Faith vs works

[snakelegs]

My personal view is that by submitting to God you gain freedom much greater than the one you surrendered to him.
I don't expect that to make any sense to you, but that's the only way I can express it.
Peace

yup. well said.
many mystic traditions would understand this, i think.
ironically, it is a very powerful concept.

 

[Abdul Fattah]

Snakelegs (the agnostic you are refering to?) just said its deep and powerful. Didn't say anything about beautiful, unless I missed it. They putting words in your mouth Snakelegs or did I miss a post of yours?

Speaking as an athiest myself, I too would agree that surrender is deep and poweful, but I find it very far from beautiful, quite the opposite in my case.

The word surrender to me just means giving up freedom. And I view freedom as a wonderful thing.

From a strictly theoretical point of view freedom is neither beautiful nor ugly and hence the same goes for it's opposite. Instead I would say freedom is potential. Potential for both the beauty and ugly.

Islam says the following: animals are created with desire, and they follow it. Angels are created with reason, hence they follow that. Mankind is created with both, so we have to choose. If you look at freedom vs. submission from that point of view; submission to religion means following reason, and doing what one wants (for him/herself) equals following desire. That's why Muslims find submission more beautiful then freedom. Another interesting view is that as slave of Allah subhana wa ta'ala we have the highest degree of liberty. So the real freedom is choosing to follow your reason, as opposed to following the causality of your desire. And in a way science backs that up, we cannot control our desires, we cannot dosage our emotions, we cannot fine-tune them. The only control we have over the physical inputs from our body is that we can ignore them.

So basically what Glo just said
See, you're more of a muslima then you realize yourself

 

[Grace Seeker]

Snakelegs (the agnostic you are refering to?) just said its deep and powerful. Didn't say anything about beautiful, unless I missed it. They putting words in your mouth Snakelegs or did I miss a post of yours?

Speaking as an athiest myself, I too would agree that surrender is deep and poweful, but I find it very far from beautiful, quite the opposite in my case.

The word surrender to me just means giving up freedom. And I view freedom as a wonderful thing.

Let me put surrender in a different context, and then tell me what you think.

In Christianity, husband and wife are enjoined to live in mutual submission to one another. (Btw, I am aware that there are some fundamentalist Christians who only want to have the wife submit to our husband, and not the other way around, but I think they selectively read those passages to their own ends, not the glory of God. --But, I'm off topic.)

In mutually submitting to one another, they are surrendering the natural human desire to put one's self first, to instead consider emotional, physical and spiritual needs of one's partner as having primacy. There is no loss of freedom, but an exercising of that freedom to bless another human being.

I do think it is beautiful I also think it is beautiful when parents submit to providing for their children, employers for their employees. What a beautiful world it would be if we could all put away the idea that "I'm #1."