Tolerance and Muslim Faith

One day, someone in Denmark made some drawings of prophet Muhammed, of Islam. It was a cartoon about the muslim god. However, the reacting muslims looked more like this:

Muslims at the Danish Embassy in Britain,
preaching their views on tolerance,
according to their religion.

For these religious people in the picture above, it is ok to trust the invisible god they have never seen, and trust that his teachings are just fine: if anyone makes a drawing of my invisible god, or if they say something I believe to be an insult to him, I should slay them, butcher them, and make all Europe pay because demolition is on its way.

Religious faiths are not all the same. But when us as a society grant people the right to trust whatever thing they want (faith), even when no reason or facts are behind those beliefs, it is obvious that if enough time passes, beliefs like the ones on the pictures will eventually be part of our world, and forever passed from generation to generation...

If you think world peace is on its way, religion will make sure that day will never come. At least for as long as we allow people to draw cartoons about whatever they want, that is...

Faith

Faith: confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

Faith is also a personal choice. The concept alone has little to do with reality, proof or fact. It can, but it does not have to. It is a trust based system, not necessarily a fact based or reason based one. You can trust a person, idea or thing, for any reason (or absence thereof) or fact whatsoever.
Some people wrongly believe that faith is a concept of religious origin alone.

Faith can be the choice we make when facts are not available:
Like when we are about to decide between A and B and we believe both choices are good in their own way, but we are unable to choose both. In such cases, faith comes in. We decide to trust one choice to be the better one over the other or others, and we go for it.

I have faith when I play the lotto. I know the odds are against me. I know the odds of it being a waste of money are huge. But I play. Even though I rationalize the act of buying a ticket as the price for the excitement before losing, faith in winning is a big part of it all as well.

Religious faith is no different. It just means that the same faith is put into what some religion / belief is claiming to be true with a lot of trust and confidence, wherever those claims may be coming from.

Free Will

If I give you the remote to a TV with 99 channels but that only picks up the reception of 1, and then tell you have the free will to choose any channel, even though the 99 options are real, I do know what you will choose just because I know there is only 1 viewable channel on such TV.
As long as I know what your choice will be, you have to real choice. You will choose exactly what I know you will.

I always felt religion was throwing sand in my eyes when the subject of free will came about to shield gods from guilt and responsibility.

Every time we ask why do gods allow for evil, a weird answer is always given. In those answers, there is always a relative or a too general term to describe the whole deal.
My favorite one, is God giving humans free will.

Let's grasp this concept.
Let us consider God in that moment before creating man.
Then, let us consider mankind as we know it today.

Before Man was created, God knew everything, as He always does.
What this means, is that all future things He was about to create were known to Him.
What it also means, is that the knowledge of all people's actions was also known.
And what it also means, is that he knows exactly what all humans that will ever exist will do every time, in all the moments and choices of their lives.

If He knows all my decisions, then I am only making the decisions He knows I will make. Not the other decisions also presented to me.
If I am living exactly the life God knows I will be living, then I am only choosing to live the life God knows I will live. I will happen exactly the way God wanted and knew all along.

Where do I do whatever I want? So much for free will...
There is no free will if someone else with 100% certainty (such as all knowing gods) can know what my choice will be before I even make it.

Divine sloppyness.

A god is, according to many, the all powerful, all knowing creator of everything.
When he was about to create Man, he knew how we would turn out to be, and made us the way we are anyway.

Man is by far, the most cruel of all species. We are the only ones capable of torturing, killing for sport, genocides, mass pollution, the atom bomb, to name a few...

When I was a roman catholic, I was once told that God had made us in His own image. Now that I see that a being that can do everything (including having created a perfectly happy humanity) was able to be so sloppy in creating Man, I wonder:

Since God is also responsible for the creation of evil to begin with, and responsible for creating beings that become evil, is God really that human?

Perfect

Defining what perfect is, can be very difficult.
One of the reasons for that difficulty is the fact that some of us may consider something to be perfect, while others may not.

Although I do not think this post will end up with an exact and precise definition of perfection, it is in the interest of this blog to at least present the readers with a definition that matches what we mean when mentioning perfection.

Perfection is a relative attribute: It describes a goal's complete achievement.
It is a good rule of thumb not to use the word perfect by itself.
By itself, the word perfect cannot specify the goal it is referring itself to.

In religion, this separation of the word perfect from its goal is, in my opinion, intentional. By stating something like "God is perfect", the goal is hidden, and we are allowed to fantasize about any kind of perfection, making God's perfection match our own definition of perfection.

The statement "God converts people to His faith perfectly." states its goal clearly.
It is also a false statement being that atheists exist, and are not converts; the goal is definitely not completely achieved.

Religion also complicates the very definition of perfect. Sometimes God's perfection is referred to as infinite as well; Infinite perfection.
If perfection is an absolute quality, making it infinite only contradicts what perfection means. Perfection is something one can achieve, not improve on infinitely. If you believe you can improve perfection, then it wasn't perfect to begin with.
Perfection is like death. It can't be infinite. God's perfection can never be infinite.
Either it is, or it is not.

Testing

When I think about the movies I like and the actors that play them, I can't help to realize how good some are at playing roles that sometimes are so different from what the actors are in real life.

If you lose some of your limitations, you also lose a part of what you were when you had them, to become what you now would be without them. For example, if you were to become immortal, then dying would be something you would lose, and never again be able to do. Immortal people do not die.

The same thing applies to omniscience, that wonderful ability of knowing everything, that all gods seem to share. If you know everything, there will be a few things you just will not do: wonder about something, the need to ask questions, discovery, learning... etc.
Once you know all, you stop needing those things. And in some cases, just like being immortal, some things you won't be able to do anymore: ignorance is one of those lost things.

We, regular humans, observe the world, pass knowledge from person to person, inquire, experiment, and test things, in order to understand and know the world around us.
Of all these things, all knowing beings need none of them, and can't do a few: like learning. Gods can't learn, because they know all already.

As such, the next time someone tells you that your god is testing your faith, or wants to find out something about us, remember that those are just some of the things he can't do.
He can't find out something he already knows (knows all), or test us to see what we do, because he knows that as well.

Like my favorite actors, some roles just aren't for God. Being curious is one of them.