but God’s knowledge and power encompasses all that happens in this life. This means that we will be held accountable for our actions, since God, while knowing what the outcome will be, allows people to act on their own free will to choose good or evil.

All we do, at least the honestly curious among us, is trying to grasp the intelligibility of the "World"...now from your Religious background you call it Allah, I from my more or less secular background call it Being or Logos, it doesn't matter, what matters is that there would be no "Religious/Spiritual" need if the case wasn't precisely the opposite of what you stated. We strive to understand ultimate reality even when we deny ultimate reality. I have pointed to this paradox along my time in A2K over the years to some of our more prominent nihilists...