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The Beginning of the End
Imagine you are a devout Muslim living in
One day some of your so called friends approach you urging you to come fight with them. They push verses like Sura (chapter) 2:216 in your face and tell you that you are selfish and arrogant for doing your own thing, they say, "who do you think you are? Do you think you know better than God?"
Sura 2:216 says,
Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not. (The Quran)
You obviously have a problem. You empathize with your friends when they tell you about the atrocities which are being committed against your people (many of them are rumours spread by those who want Muslims to join the fight but you don't know that. You don't know what to believe and what not to believe).
You are divided in yourself, you think it is wrong to go and fight (the foreign soldiers have always treated you kindly) but you also know that you are only human. You've been wrong before. You're just a man, Allah is God. Who are you to argue with God? After all Allah knows best.
If you do go and fight you have chosen a very dangerous path, you have chosen to ignore that inner voice called conscience, our sense of right and wrong which God has placed in each of us (see "Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe" by C.S. Lewis). If we go against our conscience we are going against God. When a man goes against his conscience his heart becomes hard and he will grow capable of things he never thought he could do.
Just recently some Australian converts to Islam were caught smuggling weapons in
We all believe something and we believe what we believe because we think it is true. If we did not think it was true we would not believe it. We are all believers. Whether a person believes in God or not will determine more about them than any other factor. It will determine how they spend their time, money, energy, what kind of books they read and what subjects they talk about; beliefs influence behaviour.
If a person believes in God, the kind of God they believe in will determine how they behave. If you wish to please your god and you think forgiving people is pleasing to him you will forgive, if you think helping the poor pleases him you will help the poor. (People become like the god they believe in.) Now you may say, "I know people who say it is pleasing to God to help the poor but they don't do it." If that is so they don't believe what they are saying, they are just saying it. A person's real belief is not what they think they believe, a persons real belief is that which they live by. If I believe the house is on fire (and I wish to live) I will either try and put the fire out or get out of the house. Beliefs motivate us to take action. The men who flew the airoplanes into the World Trade Centre believed that what they were doing was pleasing to their God, so pleasing that they would be rewarded with 72 (renewable) virgins and the strength of 100 men. (The men who committed those crimes had a wrong concept of God. The god these individuals believed in was an imaginary god because the real God could not be pleased with such behaviour. They had no idea what the real God was like. Unfortunately, there are too many people like them.) Beliefs are very powerful; it is our beliefs which motivate us to do what we do. Naturally, embracing new beliefs is a big step.
A person embraces new beliefs because they think they are true (whether they are or not). All genuine converts have the converts zeal and may come to believe that the end justifies the means. (In other words everything is permissible as long as it brings the world closer to the final goal.* (This is how cults encourage people to ignore the inner voice of conscience and justify evil in the name of a "good" cause.)
It is amazing what people will do for what they believe is a good cause. The atrocities committed in the Russian revolution were justified by many who perpetrated them, they believed it was necessary for the greater good. Many Nazi's did what they did with zeal believing that it was in the best interests of society and the world.
Are those who fight for Islam any different?
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No one was ever brain washed because they asked tough questions; people are only brain washed when they don't ask them. It is easy to ask tough questions about what others believe but it is not so easy to ask tough questions about our own beliefs and convictions.
"Obviously, Muslim organizations make available only those debates where they look good, and not those that they lost. We have yet to see them sell the debates by Dr. Badawi, or Mr. Green against Jay Smith" (Quote see Jay Smith on You Tube).
Don't just listen to debates where your side wins. Make sure you take the time to listen to some in which your side loses.
* Note: I do not believe that religion is inherently evil. Only a fool would think that.
There are only two choices in this world. We will embrace one of the following beliefs.
Either
the means justifies the end
or
the end justifies the means (the logic of terrorists, the Nazi’s and sadly many academics who have chosen to believe Neitzche's foolish ideas regarding relativism).
When I say the means justifies the end I mean doing what is right no matter what the cost or the end result is, even if the end result is that you lose your life and everyone who believes what you believe is killed. see True Religion
What is the root cause of terrorism?
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