[TripolySunni]

Originally Posted by Ataraxia

It doesn't have to be a "coincidence". Look back to what I said about God suddenly creating the world. It shows how religious people think backwards; They live in a present which they believe required a creator in the past, but when you go back to the point "the world was created", you'll realize that it doesn't make sense for it to happen so that we live in the present. You have to be inclusive and not "live in the moment".

You don't make sense.

I'm sure somebody created the Mobile phone I have then pogrammed it, the same way somebody created and programmed the Human to function, if I'm walking in the deser and I find a mobile phone (main components are Glass for slilicon and Petrol for plastic) I won't say that this is a product of chance and billions of years of oil bubbling and wind blowing and sand clumping.
Let's take an even simpler material like a piece of pottery(main components Clay) when an archeologist finds just a small shard of it in the sand he doesn't Say " Oh! what a Wonderful Chance this is!!!" He says "Someone Made this, Just who could have made it ???" then he starts his research, and in fact the archeologist can tell you so many things about the civilization who made this just out of this piece.
Unlike the animals we humans are not just a bunch of chemicals we have our spirituality and our hopes...You Aethiests have a problem as far as i'm concerned and it's a psychological one rather than an intellectual one, all of you must have had some horrible experience or seen something horrible then blamed it on God, then you think of the most effective way to insulting God which is denying his existance with an absolute statement on something which you have absolutly no knowlege of as opposed to the agnostics which say "Maybe there is a God, maybe there isn't".

So What is a God? What makes something a God? Well a God is something that people worship, so why do people worship things? Well they worship something in order to get something which they need in return...So a God is something that people worship and believe can give them what they want and what they need.

In different religions people have different gods for different purposes for example if you wanna win a war then you worship the god of war (not micheal aoun) or if they want someone to fall in love with them then they worship the god or godess of Love and so on...another example is the roman catholics that have different saints for different things such as travel and art or saint anthony for finding lost objects...So there is no difference between worshiping and praying to a god or a saint because in the end you are praying for that being in order for him to grant you something which you need.

Now the religion or the rituals are how you communicate with those beings, such as praying or offerings or even extreme things such as human sacrifice.

So the question Does God exist? can be answered by a simple yes, in fact there are millions of them from Hindu to greek and zoroastrian. because as we all know a god is something which humans put thier hopes and faith in So everyone in the world has a God at some level or another, And these gods are not necessarly Idols or Saints or Planets but they can also be ideas and concepts because people put thier faith and trust in so many things such as communism or science and so on...

Another example in an english family for example a child is brought up on a certain set of rules such as not to wear brown shoes with black pants or he is taught how to eat his breadroll correctly or how to address elders and these strict rules are a type of ritual or a type of religion which the parents believe if thier child would follow then he would be recognized as a member of the upper middle class and then many oppurtunities would open up for him, In other words they believe that this is the WAY and the THING that would get you what you want and what you need and so it becomes a type of God.

Now whenever you ask a Hindu or a Buddhist or any person who worships idols about thier religion then you should expect to hear stories of how This or that thing happened and how he prayed for this god and was rewarded with whatever and how he offered milk to an elephant god (Ganesh) and came the other day to find an empty glass of milk or the Virgin Marry (PBUH) crying or the Crusufied Isa (PBUH) dripping with Blood, and then they say that these experiences are poof that thier gods are real which is the same as the english boy example above, and it's true that sometimes you will get a job only by what virtue of school you go to just as your parents believe and aspire as per thier experiences.

So to sum it all up, everybody has a God and most people have many Gods.

But the question which should be asked now is this: Are any of the things which people put thier faith and trust in, are any of them truly worthy of it?

So let us devide these millions of Gods into broad categories and talk about them in light of the Quran thus showing that they are not worthy of worship.

Now the quran unlike any other book uses a method of dialogue thus god is talking to you directly through it and is presenting the excuses and arguments that aethiests and other religions use and then proving them wrong...
let's take the example of buddah and buddhism in which he teaches that in order to succeed one must abandon life and live in a monastry and if you can imagine every single person on the face of the planet doing that then even the people in the monastry would have no means of surviving and we'd be extinct as a species...So this is really not an inclusive religion.
So this is budha's way of reaching enlightenment and as opposed to the Quran this does not appeal to most people because it does not appeal to common sense which is common to all of humanity (Not Logic because that is a systemized way of thinking). Now the only people who do not agree with common sense are either IN-sane or philosophers.

