Tag: fate

  • Questions from a Non-Muslim

    cynicallyjaded:

    wolfy18:

    I have a few questions I’d like to put out to the Muslims & Christians on here.

    Some questions might appeal to one religion more so than the other and the questions are sort of related to eachother, but whatever.

    1.  If God is all seeing, all knowing, and the great planner of everything, does this mean he plans evil?

    2.  Can you have mercy without sin?  If not, does this mean we have to become a sinner before we can “find God”?

    3.  If our lives are planned, does this contradict our free will?

    By the way I’m asking out of intrigue, not trying to sound like a condescending twat.  I genuinely want answers.

    Hi, these questions are asked often by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Here’s my perspective on what I think it means:

    1. Evil is not a ‘commodity’ like good in the same way that dark is not a ‘commodity’ like light. The one exists in the absence of the other. This ties in with the concept of fate and free will, which also relates to your third question, so I hope to deal with it more comprehensively in that answer. Essentially what I’m saying is that God doesn’t plan good or evil. He simply makes available the choices to us with predetermined outcomes, and what we choose is what determines whether good or evil results from our actions.
    2. Assuming that mercy is only required when we sin overlooks the fact that mercy is also needed to continue giving without reason or recompense. What I mean is that we often only think of asking for mercy if we realise that we’ve done something wrong. However, as Muslims, we consider every good that we receive, and every comfort that we enjoy as a mercy from Allah. So we believe that we’re indebted to Allah for all the mercy that He shows us even though we are often not complying with what we believe to be His will or instructions for the way we should be living our lives. 
    3. Free will and destiny are often very misunderstood. As Muslims, we believe we have a limited free will, and not an absolute free will. What I mean is that I can choose how I respond to a situation, or how I want to act, but I cannot control what situations or experiences are presented to me. This world is a perfect system in that every action has a predetermined reaction. These are the natural laws and order of things that we believe was created by Allah. Therefore, whatever we do, the outcome is known to Allah because He created the ‘rules’ that govern existence and how everything interacts. But in this system, there are variables, and these variables allow us to exercise our limited free will. So by exercising our gift of reason and logic, and our ability to act on it, we choose either to encourage good, or evil. How we choose, and how we comply with the laws and guidelines set out for us is what determines our standing in Allah’s court, and subsequently will determine our final fate when we’re called to account on the day of judgement.

    I’ve contemplated the issue of fate and free will previously, so if you’d like to read more about my thoughts on the subject, you can see some of my previous posts under the tag of fate.

    I look forward to hearing your views on this. 

  • Erm…that’s like saying that if you’re a vegetarian and you stand in front of a raging bull, it won’t charge at you. Hmmm…nah, that won’t work. That’s like expecting life to treat you well just because you’re a good person. Hmmmm…nah, that doesn’t happen. So me thinks this is crap.

    (Source: http://only-the-unloved-hate.tumblr.com/)

  • Sometimes

    sometimes, they’re just beaten into submission

    and we assume their lifelessness is actually death

    when in fact, they’re just cowering out of fear

    hoping that no one will notice them

    but then they wither away because they were not noticed.

     

    sometimes, we find that the smallest things have the greatest impact

    but fail to notice that the small things were actually the big things

    but we were too distracted to notice.

     

    sometimes, life happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes, death happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes…we over-think life while forgetting to live

  • Man has never created anything. We’ve only manipulated what we have in order to arrive at new configurations of what already exists, regardless of how complex the manipulation may be, it will always be nothing more than that. A manipulation of what exists.

    Excerpt from a previous post on Destiny

    Serves as a good reminder for me whenever I feel pompous about my achievements in life.

  • Misconceptions of Taqdeer (Fate/Destiny)

    reflectionofhumblemodesty:

    A husband and his wife were standing in front of a mirror The wife asked: “What do you see?” The husband smiled and said: “The rest of my life..”
     
     
    Allah subhana wa ta’ala has already written the names of your spouses for you. What you need to work on is your relationship with Allah. He will send her/him to you when you’re ready. It is only a matter of time!!

    I find such statements very difficult to reconcile. My instinctive response is that it has to be a misinterpretation of the concept of taqdeer. It is based on the premise that a single partner has been intended for every single person. What then of those people that have married more than once and divorced more than once? It simply doesn’t add up. I love the idea of having that perfect person just waiting for the right time to walk into my life, but I know it doesn’t happen. I know this from experience on more than one occasion.

