Tom Facchine – Addictive Dimension of Sin
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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.