Dying in a state of kufr and shirk

[good logic]

Peace All.
Just what are we talking about here?
Shirk?
Then how can we remain ignorant of what shirk is if we know for sure there is a Creator and the message from the Creator says do not commit shirk?
Of course there are a lot of other things we do not know that do not really matter if you do not get to know them.
But it does matter if we remain ignorant of what shirk is!
Unless of course one is not sure or does not want to know, then they are making that decision.

For those that do not believe/know for sure GOD exists or that there is a message from GOD this thread is irrelevant. There is no shirk /partner with GOD  because there is no GOD in their reality.
GOD bless .
Peace.

[huruf]

Hey all,

People feel deficient and lost when in a state of not knowing. That's why people 'believe' stuff. A belief is comforting and soothing... something you can hook your mind and identity on. A crutch.
But people often claim to know when they actually only believe. You 'believe' when you actually 'don't know'. But it's hard to admit.

No, we are playing with words. We use the term believe with a variety of meanings and then finally everybody is happy he is right, just have in your head that particular meaning of "believe".

If you know of course you believe, it would be idiotic not believing something you do know.

The belief that the Qur'an speaks about is not the "faith" without proof that some people take for believing. The believing of the Qur'an is the one based on conviction. The belief that comes from having gone through several stages of questionning and enquiring and digesting and checking that allows you to be convinced of something. That I think is what the faith in Qur'an means, al yaqin.

Salaam

[hawk99]

Hawk99
Based on what you have outlined it would seem shirk is very easy to commit.
We?re all governed by laws/governments, everyone grew up in a culture that has customs and people add and subtract to what suits them ? consciously or not, we all want things.

what you say is true, however we must understand shirk in the context
of taghut, rebellion, institutionalization, culture and on a personal level
via Quran.

[45:23]
Have you seen he who has taken as his god his desire, and Allah has
sent him astray due to knowledge and has set a seal upon his hearing and his
heart and put over his vision a veil? So who will guide him after Allah ?
Then will you not be reminded?

[14:30] And they set up rivals to Allah, to mislead  from
His path! Say: ?Enjoy But certainly, your destination is the Fire!?

Who are the misleaders?

[4:48] Allah forgives not that partners should be set up with Him; but He forgives
anything else, to whom He pleases; to set up partners with Allah is to
fabricate a great sin.

The believing of the Qur'an is the one based on conviction. The belief that comes from having gone through several stages of questioning and enquiring and digesting and checking that allows you to be convinced of something. That I think is what the faith in Qur'an means, al yaqin.

I would say believing the Qur'an is based on evidence and not mere conviction.



                                                                               


                                                                                   

[Zulf]

No, we are playing with words. We use the term believe with a variety of meanings and then finally everybody is happy he is right, just have in your head that particular meaning of "believe".

If you know of course you believe, it would be idiotic not believing something you do know.

The belief that the Qur'an speaks about is not the "faith" without proof that some people take for believing. The believing of the Qur'an is the one based on conviction. The belief that comes from having gone through several stages of questionning and enquiring and digesting and checking that allows you to be convinced of something. That I think is what the faith in Qur'an means, al yaqin.

Salaam

I definately agree that it mostly becomes a play with words, a semantic game, and then misunderstandings arise, either willfully and by mistake. Politics, and I guess much of human communication, is like this. I guess it stems from that we all in fact live in our own worlds, with our own unique perspectives, and sometimes the overlap is very large and sometimes it is not so large.

When I say 'believe', I mean anything which you do not have direct experience of. Which means alot of things.
Conviction can be based on different degrees of honesty and reason.
The one with blind religious faith has conviction, but so do you when you have e.g. observed something for a long time, pondered on it, heard different view points about it and then drawn a sensible conclusion about it.

People can have faith, believe or be convinced, yet without actually knowing. Real knowing is rare. But I think the most important point is not whether you know or not, but rather whether you admit that you don't actually know something for sure, regardless of your convictions, beliefs or faith.

Admitting you don't know keeps doors open. But people are afraid of that. What if something they are convinced of suddenly becomes less convincing? Scary! People are actually afraid of letting go of certain beliefs. Fear.



But then again... it's all about words.

[huruf]

Know?
I know I am here now. The question would be hat is here, hat is "am"...

If we go beyond that a little bit we have to know by reason and feeling. Sometimes reason goe one way and feelings go the other, however hen both go the same way usually you have something right.

The question is that absolutely nobody knows anything or everything, however we do know that knowing is there and is possible even if it is not absolute.  We have to do with that. But what we also know is that it is possible to improve knowledge, so in fact, jast as with everything else, the important thing is that we try to know better if we can.

