Short, Short: On Belief
"Credo ut intelligam." ('I believe so that I may understand.')
Augustine of Hippo
“The conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘who is in His place?’ ” Karl Popper
"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
Albert Camus, "The Fall"
"Atheism is like excrement: when enough builds up in the body, it has to come out....The New Atheism is built on three pillars: human ego, priestly pederasty and the Wahhabis of Mass Destruction (WMD). Abdal Hakim Murad
In the final analysis, there is only belief; we either believe in one God (tawhid or unity, oneness), or in Mickey Mouse, Taylor Swift, chicken biryani, Hollywood, Bollywood, progress, development, democracy, socialism, Marx, Darwin, Freud, evolution, science, nationalism, Gucci, Rolex, soccer, cricket, basketball, Ferrari and BMW, McDonald’s, iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and so on (shirk, takthir or multiplicity, the opposite of tawhid). Those who say “I don’t believe in God” are also believers of a kind; their contrary claims are nothing but a form of belief. Modern sentimentalism aside, "Humanly, no one escapes the obligation to believe in order to be able to understand" says Sheikh Isa Nur al Din (emphasis added). Given the limited and self-referential nature of human reason/rationality, the anti-God “non-believers” also end up with belief: eventually, they believe that there is no Creator of all that is created, including themselves. To the discerning, however, it is clear that theirs is nothing but an imitation religion with its own myths, idols and ideologies, its own pseudo gods and prophets. Said G.K. Chesterton once: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing; they then become capable of believing in anything."
Thinking never happens in vacuum. We don’t speak from no-where; we are embedded creatures. We are grounded in extra- rational, or supra-rational ontological presuppositions of one kind or another. Knowing and knowledge are but things in the foreground of much important, but hidden and unexplored, axiomatic background. Thought is always implicated and rooted in deep, metaphysical assumptions that are not the exclusive result of “objective” and universal discursive processes or, of them only. What is presented as utterly rational, universal and objective is but a kind of subjective will, a product of a particular paradigm, often arbitrary discursive formations of a mundane, power hungry and power driven cultural worldview or weltanschauung, as Foucault, Derrida and others have irrefutably demonstrated. Change the deeper, metaphysical assumptions---the profound, axiomatic (back-) ground of thought---- and you get a new, equally “universal”, “objective” system of knowing and being. Man, because of who he is, cannot live without an “idol” to worship, without a myth to give meaning and purpose to his life: what is destroyed, dethroned, demythologized or demystified by the ultra-rational mind is soon replaced with other myths and mysteries, often of inferior quality. Or, the pathology of irrationality is soon replaced by the pathology of rationality with horrendous consequences as recent human history has shown.
To the lost souls---the uprooted, the unmoored and disoriented, the bamboozled who fall for appearances and fail to see "things as they really are", the sarr gardaan---says the Sufi sage Fariduddin Attar in his Conference of the Birds:
"These thoughts have made you stray
Further and further from the proper Way;
You think your monarch's palace of more worth
Than Him who fashioned it and all the earth.
The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole."
And, he beckons them back to their Centre and Source:
"Come you lost atoms to your Center draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return, and back into your Sun subside."
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