What is life? (a personal view)

This is perhaps true...
...but it is also true that a little knowledge of Theology gives you a very poor knowledge of what God actually is, far, very far, from the Christian version...the rock of all Being as it may be, and yet powerless to change itself and powerless to change the Universe and its intrinsic rules...a God without Free Will...a God which is not good nor bad..."perfect" just because there is no alternative to the ground Set of all sets which is all...a meaningless perfect...a Logic without justification nor alternative...a kind of "love"/contact which can be cruel in its "affection"...
My "God" is of a very different kind from yours...light-years apart from your "Walt Disney" version.

PS - The irony is that smart theologians know exactly what I am talking about, but hey they have to sell the "god" of the people...The princess Diana kind of God that every Joe nobody can relate with...and this precisely because of people like you who wouldn't follow the law unless they believe Hell and Eternal punishment waits for them.

One more thing, "Theologian" is just a convoluted word for Metaphysics Politician...

I am not trying to sell any version of God. God is God and He has taught us His attributes so we can understand Him better, it is definitely not the Christian version of God. Read Quran or search for attributes of Allah and you will know what I am talking about.

It doesn't differ much in case you haven't noticed it. Is the same Abrahamic God! Now my view of what you call "God" is much more abstract...some of your elder Theologians know just as well that the actual thing is not the personal God you believe in...your tribalistic view Christian vs Islamic God is irrelevant, they are very much alike with little to no difference. My take is just a pantheistic approach on the line of Spinoza but without any animistic approach. God is just the set of all sets, everything there is, the rock, the ground of all Being, past present and future, in a motionless monolithic block ordered by Math looping in a fractal! That is to say, "It" is information finite.
Inside this huge Set "Motion" is an illusion, a pattern of all patterns that repeats ad eternum. past, present and Future coexist together. While finite it has no boundaries as it goes round and round just like a Rubik's cube.

A true God (ground of all being):

1 - Doesn't have needs, it's full!
2 - It doesn't have wants, is satisfied! (mathematically complete)
3 - It doesn't need to think. Again it is complete, full, nothing to troubleshoot, it can't outgrow itself. It is done period! Thinking requires you to be inside time and try to survive by guessing the future, a characteristic/domain of incomplete beings, not a God.
4 - God cannot change anything if it is the total of all there ever was, is and will be. It can only loop around itself ad nausea ad eternum.
5 - God does not have joy or sadness, it doesn't judge, that which belongs to itself, us, and everything else.
6 - God is just unfathomable ORDER! The sort of order that rings around the apparent transient disorder, to rap it all in the ONE final pattern, itself THE ORDER!

PS - Now take that information to your best elders and scholars and come back with something solid if they even grant you an audience which I bet they don't, you are just to simple-minded!

You know what else is ironic about the US atheists, they are to religious for me...they keep on talking about the problem of good and evil, believe in free will, justice...they still have all the shadows of a religious cultural background...they haven't yet developed a more sophisticated language to counter the idea of God they claim to oppose...well, I do have the language, the understanding to be a true atheist and all the while I still have an idea of God. But one so Alien, so different that for all intents and purposes it is far more atheistic then the Godless vision atheists claim to have.

Fil you seem to have a good understanding of some attributes of God. God in Islam is not the same as defined in Christianity. There are many problems in a way God is described in Bible. God in Bible seems to be a creation who has needs, Christian God is not perfect, changes its nature, not eternal. Anyways you know what I am talking about.

Islam has a very simple concept of God. God is One, He is eternal, perfect, has no needs, neither begets not begotten, does not get tired, does not need to sleep, does not change His nature, etc.

There are many attributes given in Quran about God so we can understand some of the attributes of our creator and that would help us to understand God. I can say with 100% confidence that no religion has such comprehensive attributes of God and yet it is very simple to understand that God is One and He has no partners ( no holy spirit, no son etc.).

Please visit the website below to look into some of the attributes of Allah and decide it for yourself.

https://www.whyislam.org/allah/god/names-and-attributes-of-allah/

How do you relate to such a God? What would love even be to such a God?
I mean, if I were 100% convinced that you are right about God, what would I even do about it?

As you know Muslims pray 5 times a day. So I meet my Lord 5 times a day. I know He is all Seeing, all hearing and I know He has knowledge of all what has happened, what is happening right now and what will happen in future. I ask Him for guidance and for success in this world and hereafter.

Muslims do every single thing in their life after making certain supplications. I pray before I go to sleep, after a wake up, before I go to rest room, after I come out of rest room, before I eat, after I finish eating, before I drive my car, before I enter mosque, after I leave the mosque, before I start my work, after I end my work, so on and so forth. If I see a needy person, I try to help them because I know that pleases my Lord and will be a means of me getting closer to God. I don't expect anything back from anyone I do good to, I only expect God to love me and have mercy on me because after all this I still fall short and can't worship God in a way He deserves. If God has given me power on someone and they make mistakes, I try not be mad on them because Allah loves those who be kind to others.

As you see, God in the center around which Muslim's life revolve and we relate to God in a way no one can. There is peace, tranquility and satisfaction in doing all this and I personally feel that's my purpose of life. If you ever fell in love with someone then you know how we relate to them even when they are not there. How we think of them and smile. How we see them in our dreams and how we talk to them even when they are not there. I love Allah more than that. And why should not I. Everything I have is because of Him inlcuding my existance in this world.


