What God do you believe in? Your point only makes sense if your understanding of God differs from the conventional one(s) in some important respect, which it probably doesn’t.
I pointed to the Mu’tazila in another post to connect my position with an old tradition, one which is frequently thought to be heretical. The real story is that the Rationalists were very successful, early on, which might say something about the compatibility with the “proof-texts” of Islam, i.e, the Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet, but they asserted their power to attempt to crush contrary opinion. No surprise, they then lost power, and were in turn crushed.
To be fair, it was not the rationalist theologians who did this, it was their powerful supporters, who made the reserved and rational interpretations into a state-enforced dogma. Perhaps we could say that they did not adequately restrain their supporters.
Many “Muslims” would consider my comments heretical, I’ve run into this. I was considered to be too accommodating to “non-Muslims,” who, they believed, were doomed to Hell if they did not “accept Islam.” This got to the point that when I recited and translated a section of the Qur’an to a group of visiting Christian seminary students, the imam of the mosque was waving frantically at me to try to get me to stop. His religious affiliation trumped any concept that our responsibility might be to convey what was actually in the Qur’an. He was mostly ignorant of it. Small mosque, in a small town, a big fish in a small pond.
Definition of believe: “to accept as true or real”. I don’t believe with certainty in anything. (Technically, my intuitions are certain about certain things. Other parts of my brain disagree with their confidence though.) I slightly believe in everything, in that anything is possible because I’m fallible. But for everyday purposes, I believe that I am a human, that the sky looks blue sometimes, that rain is wet, and about ten million billion other things.
Great. Could we say that you believe in your experience? I would put it a little differently. You trust your experience. But for what?
In any case, can we distinguish between experience and what is concluded or expected from it?
I pointed to the Mu’tazila in another post to connect my position with an old tradition, one which is frequently thought to be heretical. The real story is that the Rationalists were very successful, early on, which might say something about the compatibility with the “proof-texts” of Islam, i.e, the Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet, but they asserted their power to attempt to crush contrary opinion. No surprise, they then lost power, and were in turn crushed.
To be fair, it was not the rationalist theologians who did this, it was their powerful supporters, who made the reserved and rational interpretations into a state-enforced dogma. Perhaps we could say that they did not adequately restrain their supporters.
Many “Muslims” would consider my comments heretical, I’ve run into this. I was considered to be too accommodating to “non-Muslims,” who, they believed, were doomed to Hell if they did not “accept Islam.” This got to the point that when I recited and translated a section of the Qur’an to a group of visiting Christian seminary students, the imam of the mosque was waving frantically at me to try to get me to stop. His religious affiliation trumped any concept that our responsibility might be to convey what was actually in the Qur’an. He was mostly ignorant of it. Small mosque, in a small town, a big fish in a small pond.
Great. Could we say that you believe in your experience? I would put it a little differently. You trust your experience. But for what?
In any case, can we distinguish between experience and what is concluded or expected from it?