Tag: random thoughts

  • A Time Not So Long Ago

    There was a time when I considered engagement with others as being tantamount to the meaning and purpose of my life. I don’t any more, which is unsettling because as much as I don’t seem to yearn for it, I miss it as well. Ambivalence has never enjoyed my patronage because the indecision and discomfort it brings is repulsive.

    I always pride myself on being decisive, yet with age often comes many life experiences that either spawn wisdom or regret, and often both. In acquiring these assets, I often find that knowing more than before only highlights the abyss of ignorance that stares at me while I indulge in the seemingly noble endeavour of engaging with the hope of understanding.

    Understanding is an outcome that seldom accompanies debate these days. Perhaps my pointless circular debates with atheists have eroded my jadedness to the point of disillusion or perhaps even despair. Despair at the realisation that despite my greatest aspirations, or my most sincere efforts or intentions, arrogance will always triumph over knowledge. Arrogance breeds ignorance, and therefore it stands to reason that by extension, ignorance, in the end, will also obliterate knowledge.

    Another pointless post contemplating the purpose of life, the meaning of engaging with others, the goals of existence, and the irony of life. I feel clichéd. I feel as if my ability to contribute, to fight, to persuade, or even to influence, has been almost entirely expensed. That old familiar forgotten feeling of mental and emotional exhaustion lends its stench to my being again tonight.

    It appears I am becoming a bitter old soul after all. The brittleness of my being is all I  am able to share.

     

  • On Atheists, Cartoons, And Muslim Mobs

    There is nothing so bad that there is no good in it. This has proven to be true in every challenge or struggle I’ve ever experienced in my life. Most recently it has once again proven true in my engagements with a group of atheists on Facebook. I’m constantly cautioned by those around me that engaging with them is a futile exercise and will only create doubts in my own mind about what I believe to be true. I respectfully disagree.

    By engaging with these atheists, I am forced to rationalise my beliefs, my faith, my subscription to a set of laws that have proven to transcend specific periods of time, and in this there is much to be gained. It confirms that man-made laws have to constantly be adapted to cater for the changes in society, but laws based on sound principles are applicable at every stage of human development.

    Muslims generally avoid taking a critical view of Islam because of the fear-mongering Imams that discourage such questioning. If you believe in something blindly, can that really be called faith or iman? Assuming that it can be considered as iman, how is blind belief ever going to strengthen that iman? Will that iman not then stifle and be fragile the moment it is challenged rationally by one that does not hold Islam in such high regard? Isn’t it then true that by not rationalising or clarifying your beliefs or at least trying to understand the logic behind the Islamic injunctions, you’re actually exposing yourself to a greater risk of misguidance or deviation, let alone the risk of being ‘convinced’ that your belief system is not credible, thereby resulting in you either holding on because of the fear of letting go, rather than holding on because you actually believe? Worse still, doesn’t it then expose you to the very real possibility of having that iman stripped away from you because of doubts that others could sow in your heart?

    I strongly oppose the views of many that suggest that we must simply do and not question. How we question is the critical differentiator. But that we must question is unquestionable. That we must understand is undeniable. Yet we have mobs of Muslims running through the streets destroying private property in their display of outrage in defence of the image of Rasulullah (SAW) whilst at the same time being oblivious to the fact that Rasulullah (SAW) himself or his companions never responded in such a despicable or barbaric manner when the very person of our beloved prophet was directly and infinitely more abused and attacked by the disbelievers in Mecca and Taif and so many other incidents. When the entrails of a goat was thrown on Rasulullah (SAW) he didn’t pronounce the death sentence over those that did it. When he was stoned out of Taif and had the opportunity to have the entire town destroyed, he made dua for them to be guided and didn’t rally the companions into mobs to harass or destroy the property of anyone that got in the way of their ‘protest’.

    This dignity and patience is absent in the mobs that profess to be protesting in the name of defending the honour of Islam and the Prophet (SAW). All they’re doing is revealing their barbaric tendencies and ignorance of the true values that Islam inculcates in us. I still maintain that the Muslims are directly responsible for the tarnished image of Islam today. If we conducted ourselves with integrity and dignity in line with Islamic principles, we would be above the reproach that is being levelled against us, because it would have been easy for the layman atheist to even determine that any such unfounded criticism against us is exactly that, unfounded.