If someone give you $1M how much you would be thankful to that individual? Allah has given me many thing which are pricelss for example my eye, my ears, my arms etc...If I loose any of this, I can't get it back even if I pay $1B. Allah deserves to be worship 24/7 for all the favours He has bestowed upon me.

The relationship with God is also on personal level. Muslims don't need intermediate persons ( priests etc.) to communicate directly to God.

Also one of the key aspect is that the God is forgiving. He has created us and know that we can't be perfect. We will make mistakes but best of us are those who repent over their sins. If we reach out to Allah and truly ask for forgiveness, all the sins are forgiven because Allah is the most forgiving.

Unlike Christianity, Muslims believe that we are responsible for our own actions. There is no such thing as original sin. Adam PBUH did not ask me or you before eating from the forbidden tree so why should we be punished for that. Similarly, no one can die for the sins of others. Salvation is something which one earns by one's own actions.

It’s not just that one highlighted thing but here’s what I don’t get about that part.

The God you describe has no need of us. There is nothing we could possibly offer him. There was no reason for him to create us, no reason to love us, no reason to care a thing about what we do or not do. He is unaffected in any way by it.
If God is this unmovable impersonal thing, it makes him no different than the matter of the universe that the unbelievers credit with our creation. Even if I gave 'your God' full credit for creating me, how am I to love him? Sure, I can be thankful for all the stuff he gave me, glad as hell I got this chance to exist, but 'Love with all my heart mind and soul'? Nope. We are not made that way. God must be somewhat more like us for that to happen. He wouldn’t expect that of us otherwise.

Love implies vulnerability. Does that make one imperfect?

Get the Sarwar Translation of the Koran, its amazing how the God of Islam (a dictated through the Abrahmic tradition) is the ame as the God of Judaism an Christianity.

So you should really have to answer those same questions about your Judaeo/Christian "Big Guy"

I would, but no one else asked.
And I kind of doubt you seriously would.

But I totally agree. These are the questions one should ask themselves about their God.

In its most abstract form the word "Love" means to contact, and being in contact simply means being ordered. Similarly, there is no logic to Logic, Logic is what is the case, the Order of things through spacetime, itself as a whole timeless, a repeating pattern...The kind of "god" Einstein or Spinoza talked about, just the way I do, while the ground of Being for everything including our personal more incomplete, more mundane form of love only Knows its abstract form which again as I said is just, the final complete ORDER of all things possible!
There is no separation between "creator" and created...in that which is cyclic and eternal there is no creation...indeed everything is One! (Just not the way the other guy thought about it)

A series of undergrad courses I was required to take back in the Pliocene was a comparative theology course that beat me about the head and neck re Islam V Judeao/Christian traditions.


Summarized as to how Abraham's law is interpreted by each Ive put together a sense of what each tradition gave me as the only takeaways worth mentioning.
Judaeo /Christian religions (minus all the Pentateuch and Historic stuff) hav taught us to

1 Always Do the Good
2 Avoid Evil

Islam , on the other hand says to
1 Command the Good
2 Destroy Evil

All of several major Abrahamic religions begin with pretty much the same histories and beliefs at the Earliest levels of their existences, but arrive at two diametrically polar opposites of their methods to accomplish the exact same ends.

THATS why "The Life of Brian" is more truth than not in the way these silly pastimes are born and nurtured, We really dont need religions to do whats best, just think of others spaces and feelings.

Its all definite integrals

I have one question for you...What would be of society without sociopaths? Very useful very precise tight numbers 3% to 5 %. What would be Darwinianly speaking? I think it would regress intellectually, be less alert...same is valid for all sorts of challenges, misfortunes, diseases...
"Evil" does not exist, suffering does, and its just a part of the equation in the order of things like "good" is. Funny enough many atheists still cling up to this obscure vernacular of "good" and "evil" and they mean it literally not just as a useful metaphor for complexity...I don't do that, and I don't do free will either!

PS - Does the American white trash committing domestic terrorism and mass murders every 2 weeks in the US was inspired by Islam? Do you buy the bulshit talk of Sam Harris on Islam? Society is in overheat mode, information overload, clash of cultures and tribes, lack of employment, lack of goals and meaning, as you well know more heat, more bouncing, in Physics, means more chaos...

More inflation.

What's Harris take on Islam?

Sam Harris has stated publicly on several occasions that Islam is distinct from other religions and that its fundamentalist oppressive nature is more inductive and prone to lead to terrorism. He criticizes all religions at large but firmly believes there is a special case with Islam. This, of course, IMHO is extremely short-sighted and simplification on a much more complex sociological problem. One that can be seen more notoriously in the US frequent mass murders but also in Europe extremist movements on the rise. As I said before society is in overheat mode, information overload, unemployed, and buried in moral relativism seeking guidance in echo chambers on the web, and extremely polarized in cultural tribal warfare. Sam Harris with all the recent explosion of mass murders in the US has been quieter now on the sales pitch that Religion and Islam are the mothers of all evils and only Science can save us...
I use to like Sam Harris but upon close inspection, he is ill-prepared for Sociological analysis.

I stand by my observations that those fairly summarize the overall doctrinal differences among the three religions, not whether I live and believe them (or not).