    It reminds me of the following hadith:

    One day Allah’s Messenger noticed a Bedouin leaving his camel without tying it. He asked the Bedouin, “Why don’t you tie down your camel?” The Bedouin answered, “I placed my trust in Allah.” At that, the Prophet, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, said, ” Tie your camel and place your trust in Allah” – Tirmidhi

    To me, taqdeer is more than just having everything set out for us regardless of our actions or efforts. Maybe I’m completely off the mark, but the more I consider it the more I believe that the whole issue of taqdeer is very misunderstood. The above hadith is a prime example of this misunderstanding.

    The fact that everything is pre-ordained I do not dispute. How it is pre-ordained is where the interpretations come into play, and again, as can be seen from the above hadith, it is not a predetermined outcome regardless of your actions. Within the context of the original post, what would you say to the person who has been married and after trying their hardest, ended up being divorced? Divorce, although hated, is halaal. So are we suggesting that even that is predetermined? If so, where does our accountability start and where does it stop?

    Or perhaps we’ve got this entire perspective on taqdeer all wrong. Perhaps taqdeer comprises of rules and laws that determine the effect of every cause, or the reaction to every action. Perhaps, within this context, our limited free will allows us to choose the outcomes based on our choices, and the more informed our choices, the more predictable the outcome? In the absence of this relationship between cause and effect, our limited free will would be inconsequential, and subsequently, there would be no basis on which we are to be judged for what we do.

    So isn’t this romantic idea of marital bliss and perfect partners really an over-simplification of divine decree?

    (Source: http://reflectionofhumblemodesty.tumblr.com)

  • Fate and Free Will

    I often see posts of people questioning why the Almighty does not answer their prayers. Then there are atheists that believe that if God existed, we would not have so much evil and cruelty in this world because a benevolent god would never allow that to happen. All that this proves is that we have a power of choice and reason that we are able to apply in our lives to inform our choices, because it is this same power of choice and reason informed by our intellect that confirms that we are free thinking beings. By extension, this confirms the indisputable fact that we have a limited free will. Limited because anyone that has lived a single day of conscious being knows that we cannot control everything around us, hence our need to determine the difference between that which we can change, and that which we can’t. So we pursue the acquisition of wisdom that would help us identify the difference. At least that’s what we should be doing if we’re self-aware.

    Bearing the above in mind, why then would it be reasonable to expect the Almighty’s intervention in every unsavoury experience of our lives where we may lack the courage or resources to set aright that which is wrong? Are not the bad choices of some the test of character of others? Or do we believe that everyone should be good and wholesome and no one should slight anyone else, because then we’ll finally have peace on earth and all will be right with the world? But then, again, I ask you, what would be the purpose of our existence? 

    If not to exercise our power of reason and choice towards acquiring good in our lives, then what? If there was no bad, what would we need to strive for? Something that I’ve been more aware of recently is that anything bad requires no restraint at all. If you want to damage, destroy or eliminate something, it’s not restraint that is needed, but in fact a healthy dose of indulgence. But anything good that we wish to achieve or acquire requires restraint in ways that we rarely imagine when committing to a noble goal. 

    So it seems that sitting back and feeling like a victim waiting for the world to treat you right is a fool’s endeavour that will never come to pass. We need to be conscious in our efforts to oppress the oppressors. If not, if we cower in the face of a challenge and believe that we’re not worthy, we lose any right to claim fulfilment in a life fraught with suffering and challenges. Evil is not an incarnation of its own. It simply manifests itself in the absence of good. Therefore, it’s not evil that exists, but rather good that ceases to. And given that effort is required to uphold good, there can be no overcoming of evil unless we apply ourselves to a course that is destined to realise that which we seek in our own lives. 

  • Destiny…

    Some believe that the future is written and cannot be altered, others believe it can. Some believe it’s not written at all, and lies completely in your hands. Unsurprisingly so, I believe in neither, at least not within the context of its common interpretation.

    I often wonder what fate really is, and if it really is as rigid as we often believe it is. Someone recently shared a post that suggested that it is largely our inability to control the choices of others, and therefore their choices result in our destiny, and how we react to it is what completes the cycle. I think this is only a small part of a much bigger picture. 

