• tarbeez
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    4 months ago

    Late reply, didn’t see.

    Something to keep in mind is that a heavily externalized idea of God is a bit simpleminded. We are not owed anything.

    The theist/nontheist discussion is a dualistic one. While dialectics as a method and process is sound, the idea is ultimately to unify opposites, not pick one or define yourself in opposition to one.

    It’s possible to take the very valid misgivings you have and turn them into questions rather than using them as conclusions.

    When you look at the history of the occident, it is built on things that weren’t organically grown by its people, and the Abrahamic tradition, as well as the Greek, was adapted in a strange way to try to claim it – The actual producing tradition is foreign to it, and so you see that even foundational, culture defining output like Dante’s Divine Comedy was essentially lifted from Ibn Arabi & Co. The conceptions that informed this appropriation and further developed from it can easily color your thinking and put a veil over your eyes when you are forced to live among its proponents.

    Keep in mind that Islamic Theology is not as literal minded as the western approach. Basic things like God not being an external entity as such, and certainly not a man-like one, and man is not created in God’s image and so on. It’s subtle, as are its interpretations, because it (and its interpreters) belongs to a long tradition. Ditto for Orthodox Christianity.