    It’s time to stop blaming cartoonists and pathetic attempts at sensationalism for the attack on Islam, and start looking inwardly at our own communities and personal behaviour that maligns the honour of the Prophet (SAW) much more than any despicable cartoon or video could ever do.

  • Bemoaning the state of Muslims

    It’s one of those days when sprawling before me on my keyboard is a world of nothingness. A simmering anger, disbelief at the stupidity of the world, and contempt for the state of the Ummah is all that pervades my thoughts right now. Watching and listening to the ridiculous behaviour of Muslims allowing themselves once again to be used as pawns in the war of the nefarious gluttons of the west leaves me disenchanted as always. We lay claim to a heritage of the greatest personality that ever walked the face of the earth, yet behave in a manner that contradicts the very essence of the beauty of that same personality.

    I’m deflated tonight. Exhausted and deflated. Mob justice, unbridled anger, and barbaric behaviour was never condoned even at the height of the struggle of the Muslims against the retards of the Quraysh. Yet now while being steeped in superstition, indecency, and indignity, we run through the streets destroying property of those from our own neighbourhoods, and kill soft targets in the name of defending the beloved of all beloveds, all the while forgetting that our behaviour will only draw the scorn of the one we profess to love so dearly.

    The beauty of Islam is lost in the putrefaction of the decaying morals and ethics of the Ummah. We’re more adept at heaping scorn on each other because of differences of rituals and historical perspectives than we are at assembling a group of rational thinkers to expose the hypocrisy of the west in their use of peasant pawns to further their own agendas. Our individual piety and overt religiosity scares into seclusion the very ones that have the presence of mind and conviction to stand up to this onslaught against the Ummah because each time a voice of reason rises above the clamour of the masses and the bigoted media, it’s quickly drowned out by the undeniable examples of idiots that tarnish the course of Islam by behaving in such an abrasive and crude manner that even the disbelievers of the dark ages appear dignified by comparison.

    I despise every person that judges a Muslim because of their apparent labels rather than their individual actions. I despise every Muslim that is steeped in arrogance based on historical or scholarly affiliations. I despise every Muslim that drags the banner of Islam through the sewers each time they open their vile mouths and utter slanderous remarks about personalities they have no claim to ever know beyond the jaundiced narratives of the secularists. I despise every Muslim that sits idly by while watching Islam being hijacked by the ones with big mouths and empty heads. Worst of all, I despise my inability to change any of this seeing how easily it is that we provide the fuel that feeds the fire of hatred and condescension that rages against Muslims the world over.

    May Allah have mercy on us and save us from our pathetic selves, Ameen.

  • Atheists and Me

    It’s disappointing, yet almost unsurprising to note that the very same behaviour atheists accuse theists of, they’re guilty of themselves. I was recently invited into a closed group on Facebook with the assurance that it was a mature environment in which constructive and objective debates are held to test the various views of either side in order to seek to understand each other better. Again, unsurprisingly, the kind of attacks and arrogance that I encountered on other blog sites prevailed there as well.

    There are few, and I mean few that actually do try to present a well considered view of various issues and despite how lengthy the debates can be at times, they stick to the point, and don’t turn it into a mud slinging match in their efforts to try to bully the theist into agreement or submission. It appears that the lack of maturity that atheists are quick to criticise in theists is just as common place amongst their own ranks. Their insistence on not subscribing to a formal structure or singular view of their atheistic philosophy is starting to appear as extremely convenient because it allows the perpetual graceful exit that suggests that they’re not organised religion, and they have no dogma.

    Engage with any number of atheists and the dogma disguised as science is quick to show through. The assumed arrogance and selective qualifications of their statements is forced as the only reasonable approach to the subject when issues like infinite regression and impossible-to-prove theories are highlighted. There’s a stubborn claim that science is all that matters, but a quick deflection when questioned about how science deals with spirituality, or the spiritual needs of their communities. Blatant assumptions are made about the ideology of the first man/woman that set foot on this earth despite there being no proof to confirm it either way. So claims that we are inherently atheistic are supposed to be believed and accepted without question by theists, although atheist have no way of proving this. We’re supposed to accept blindly that infinite regression questions based on their own theories of causality do not apply beyond the current time and universe constructs, even though there is no objective authoritative source to confirm this, which makes it just another theory.

