Satan must be burning.
How can Satan act to keep the world from becoming completely Christian (Alex would substitute the word 'Godly'), and the love which God gives us from becoming universal? Satan must develop a movement of renunciation and nullification. What must he do?
Well he does two things, separated by a millennium. Time in our terms means nothing to God or to Satan. God is the ink and all the writing, and the paper, and the hand and pen, of this essay. God is all words at once, and the blank page, too, and the process of cognition and of writing, and everything. We poor humans can only comprehend the process: gather supplies, fill the pen, sketch the outline, write the essay. Satan, who can mimic God, tries to corrupt the process that we humans can only partly comprehend. And, scurrilously, Satan preys upon the strengths of the weakest, and upon the strongest, their weaknesses.
Letβs skip over to Arabia. Allah has revealed himself to Mohammed and sent him forth to evangelize among the heathens in that country. The foundation of Islam is divine, and that the God of Abraham is indeed the Allah of Mohammed. There is much in Islam that is good and pure and loving, and there are many who gain solace from Islam. Let us not forget that Jesus preached in a Jewish, rabbinical society under the aegis of the Roman rule of law: Jesus's message was formed to fit the local conditions as it were. Mohammed's message was formed to fit his local conditions, a mostly barbarous, tribal, pagan society. Let's not quibble, although some of you may not call it quibbling.
There is something in Islam that I feel is corrupted. It's the firebombing in the name of Allah. It comes from somewhere we can't logically explain by watching the Muslim woman and her children that spoke at my wedding. It's either that, or the entire religion is suspect. I don't believe that the entire religion is suspect for a second. I believe Anwar Sadat was inspired by Allah. There are rifts in Islam. Letβs call those who arduously subscribe to the corrupted portions, for the sake of the argument, the islamists or islamofascists. What is the nature of the corruption?
One can guess. In Islam there are a set of βSatanic Verses.β In the passages, Mohammed proclaims an overflight of geese to mean the blessing of pagan gods. This, of course, is incompatible with the word of Allah, who is the only god. This passage is later corrected by proclaiming that Satan appeared in the guise of Gabriel and fed a lie to Mohammed.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Fascinating and extremely thoughtful (and thorough, as you noted). I agree with most of it but have a few thoughts: absolute certainly in the rightness of your own beliefs is as dangerous as moral relativism: this is what fundamentalist Muslims have - terrorists or not. I think we must all leave room in our minds that we might be wrong and therefore respect the beliefs of others as long as they do not cause us harm. In the case of Islamists, however, (and all fanatics) they are doing harm and are not to be respected.
Thanks for sharing this Paulie!
2 - JR
If evolution is such a deliberate process, why has it appeared to stop?
Actually, evolution appears not to have stopped. This group is studying the effects of living at high altitudes. From Nature news:
Not to mention all of the evidence of continuing evolution that is observed among other life forms. Didn't you learn in seventh-grade about those moths in industrial England that adapted to soot-covered trees? And why do you think they have to make up a new flu vaccine every year?
A more thorough understanding of evolution would reveal that, like entropy, it simply occurs with the passage of time. There is no stopping.