An example of common sense is: "A Part of something is less than the whole thing" and that is a universal truth, another xample is : "You don't get something coming from nothing".

True or not? Have you ever in the totality of human experience everheard of something just spontaniously appearing out of nothing?

For example when we humans see a Magician pull a rabbit out of the hat we are momentarily surprized because we know by common sense that we cannot get something out of nothing Although we later realise that this is a trick because we refuse to accept that "magic" even after we see it with our own eyes.

Now as we are talkig about common sense and things which we agree upon as humans it is good to note that one of the things which we as humans do not agree upon are "Ethics" and "Morals" such as things we should do and punichments we should undertake.

So no religion can judge another religion of being backwards because of something such as Polygamy as opposed to monogamy, because on what bases is this right and that wrong? and it is good to note that the only reason monogamy got famous in the northern hemisphere is because it was the easiest way to survive in the cold whethear with only one wife and a few children. So this monogamy thing was estabished mostly due to geography and climate.

Anyway so the first Category of people are a minority as History shows and they are the ones who say "There is No creator" and this existance is just a product of random events or whatever...
Now societies which adopted this point of view have been non-existant throughout history or have vanished and evaporated very quickly (Soviet union) that history barely mentions anything about them...
Now if you look at the History of humankind u'll see that almost all societies believed in a creator which transcends creation such as the Zulu in south Africa or the old Australian tribes or Chinese ect.ect... and this is because this idea of a creator is deeply rooted in the fundamentals of common sense which make it a common human experience.
The Quran poses a bunch of rethorical questions in relations to these people such as "Did it come from Nothing?" and the answer is obvious. because when you see something working in a certain pattern we humans think that thee patterns have been imposed upon that Thing. an example of that would be a "Noise" generator in a 3D software, although a noisy pattern is chaotic but in the end it is programmed by the software engineer with certain mathmatical formulas.

The Quran asks and keeps asking you to Look at the alternation of the night and the day look at the animals that you ride and you eat, look at yourselves for God's sake then it says "In all of those are signs for those who are wise and those who understand", these verses all point us towards the same thing that this systemized world and these articulated coordinated systems...you get the idea.

Another example, the ants build huge mudholes with ventalation formed by rings around their kingdom so as to keep the temperature constant because of the heat in south africa, they they have specialized places in order to grow fungus and farm fungus to later consume ect.. now thes ants they are not humans, they can't think like us so were do they get this knowlege from? how do they know how to achieve this complicated yet delicate architecture?

Look at the distance of the earth from the sun Look at the size of the earth in relation to gravity look at the combination of gases on earth, look at the Ozone layer, look at the presence of water, Look at the speed of rotation of this planet around its own axis.... and we can go on forever.

only common sense, there is a hiden power behind this there is a wise super intelligent creator and one thing to note is that this being is UNLIKE US because if he was like us then that being would need a creator of his own which is illogical and I'll tell you why in a simple example.
Imagine I need to lift up heavy Box and I ask you for help, then you tell me Ok I'll help you but I need someone to help me to help you lift it, then that third person says he needs a fourth person to help him help you lift it and so on ...Will this box ever be lifted in the end? No it won't.

So it makes sense that the creator is self sufficient with no beginning nor end and is infinite.

Now the Quran further explains that theproblem with humanity is not hat it doesn't beleive in God, But the problem is that it offers the Qualities of the creator to the creations, such as worshipping Humans or statues or Animals or Human Laws, OR sometimes they attribute to God some of the deficiencies and weaknesses of the creation and this is all called "Shirk" in Islam and the reason fr this is that they speak about god without knowlege and they invent things Because the reality is that what we can come to know about the nature of god through our human minds is in FACT EXTREMLY LIMITED (this is where the holy book comes in).
So when faced with this dilemma we invent stuff, Now there has been a bunch of popular philosophers since around 200 yrs ago called the "deists" and these guys believe that god exists which is very logical but they didn't belive in a personal god which means that they didn't think that God really cared about his creations and we can't have communication with him... Others beleive that God exists but we cannot directly communicate with him because he isn't like us (thus contradicting themselves by attributing the deficiencies of Humans to God). Now in Islam this line of communication can be opened directly at any time and in any place because we belive that he is an all knowing God thus knowing all secrets in our hearts and minds.