    Authoritative source is dismissed when asked to present one, since such a thing does not exist. The absence of this resulting in personal biases and theories being the order of the day appear to be accepted as factually accurate amongst their ranks, although there are very few that are willing to acknowledge that this glaring gap in their rationale does suggest that there must be a cause that set the creation of this universe in motion. What that cause is, or what form it takes, is entirely open to conjecture for obvious reasons.

    So the sum total of my experiences to date is that the very same extremism, rigidity, blind faith and dogma that atheists claim plagues religion is very much rampant in their own circles. Trying to find a middle ground, at this point, appears to be a pointless endeavour. But I am the anal optimist, so I will persevere for a while longer before I decide if throwing in the towel is as inconsequential as persevering in my efforts to understand the rationale of the atheistic mind set. In fact, I don’t think it’s an attempt to understand the rationale, because I’m already quite convinced that that is as flawed as any argument a theist can present to prove the existence of God. If it was possible to prove the existence of God, we would not need faith to believe in God because the proof would render faith irrelevant. Unfortunately this is a point that many theists and atheists alike fail to understand.

    The fact remains that atheists cannot, with hard evidence, disprove the existence of God, and theists cannot prove it either. But until they get past this blatantly obvious fact, and set aside the arrogance that accompanies such a debate, not much progress will be made in finding mutual understanding, respect or common ground between the two.

  • I Don’t Belong Here

    I don’t belong here. I belong in another place from another time. A time when struggles were filled with purpose, and a place where life was lived. My struggles these days seem hinged on survival, existence, garnished with a side portion of indulgence to keep the angst at bay. The fulfilment of purpose escapes me. I don’t see new opportunities any longer, I only see patterns and statistics. Everything has become painfully predictable taunting me with the doubts of what may have been inevitable, or what may have been a self-fulfilled prophecy.

    I look at the future and it appears to be a fractured reflection of the past. I see the faces around me that look to me for support and assurance, but all I can provide is dependability in its place. Optimism is tainted with reality. Hearing of the news of a fellow blogger (potentially) having committed suicide this week further deflated me. Seeing someone struggle with the same questions of purpose and sincerity, action and desire, life and death, suddenly succumbing to the despair of it all emphasises the gravity of what it is that I contemplate even when I’m dreaming.

    Everything is ephemeral, except reality. There is little that can bring comfort to a jaded soul. No, not jaded, tarnished and tainted. A soul that has found itself in the throes of realising that its life’s struggles have amounted to nought, and then some. This world was made for respite. I need to remind myself that this world was made for respite, not justice. I forget that at the times I need to remember it most. Respite, not justice.

    I need to trust in order to find reason to persevere, all the while knowing that such trust harbours nothing but betrayal. The cycles are almost perfectly formed. It’s only the players that keep changing. We embellish the distractions with superficial meaning trying to convince ourselves that it’s not the same routine. It always is.

     

  • South Africa, A Nation Under Siege

    We had a security incident at our home tonight. It was literally a minute before midnight when I was prodded out of bed by the sound of the siren for the electric fencing screaming. In typical fashion, I loitered, somewhat from being disorientated because I was in a deep sleep, and partially because it takes me some time to completely snap into crisis mode. I slowly worked through the process of switching on the outside lights, then getting my firearm out of the safe, and then making my way to the security gate that separates our bedrooms from the main living area of the house. In between I vaguely recall going to the bathroom first before finally making my way over to the back of the house to see what was happening.

    When I pushed my curtains back, I saw an owl that could easily have been almost two feet tall standing on the parapet of the outside room. I shone the torch straight at it, and it looked at me as if I was wrong for having electric fence. I suspected that the owl had tried to sit on the top strand of the fence but caused the two strands to short circuit because of its weight, resulting in the screeching siren in the middle of the night. But this is South Africa, so you’re an idiot that’s just asking for it if you don’t make sure that all is relatively safe before you step into your own back yard at that time of the night. So I waited patiently for the security company to send out a response vehicle before venturing outside. Unfortunately, due to a poor installation by a fly-by-night contractor who was an ex-cop, my control unit for the electric fence is located in the outside room with no direct access from inside the house. It’s also not wired up to the main alarm system, which means it gets armed and disarmed independently.

