Tom Facchine – Addictive Dimension of Sin

You know, there's an addictive dimension to sin,

and it's something that is similar to the

concept of habitus. Right? It's like if you

do an action,

it makes it easier for that action to

occur again, or it makes it easier for

you to perform that action again.

And so it takes you know, the inertia

of the thing is that it's gonna keep

on going

unless you insert some sort of, you know,

energy to overcome that inertia

and then stop it or reverse it.

And this is actually a field where, you

know, you can actually capitalize or benefit a

lot from,

the works outside of Islam when it comes

to all the different sort

of factors that play into

what

puts a person back in a situation of

sin or repeating a certain action. Let's just

take an alcoholic, for example. Like, somebody, they're

trying to get clean. They're trying to stop

drinking. Everybody knows that there's certain triggers, there's

certain situations, there's certain sort of,

even people that bring that person back to

a a situation where they want to do

that thing again. Right? Whether it's yeah. Like

when they're sad or something happens or a

certain time of day or going to a

bar or after a meal or whatever it

is. Like, the person has triggers. Okay? And

so sin is like that.

Right? Sin can have these sorts of triggers.

There are certain situations,

right, where

the suggestion from shaitan comes and it there's

certain situations that you're in where it seems

more likely or more reasonable or you're more

willing to act on it. Your defenses are

down. Right? And so if somebody's really trying

to reroute their habits, you know, it's not

just about subtraction, and that's, I think, one

thing that we get trapped in when we

think about sin and stopping habits. We need

displacement.

K? You have to displace that habit with

something else, with another habit.

And that could be lots of things. Right?

Like, there's always the example of

when he

came to Masjid one day, and he missed

the salah in Jema'ah because he was delayed

from his

He was working in the fields. You know,

he had a a a date plantation or

whatever. And so he was so upset with

himself

that he missed the the congregational prayer

that he gave that

plantation away in charity.

Right? So he had, like, a counterforce, like

a counter habit to displace

the habit that he didn't like. Well, it

wasn't necessarily a habit for him. It happened

once. But that's the sort of thing that

we're talking about where it's like, you need

some sort of consequence even put to put

on yourself. Okay? If you get angry with

your spouse and you you start to, like,

say not not nice things. Okay. Maybe,

you have to give a certain amount in

charity every single time.

Somebody told me, a friend I had from

from Bosnia, what was it? They said something

like,

whenever they

were about to commit a certain sin,

they

they said, I'm gonna pray to raka.

And they found that very, very, very soon,

they stopped even wanting to do the sin.

And they were telling me this. They're like,

you know, I think it's just that it

really is the shaytan because the shaytan doesn't

want me to pray.

And I got so in the habit of

praying whenever I wanted to do this sin

that the shaytan just gave up and said,

you know what? Forget it. I'd rather him

not pray.

So those are the sorts of things we're

talking about. So if you wanna break your

habits, it's not just, you know, it's not

just subtraction. You have to displace it with

something else with something new entirely.