Let's do this.
Alpha Dude said:
People that die before the message has reached them are not held accountable.
Okay
Denial after the message has been received is worthy of punishment, however. Allah has said he is Most Just. He wouldn't punish without reason. Therefore, the implication is that the signs of Allah and the signs of Islam's truth must be so manifest, that there is no sound basis for us to reject them.
What constitutes 'receiving the message' and what constitutes 'denying the message'?
As to why people reject faith after receiving the message - some reasons might include looking at the religion with insincerity, deliberate arrogance in rejecting, desire to stick to what their forefather's believed without paying attention to the apparent signs. Even being led astray by shaytan himself. God knows best what an individual's reasons for rejection are.
You appear to have missed other reasons, such as sincere skepticism over the claims of Islam, disbelief due to the perspective that there is a lack of evidence for God. Do you believe it is impossible to disbelieve honestly that Islam is untrue, or without evidence?
We can never answer such a question why, as it beyond our realm. Only Allah can tell us things about why he does things.
Then you do not know. You cannot claim objective insight into morality when actually pushed, you retreat back to a perspective of ignorance. At the very least, concerning God you can claim to know that he must be observed, his tenets upheld and his commands listened to - but you cannot say why, and you cannot explain why.
Even more importantly, this question is flawed insofar as the attempt is to come back and say 'God doesn't make sense, hence he does not exist', or 'Even if he exists, it doesnt matter'.
What are you talking about? Either you know why God, per Islam is interested in our observance of his reign or you do not. Either it is explained sufficiently in scripture, or it is not. Either it can be explained philosophically or ethically or it cannot.
Think for a moment - you wouldn't exist if he didn't create you. Yet, you find it unfair to follow his orders. I would consider that ungrateful.
First of all, I don't not 'follow his orders' due to rebellion against his rule - I actually refuse to 'follow his orders' because I do not believe that this deity exists - and I do not make it a habit to observe the importance of things I deem unlikely to exist.
Secondly, why does it matter if he created me? According to you humanity was created, without our permission to live in a hostile world full of natural disasters, natural diseases and natural predators. For thousands and thousands of years almost every human endured short and harsh lives just to survive. In time, our insight improves and we begin to adapt to atrocity and hardship and live progressively better and longer lives - but nonetheless, we did this throught our own 'free-will' did we not? We came very far through sweat & toil over all these centuries - and what is the message, what is the objective we should be keeping in mind through all of this according to you?
Worship Allah? Did Allah create us
just to be acknowledged? He created a world of disaster, disease and destruction - put upon it a frightened human race and watched as we corpse-dragged ourselves through it to progressively greater heights, and
eventually decided that well, the most important moral lesson out of this is ritualistic obedience to me at all times. What is this masochism you support?
Thirdly and in correspondence with the above - why does us being just created mean we must be obliged to serve? And what is the meaning of our thankfulness if we spend our timed merely observing, obeying and negating our will to the divine arbiter?
Parents will spank their kids and set them straight if they make a mistake. If a child makes a serious mistake (let's say he kills his own grandmother for no reason), they will want nothing to do with him and will see him worthy of all kinds of punishment.
Okay.
Yet at the same time, if the child was genuinely sorrowful and wanted to set things straight, a caring and merciful parent would forgive him. Likewise with God, we know he is All Merciful and would never hesitate to forgive if the intention is sincere.
Except of course - in hell. You discount the possibility of repentance there?
What we should be concerned with is whether God exists and if so, what has he informed us in terms of the realities of the world, upon the basis of which we must act. Why or why not is superflous here in most of this discussion, unless we are interested in philosophing for the fun of it.
Pardon me, but I thought we were talking about morality here. Or at least partially. Morality has
everything to do with 'why'. If you claim that none of the questions are relevant to God, or that none of these questions are possible to answer with God then you have conceded the discussion.
It is, and I have said this before important to me why God does what he does. If I was convinced that God exists, that would only be a single part of the equation. I would need to know then why I should be interested in observing this God. I would need to know what morality or moral system claims that living in a celestial North Korea is a desirable state of affairs. I would need to know why this being has allowed millions upon millions of people historically and to this day to just perish due to the volatility of the world he created. I would need to know why he thinks it prudent to torment people for misinformation, or misunderstandings for an entire eternity. Why would I want to ignore these questions?
The question of 'if God exists' is rationally to be anwered as an independent question, as opposed to one attached to considerations of morality, good or evil, suffering that exists, or even presumed attributes he has. If we establish that he exists, then we can begin to speak of these things but not in a way that we end up back at the question of whether he exists.
Absolutely. But we are not tallking specifically about whether God exists. I am asking you to back up your concept of God.
1. Its barabric, therefore it can't be from God, therefore this revelation is not from God.
2. It's from God, therefore necessarily its right.
The second appraoch is the correct one because it moves in order of establishing realities and then moving on to discuss their implications. The first does the opposite, over and above making moral judgements without acknowledging the subjective nature of such judgements.