And everyone learns for his or her on use, so finally it is satisfying int he sense that we do not lead others into error, because what I know may not possible to know to somebody else and viceversa and it would be silly to become like a pope and state that hat I know is really what everybody must know. No. Each knows what she is apt to know. It is not that knowing is relative, but that it is wide and there is an infinite to know, so we indeed know and e do know that knowing is something satisfactory, particularly to learn, but that does not mean that we know everything or that we know something completely, and that is why we can learn, because e do not know everything.

Salaam

[good logic]

I think we need to stay specific. What  we know and what we do not know are miles apart.

When we know ,it means we have no doubt ,we are 100% certain. So why complicate things ?

If we believe Qoran and we have no doubt (we are certain it is from GOD),then we also know for certain we are accountable.

It follows that we need to find out what is shirk?

All the rest ,like we cannot know, we are not honest, afraid to say we do not know, afraid of change, do not want to find out we are wrong...etc are like deviations and excuses.

The bottom line is we have got to search/ponder/study the message and find out

It all depends on our "certainty about GOD and His message". Those who are certain will have no choice but to  seek the knowledge of what is shirk from their perspective.
Those who have doubt will stay wavering and arguing the case from their perspective.

By nature, human beings are , impatient, argumentative, hesitant, doubtful, and arrogant (70:19, 21:37, 75:5, 18:54, 14:9, 7:12). We tend to question everything and doubt all that is unseen.
We argue about God, His greatness and infinite grace. Blinded by ego, falsehood in most of the time would make more sense to us than knowledge.
Even those of us who utter the words of belief are mostly unable to take God's words literally and seriously the way we should be. That is if we believe Qoran.
The Most Merciful provides us with all the means that help get rid of any shade of doubt, yet, we continue to exhibit nothing but ignorance and lack of appreciation, We must try to be the exception, the ones that are worthy of guidance, knowledge and certainty.

[Qoran 3:60] This is the truth from your Lord; do not harbor any doubts.
We need to trust GOD to teach us His knowledge.
Just saying we do not know and we cannot know is mostly an excuse.
GOD bless.
Peace.

[imrankhawaja]

People can have faith, believe or be convinced, yet without actually knowing. Real knowing is rare. But I think the most important point is not whether you know or not, but rather whether you admit that you don't actually know something for sure, regardless of your convictions, beliefs or faith.

it's all about words.

brother zulf hope you doing good in life.

TRUE its all about words and sometimes we have to go after words for making ourselves in better position.

lets take another approach = about your approach i m not sure the faith/beleive/knowing is referred to supreme creator or the religious text but lets forget everything whatever related with religion like prophets/books..

about me , i dnt beleive in something..
but i KNOW something..

i know the place where i m living and about myself that (i m not creator) of anything.. question goes back to if its a creation there must b a creator.. this thing i know again saying i know ..

its all about words..
about religious text it varies from perosn to person as per understanding the way how one understand...

i dnt have a direct evidence who is that supreme creator, but i know someone there... two different things.

[Jafar]

Admitting you don't know keeps doors open. But people are afraid of that. What if something they are convinced of suddenly becomes less convincing? Scary! People are actually afraid of letting go of certain beliefs. Fear.

The more enlightened a person is, the less judgmental that he/she will be.
The more enlightened a person is, the less probability that he/she will succumbed to his/her own fear.

Let's take an example; on topics which is 'less sensitive', as comparison.

By merely looking at your phone screen, there are many questions that can popped inside one head; such as; how does the image being displayed on the screen works?

Voila, an answer came, the screen is actually just a bunch of little dots called 'pixels'.
Which bring forth a set of new questions: How does the pixels get it's colors? Who control the pixels to show it colors? How it actually controls the pixels? How does the pixels knows what colors to show to display the photo? How does the photo that I saw on this screen managed to be transferred over the air to my phone? and so on and so on..

An example of an answer "Pixel" gives birth to a plethora of new questions.
And the process is 'recurring', new questions->new answers->more new questions.

Compared to the 'ignorant' who doesn't even bothered to ask the initial questions, the 'enlightened' now have much more questions, more things that he/she realized that he/she doesn't have the answer, more things which he/she just shrugged "I don't know".

By merely pondering on one object, a Phone, it can gives birth to 1000 or even 10,000 questions. To those who pondered.

Of course most people doesn't even bothered to ask the questions and they just TRUST / BELIEVE in something. In this example let's take a brand named "APPLE".
By putting your belief in APPLE you trust APPLE will handle those intricate things for you, all you have to do is just enjoy the photo on the screen. And your screen is the best screen out there, WHY? because the screen is APPLE.

You enjoy the belief, the belief then gets stronger up to the level of "Fanaticism" a level where 'logic' is being kicked out through the window. The most part of it is also due to continuous campaign by Apple itself. Apple try to grow it's power by enlarging it's loyal fanatical followers, the followers who always buy everything that is "Apple" just because it's "Apple", the followers who never asked questions or complain, the followers who are willing to "defend" the "Apple" brand itself. Up to the point that they invented a name for their group, they shouted proudly "WE ARE APPLESIANS"! There is no Phone other than Apple. Apple is the truest and the best phone out there.