Now we come to the Idol worshippers and we skip the dumb ones to get to the smartest Idol worshippers who don't claim that the Idols/totems and statues which they worship have any power but that they are intermediaries or intercessors between them and God (a Statue which represents a Spirit) and they give the example " if you wanna talk to Tony Blair you don't go up to him and shout instead you have to go through Tony's cronies"... and a Sad example that was, because as you know Tony is too good for you so you have to go through special channels ( and they attribute this to god ).
Thier Main idea is that you can't talk to god directly he is too good for you, instead you need to find a priest which can later transmit his message to some demi-god which later transmits it bit by bit to the higher God.... So they imagine god like a King or a prime-Minister (Saint Sanyoura) surrounded by Body-guards and ministers and advisors ( again Human defficiencies) because the question is "Why does Tony need cronies?" well it's because he's a freaking Human who is scared of being assasinated or attacked or simply because he just doesn't have enough time and power to deal with all of us at once. again "Shirk" "Idoletry"

Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) is very well known for Smashing Idols, since childhood he used to see his dad carve out statues from wood and then pray to those same statues which he makes, so he asks himself the question "Why are we worshiping things which are controlled by someone else?" and then his people go to thier religious festival and he doesn't attend under the excuse that he is sick, so then he went and smashed all the idols except the cheif idol and then hung his axe around the neck of the Chief Idol, later the king interrogates him and asks him if he is responsible for this and Ibrahim replies: " Ask the Big Statue", then the king says "You know that our Gods can't speak to us" Then Ibrahim responds " Why do you wrship something which can bring you No Benefit Nor Harm?".

Prophet Ibrahim(PBUH) Says Unto his People: "This god/Idol can't even protect itself How is it Going to protect You!?"

isn't that common sense? you don't ask someone who can't help themselves!


The Next Category is the Human God,
The Quran uses the example of Christianity here, so some people they don't just believe that Isa(PBUH) is the Son of God (or "son of man" as written many times in the bible) but they believe that God and Isa are the Same, even Catholics say that Mary (PBUH) is the Mother of God and some worship her (we note that some christians don't even believe in the miraculous birth of Isa(PBUH)) Now I as a Muslim don't really understand what is meant by Mother of God, i hope it it's not as in Taking care of God when he was small or breast feeding him or cleaning him up or getting him circumsized ect.ect...
Anyway As far as i'm concerned God (Father in the sky as in the Bible) can destroy the entire earth with Jesus and Mary on it Thus he Has Power Over Jesus and Mary Thus they cannot be equal to him.
Now by definition God is Infinite self sufficient and immortal.
by Definition Human is Insufficient, Temporary and Mortal.

so when Pharao or Rafic Hariri claimed that he was Human/God that isn't really common sense to anybody.
Now they tell you that God can be Man and that god can do anything, well When you ask them can God do something evil then the answer is this :" He can if he wanted to but he wouldn't because God is Good", So it is in God's Nature to be good the same way it is in God's Nature to be Infinite thus he does not become temporary and it is in God's Nature to be self sufficiant so he does not become Needy... Basically God does Godly things :)

a Square can't become a circle but still be a square
color blue cannot be shifted to red and still be blue

Just imagine this scenario, Me standing in front of God on the day of judgment and him asking me "Why didn't you believe that I was a Man?" then i reply " How can I ever believe that you the great Creator of the worlds the self sufficiant Sustainer of the Universe were a Weak Limited Man, You are Far Above that!" Doubt he'd put me in hell for that BUT imagine the Vice-Versa of this situation.

Next Category is Race and Tribalism,
Quran gives the Example of Bani Israel Mostly

Amongst these people are many who think that they are better purely because they are a Jew (not all of them believe), God's Chosen people "Racism" which is refused utterly and purely in the Quran and everyone else which is why Judaism isn't prospering much and there really isn't much to discuss about these Nazis.

Final Category is the Most famous one and the Most spread from amongst all which is the God of Materializm.

The Idea that Science, Power, wealth, technology and Nothing else is what will make you successful in Life.

Robbie williams, he earns like 30 million dollars a year and he is on anti-depressors...money, money, money...If every human wanted to live the AVERAGE american dream then we would need three and a half planets to provide for all of us. We can't all live tis crappy American dream To Claim that we can all enjoy our Lives Materialistically is a LIE, The worst disaster to strike Humanity is Global Warming its gonna make terrorism look like nothing, Science is Not Going to find the answer for the Americans I assure you.


Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) said "Woe be to the worshipper of the Dinar and the Dirham", Kind of reminds you of that dollar bill with "In God we trust" printed on it.


Praise be to Allah the Creator to the Universe and may he guide us all to his path.