Wow. I have never seen such a back-to-front perspective on morality. It is of course, prudent of me to note that your analysis completely begs the question and has no meaning towards an atheist. The claim in (2) (my hash key is broke) assumes that God exists, and has things to say on what ought. I as an atheist have no reason to accept that, and so the performance of (2) capitulates immediately.
But there is a deeper problem to your examples, and it confirms exactly what I suspected. You propose a morality of systematic obedience and capitulation to authority in the face of demands. Your morality is nothing more than this. You claim that so long as God decrees
X then it is right. The self-destructive consequences of this mentality can be seen immediately. You do not say that things such as murder, theft, rape, slavery, torture etc are wrong because of their impact on the lives of other people. You say that these things are wrong just because God says so. You distort the term 'moral' to mean 'obedience' and the term 'immoral' to mean 'disobedience'. If you really, truly believe that this is true then you could have no objection to anything God could ever say. If hypothetically, God was to decree murder as valid - you could have no mechanism to disapprove. If God was to state that rape was wholly acceptable - you would have no reasoning in your library to dispute that. The terms 'justice' and 'compassion', just like morality can have no meaning in your dichtonomy. And this is objective? This is a morality of understanding, of objective parameters? It creates an applicable converse to the opposite of Dostoyevsky's famous quote in the Brother's Karamazov. I'll say:
with God, all things are possible.
There is no necessary response to this. It is the machination of an automated masochism. It is so apart from actual ethics that it explains itself as dire. How is obedience to authority morality, precisely? By this reasoning Allah could effectively permit and condemn anything for any or no reason and you would have no reason to do anything but side merrily along with it. It is the ultimate pragmatic evil. It has been used (not exclusively) as the justification for atrocity by tyrants since the dawn of time. Never can made blissfully and unashamedly commit such evil when under a mission for God.
The message has been sent for all of mankind and the average Joe on the street isn't a philosophicaly minded one that would be able to comprehend powerful logical arguments. Hence, the implication is that the proofs of the existence of God must be clear to people from all walks of life, past and present as it would be unfair otherwise.
Okay. This appears to be a passive repetition of your opening statement when you said that people unaware would not be held accountable.
So there must be a more basic proof. Simply even making dua (supplicating/asking him to help you even without believing in Islam) will produce results so many times for you, that you will be left with no reason to doubt in God's existence yet the majority of people will still harbour doubt and go about their business, without contemplating further.
You contradicted yourself without even applying a full stop. If there is
no doubt after results being produced through 'dua' then how could people yet
doubt?
If I accept the Islamic message, 'morality' is obedience to God. The problem that you have against this position is that you believe this means that the rules of obedience are contrary to the concern of humanity.
Absolutely. It is a foundational evil.
But why would God will something that is bad for humanity?
You don't have any moral parameters to ask that. You've just said yourself that morality, per your own standards is obedience to God. Whether or not a command of God might affect humanity badly cannot be of concern to you because, as you say - all you do or should do is unquestionably and unreservedly always obey God, nevermind the consequences to humanity. In fact, this has been your most consistent perspective. You have said it several times over the course of your response to me.
Don't second-guess yourself now.
You seem to think the rules God has chosen are whimsical and arbitrary. Yet this give negative connotations only because with respect to humans they are negative, but to extend the same to God is to draw analogy between the nature of humans and the nature of God, which is completely wrong. Humans have very limited knowledge and are subject to bias and preference, hence their being arbitrary and whimsical is problematic but God has perfect knowledge - All Wise/All Knowing - so there is no analogy.
This is not a response. This is just an admission that the all-elusive God cannot be comprehended. That we have no idea behind the 'wisdom' of his decrees, nor can we gain any insight into it. This intent to exempt God from questioning is not impressive, it is suspect.
To answer: Of course I will gain my perspective of morality from humanity. I happen to be a human. Were you expecting me to find some non-human perspective and begin my argument from there? You should know we work with our understanding, and most of all God should know that too.
Only obedience to God will get a person into heaven. Ghandi chose not to believe in Allah nor did he follow his religion, hence the punishment is justified.
Obedience, again.
Him being moral (as humans may understand it) has no bearing on his final resting place and like I said to Skavau, this apparent unfairness shouldn't be taken as proof to show God couldn't possibly have said this and by extension, God doesn't exist.
The part in bold is important. You have just, even after your declaration of obedience to Allah in spite of humanity gone that one step further. You have just
admitted that morality has nothing to do with the ultimate objective. Do I need comment further?
Rather, you have to prove God doesn't exist and the message of Islam is false, first.
No I don't. You make the claim that God exists and that he has something to tell us. This is a large claim and it is upon you to back it up.
Yes. Our time on Earth is the exam. You can't go to an examiner and tell him that you made mistakes and want the necessary grades after seeing all the answers in front of you.
When you sign up for a course, or for a subject in any educational establishment you are made profoundly aware that you happen to be signing up for it. According to my perspective, there is no examination and there is no grading system involved. You can't go around making up silly comparisons about what God does with human affairs after telling us that God is beyond our semantics and beyond our comprehension. It is a passive contradiction and suggests that you do contrast with human experiences to suit your agenda.