A different group tried to put some senses into these fanatics,
"Look, your phone screen is not the best screen, do you know that there are other phones which has more pixels than the one that Apple has?"
"That is utter BLASPHEMY!" saith the Applesian, there is no Phone who has better screen or anything than Apple.

For the fanatics, they will not even try to ponder on "how does the screen works?". Because they believed that Apple has handle it for them and they don't even have to know how it works, they just need to believe in Apple. Asking such questions will trigger doubt in their heart, a doubt which will ruin their faith.. in Apple.

They fear that they will lose the safe comfort of being ignorant.

[Makaveli]

MakaveliWhat do you think?

I think, and I believe it is quite evident, that the very idea of "one true God with no other gods" and the "shirk" associated with not acknowledging this statement is as meaningless as arguing over one main Sun over 200 billion stars in the galaxy. It is a load of dung ideology, which does not hold water because in case a person does not even know about such an ideology, in accordance with the adepts of a monotheistic thought, he is thus called a sinner, a disbeliever, a "rejector", a paganistic polytheist and idolator bound to burn in eternal fire simply for not "knowing" about their religious speculation, and which in its highest historic peak shed more blood than Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin ever spilt even if we doubled their warmongering advances.

There is no religion or a nation which would be "polytheistic" in a monotheistic sense. Any so called "polytheistic" nation always had one main God in the highest realm of their Olymp (Amun-Ra/Zeus/Jupiter/Odin etc.). If we consider that the Source of All Creation is One, which again is accepted by all cultures, which ever had history, then a very idea of worshipping one true God and being thrown in eternal fire for assigning "partners" to him is a load of crap, it is meaningless as it is, it does not make any sense outside of religious domination, misery caused by religious wars and massive ignorance in which humans abide for centuries.

There is no biggest misery and curse than ignorance and mental apathy caused by not questioning authoritatively-forced worldview. It is not limited to monotheism either. Women who believe in patriarchy and incapability of women of being capable of leading their own life without going "astray" is the same mind controlling and mind corrupting technology similar to believing in the one true God who is jealous of other gods, and not questioning the bigger picture behind those social mechanisms (traditionalism as we call it today) and philosophies (monotheism, worshipping of idols in hierarchical order). Simple ACCEPTANCE and a lack of faith in oneself as a standalone mind as a part of the bigger Universe and a lack of thirst for understanding leads to the people remaining in miserable stupidity and confinement/slavery/mind-control.

The biggest "shirk" is not using your mental capability, which I believe is not universal for all people, but which is certainly subject to potential expansion in most "mind-bearers". The very word عرب, which is believed by the MAJORITY of people ever reading the book called the Qur'an to be a specific Middle Eastern dialect, implies that it is related to something of abudance, of multiplicity and development (root RA-BA, the same as in Rabbi or thy Rabb/Lord). The language of the Qur'an is not Arabic as there never was such language by the time the book was "un-zilla'd" and no one called the "Saracenes" the Arabians, as there were no such nation who called themselves as that and identified themselves as that. Yet the clergy and the closed-minded like to parrot about the "Arabic Qur'an" non-sense, simply because they were TAUGHT so and they did not even dare to think for other possibilities. This is a crime. I strongly believe these are criminals. Not the true higher standing criminals, the Dons who control them, but the small-time criminals who follow orders. They share the crime, so they are criminals of mind-control. There is no worse of a slave than a slave who holds a whip given to him by his controller to strike other slaves of his own kind. And in case someone is rationally accepting the dogma, refuses to question those and does his best to enforce those dogmas, he is a slave wielding a whip for his masters and this applies for mind-control-based slavery, which is religion. If he simply accepts but is not enforcing then he is a simple "dweller".

There are people who come out as smart yet translate "ma-re-jiin" (55:15) as "pasteurization", because root definition says it may mean "pasture" and to them it 'surely has to be pasteurization', it does not matter that pasteurization has nothing to do with "pasture" and was only named as such because of Louis Pasteur, which the term was named after. No, that is not important for them. What is important for these people (all quran-alone translators as far as I know) is their small dogmatic worldview, which has to support their dogma despite the possible facts. These are criminals, simple as that.

That's what I think.

[good logic]

Peace Makaveli.
Are these views of yours your own ideas? your conclusion from a study? or just following another source like all those who follow a certain source?
Some Qoranists are providing for you their source for you to check, the original text? Or at least what they see as original.
What is/are your sources and the evidence of what you say?
Otherwise it will be classed as just an opinion among many other opinions.
As for "dogmatic" it does not apply to religions only, any other source can have the effect of turning anyone into "dogmatic" if their ego is not tamed.
Thank you and GOD bless you.
Peace.