    A long 20 minutes later the security company arrived by which time the alarm had been screeching for almost half an hour. I expected to receive a call from the neighbours, but no such thing happened. Not even a light was switched on. But, this is South Africa, so we’re either immune to the sound of house alarms in the middle of the night, or we’re too afraid to get involved for fear of our lives.

    I did the walkabout around the house with the armed response guy and confirmed that the top strands had shorted. We sorted it out, I reset the electric fence, and it was back to being armed and ready to irritate again. Throughout this ordeal, my mother paced restlessly in her room in the cottage in my back yard, while my wife who is an American ex-pat got her first taste of the anxiety that South Africans have grown accustomed to. If it wasn’t for the two of them, I would not have given a second thought to the incident, but realising how it affected them reminded me of exactly what hell South Africans deal with on a daily basis. However, because there’s a constant threat to our safety, we’ve grown accustomed to living at a heightened level of stress and fear.

    At that moment, when the vulnerability showed on my wife’s face, something inside me cursed deeply. It cursed the corrupt government, the inept officials that lead the police force, and it cursed the arrogance of the likes of Nathi Mthetwa and his fallen comrades who were unceremoniously dismissed from their posts after finally being exposed as the corrupt thieves that they are. The average South African burns a significant portion of their monthly income on security related services and equipment just to feel ok, not safe. High walls, electric fence, armed response, firearms (if you’re fortunate enough to have been granted a license), satellite tracking, anti smash and grab window tinting, security spikes, security gates, and the list goes on. Until recently, even those inept police officers were getting their police stations guarded by private security companies, yet we have an arrogant minister and president that believes that South Africa is safe!

    I don’t quite care about the political correctness of this article, but under apartheid, at least we knew what we were dealing with. There was a sense of community and a sense of real safety in our neighbourhoods. The most drastic measures we ever had to take was to setup neighbourhood watch groups, and then also, it was manned by the teenage boys of the area because the threat was mainly to property and not to persons. The crime associated with property theft has grown increasingly violent and sadistic since 1994, and news reports on a daily basis proves that criminals are not only getting more creative in their efforts to terrorise people, but are also getting more brazen in their attacks on both private individuals and police officers alike. And all the while our incompetent minister continues wreaking of arrogance and incompetence, while proclaiming that the police are winning the fight against crime.

    Too many South Africans have grown complacent, and are still so stuck in the past that they fail to see the country rolling downhill as a dung ball gathering mass until it settles as a heap of manure at the bottom of the hill of progress, with a finely inscribed label made of the most extravagant materials saying ‘Failed State’. I hate what the ANC has done to this country, and every person that heaps unrestrained praise on the ANC-led government for how they’ve pulverised this country into a stink-hole of morbidity needs to have their IQ retested so that we can find a spot for them in a suitable institution. Hopefully for them funding for that institution won’t be cut because of yet another scandal of untold billions of rands having been squandered or simply unaccounted for.

    This is not what we protested for in 1976, nor what we protested for in 1984. This is not what I aspired to have as my quality of life in this country when I got my first job and started paying my taxes. We give idiots a soap box to spew racial filth disguised as affirmative action and then cry when we see senseless crimes being perpetrated. We’re focusing on rewriting history by spending billions on establishing monuments and renaming roads, highways and cities while law and order is having to be upheld by the citizens and private security industries of this country at the expense of the ordinary South African who still gets taxed on those security measures that are needed because government is not doing its job to protect its citizens. It’s ludicrous!