    Consider this scenario. I’m driving down a road, and there’s a huge rock in the middle of the road which presents me with a few options:

    1. Avoid the rock and drive on unharmed or undamaged – and people will say that it was in my fate/destiny to have seen the rock and been able to avoid it in time
    2. Apply brakes and stop before hitting the rock and escape unhurt or undamaged – and people will say that it was in my fate to have seen it and brake in time to avoid injury
    3. See the rock and choose to do nothing because I was feeling particularly morbidly destructive at the time and die in the crash – and people will say that it was in my fate to die that day and if it wasn’t the rock, it would be something else that would have caused my death anyway
    4. Not see the rock because I was texting someone and crash and die – and people will say that he was too busy with his mobile phone, that’s why he didn’t see the rock

    There’s probably many more scenarios that could play out but the point is, I had a choice in what I was focusing on and how I was going to respond to the presence of the rock, and each sequence of events and related decisions had pre-defined outcomes. And in this, I believe, lies the secret of destiny.

    Destiny, for me, is not a prescribed outcome regardless of the efforts of my life. Nor is it a cast-in-stone destination that I will reach regardless of what I do or don’t do towards achieving it. If that were true, we’d all be able to laze around and never have to worry about anything, because it’s all pre-ordained already. Well, I believe that it is pre-ordained, but just not in that context.

    I often toy with the analogy of a software developer and the code that they write. That code gives ‘life’ to a certain number of functions that have specified behaviours that are limited only to the permutations possible through the available configurations made possible by that code. Let’s assume for a second that that code had a sense of self, or a conscious nature with an associated intelligence to act out the possible permutations defined by the developer. In that case, every single one of those sequences that play out could be defined as destiny within the context of that code. 

    Extrapolate that example onto a grand scale and note how the same laws apply to the universe, and humans. The laws of nature have been defined. Pre-determined. Hard coded and configured. We have the intelligence and the limited ability to manipulate those configuration permutations in seemingly infinite ways, and because of the number of variables that give rise to infinite variations, it appears impossible to predict the outcomes accurately, except where the known variables are limited to what is within our grasp to compute. Man has never created anything. We’ve only manipulated what we have in order to arrive at new configurations of what already exists, regardless of how complex the manipulation may be, it will always be nothing more than that. A manipulation of what exists. 

    With this in mind, destiny then becomes a sequence of events that are triggered entirely by choices we make, and actions we take, with one caveat. There’s always a caveat. Each person acts with independent thought, despite many displaying behaviour that suggests that they’re possibly incapable of such an act. How our choices interact with each other is what makes life a challenge, or a pleasure. How we react to those interactions of choices is what determines our fate and well being. 

    Whether we choose to actively participate or not is irrelevant. Because every breath forces a reaction, every thought prompts an action, and every action spawns a reaction. So the only time we stop participating is when we die. At that point, the impact of our actions continue to survive beyond our lifetime, but we are then unable to influence the outcomes of any further interactions of choice. 

    The future is therefore what we make of it. What effort and focus we put in, directly influences what we get out. But don’t mistake this for karma, as in if we do good, we should expect good in return. It doesn’t work that way. Our choice to care about someone that may not choose to care in return (for whatever reason) will result in our good being repaid with bad. That is destiny and karma will never be able to explain that.

    We alter the course of our lives with every thought and every act. We develop trends through the consistency of our actions, but at any given moment a single act or coinciding set of choices could alter that carefully constructed path and destroy every aspiration or ambition we so meticulously planned for. However, this ‘configuration’ is not limited to only what we can observe or manipulate physically. I believe it extends to everything we sense, feel, think, experience, or contemplate.

    Imagine that every single thing that you can fathom, tangible or intangible, physical or spiritual, all has a value that gives it a weighting within this grand scheme we call destiny. How much we accumulate of the various values would determine the course of our lives. Take this a step further and imagine that even prayer has such values assigned to it. The accumulation of this value on a spiritual plane would have an influence on our experiences on a physical plane, which results in apparently amazing outcomes that would not otherwise be explainable. 

    The complexity of the laws that govern all this is mind blowing to say the least. The fact that a finite set of laws exists is unquestionable. If there was the slightest hint of randomness in any of it, things supposedly left to chance, there would be unpredictable chaos at every turn. But there isn’t. Even when things go really pear-shaped, after a suitably rigorous post-mortem, the sequence of events that gave rise to the apparent chaos is quickly unravelled. Which confirms that chaos in fact does not exist. 

    There’s so many more thoughts on this that I need to articulate, but it’s too many to effectively translate into words right now. This is the first time that I’ve attempted to share these ideas at all even though it has been plaguing me for many years now. I wonder if it will make sense to anyone else at all?

  • What goes around comes around…only when it comes around, it comes around twice as hard.

    (Source: http://soulhunting.tumblr.com)