    There are exceptions to every rule, and that is what is shameful about South Africa. The exceptions are all that’s left in the offices of public service while the norm is to deploy overpaid fat cat cadres to do the jobs of real public servants. While I’m fully aware and I acknowledge the presence of some level of competence in the public offices of this country, without which we would have arrived at the bottom of that proverbial hill already, but just because we have a semblance of competence in isolated areas of government in no way provides justification for the continued presence in office of a largely corrupt and incompetent government. We need change and we need it soon, and waiting for people with weak zips and dripping shower heads to provide that change is tantamount to signing your own death warrant. They’re too incompetent to even run their personal affairs with dignity, so how on earth are they ever going to be capable of maintaining the dignity of the ordinary South African?

  • Incoherent Ramblings

    For the last few days I’ve  been typing out posts and deleting them. I question the value of what I share these days and wonder how much of it really matters, or am I just adding to the clutter? I scroll through my dashboards and feel guilty for not having the presence of mind nor the attention span to read through anything that is longer than just a few lines. So I wonder how many others feel the same way when they see my ramblings appear on their dash.

    Most of life is just drivel anyway. All the distractions that I keep trying to unravel mostly ends up being inconsequential but because I applied so much effort in the process, I feel compelled, if not obliged to give it significance. I’ve been unusually productive, yet somewhat sullen at work recently, but my sarcasm is usually enough to distract anyone from noticing the mind-space I’m in. People have grown to expect nothing less from me, except when they’re in need of advice, at which point I’m expected to assume the role of Yoda.

    My rambles are growing increasingly incoherent. My mind is foggy and words…well, words seem to be just words these days. They no longer give life to thoughts, or conjure images of amazement or beauty. They’re just words that share a thought but fail to connect. Connect.

    The landscape of my mind is somewhat desolate right now. Affirmation lacks any comfort when I feel undeserving of it. The energy required to share my thoughts this morning is more than I can muster right now. This effort is draining me instead of providing release. It only re-emphasises the space where passion once resided.

    Perhaps tomorrow will hold more promise.

  • Is this the real life…

    I’ve been faced with a daunting realisation these last few days. Perhaps I’m not so average after all. I’m not better, nor am I worse, but I’m starting to realise that I’m probably just fundamentally different. This may sound like a romantic notion to some, but to me this is potentially life altering. The reason it has such an impact on me is because it calls to question every observation or piece of advice that I ever offered anyone. If my disposition and point of departure is so significantly different from most others, it means that my criticisms and insights are distinctly biased and potentially useless for most of the people that I ever engage with.

    These are troubling thoughts for someone that has found much comfort in being able to offer advice to others so that they may avoid the mistakes that I’ve made. But this realisation now suggests that my mistakes are not likely to be repeated by others because I am not part of the normal crowd. I guess in many ways I’ve been resisting this realisation all my life. I’ve thought of myself as normal but different. Now I just think I’m different, and I’m not sure I grasp the concept of normal at all. I doubt I ever did.

    My ability to detach my emotions from reason is a quirk not appreciated by most. It helps in times of crisis, but it causes me to look distinctly uninterested and often annoyed when others are freaking out while I fail to see a reason to freak out just yet. Given that most people don’t live in true crisis mode all the time, it makes this skill of mine somewhat tedious to deal with. And surrounding myself with people that are in fact living in crisis mode continually will just drain the last drop of optimism from my gut. So I guess I’m in limbo.

    Silence is the only comfort I seem to enjoy these days. Everything else demands a presence of mind and a demand of my attention that has become quite an effort. I’m distracted most of the time with thoughts of…everything. What was, what is, what might be, what might not be, what could have been, what should have been, what I’m glad hasn’t been, and it goes on. It goes on painfully and tediously. But through it all I’ve managed to remain somewhat functional and able to offer some purpose in my presence. The more I experience, the more jaded is my response to life.

    Is this what a mid-life crisis feels like? No, it can’t be. If it were, it would negate the realisation that prompted this post to begin with. I look at others my age and I struggle to relate to their frame of mind. In some ways I relate to the mind set of those 15 years my junior, but I find myself at odds with how they approach their sense of purpose in  life. I’m disjointed from society, from the community, and often from my family. But I’ve been revelling in that disjointedness until now under the misconception of it having been a valuable skill that allowed me to view the world with a fresh perspective.

    Who was I fooling all this time? I’m cynically jaded. There is no fresh perspectives for a jaded one. Suddenly Bohemian Rhapsody is mocking me.