al-Raghib al-Isfahani #32 – THESE Steps Improve Ethics

Raghav as for Hani says that there's four stages to building your nobility as an individual and two of those have to do with belief and two of those have to do with action. So the first one that has to do with belief is about believing in beautiful things, that if you want to be a noble person, you want to be an ethical person, you need to believe in beautiful things, right? We believe that the creation is the product of a supreme intelligence, right, and a perfect ability and will as opposed to something that came about through mere chance or chaos. We believe that this Creator created the world with abundance as opposed to scarcity. And some people are gonna say, well, and this is the

common sort of thing, this is what makes our oils for honey. So revolutionary, and our times is that people these days very much believed that your beliefs or your theological commitments, or your religion doesn't have anything to do with your capacity to act ethically, we say no, that's not true at all. In fact, it matters everything. And it determines completely your ability to act ethically, maybe not in times of prosperity, okay? Maybe not in times where there's peace, and everybody has enough to eat and everybody's kind of okay, maybe then you can have an atheist that's acts as ethically as a religious person or something like this. But what happens in the time of war? What

happens in a time of famine? What happens when acting ethically is against your material interests? Can we really expect that someone who only believes in materialism is going to be able to act ethically when acting ethically is going to put themselves in material danger that's completely illogical and unreasonable. And it's just not true. So the first step is believing and beautiful things a person who believes that this is a creation intentionally created with love and mercy and guidance is going to be way better off and have a an easier time or have an increased capacity to act ethically than a person who believes that this is all just chance, everything's chaos. And we're

not going to say that there might not be individual exceptions, but we're talking about the general thrust, we're talking about capacity. The second stage is that making sure that our beliefs are rooted in actual proof and evidence, and not just surmise and conjecture and feeling. And this is to contrast, we would contrast ourselves with some of the sects of Christianity, such as evangelical Christianity, for whom a lot of their religion comes back to just feeling right you have people who consider themselves prophets, or consider a significant part of their religious practice as giving prophecy right. And they're just they wait until they're overcome by what they think is the spirit

and they talk in tongues, or they predict the future, or they do some sort of thing. And they think that they're worshipping God, we say, this is the work of the devil, right? Because they don't have any evidence for this practice that they're doing, nor do they have any evidence that they are being used as an instrument of God in that particular instance, right? Somebody else could say somebody could have the same exact feelings and experience that they're having and say that they're feeling that the presence of Krishna or brahma or or Buddha or something else, or even the devil, right, what's going to determine who's right. It's all just feeling it's all just conjecture. You don't

know you don't have any proof. Right? So it's essential to ground your beliefs in actual proof in an actual evidence. This is not a joke, right? Well, we're talking about religion, religion is not just some sort of culture thing you'd like biryani biryani, and he likes shwarma religion is about what does Allah say makes him happy? What does Allah say is the right way to worship him? Does anybody get to have an opinion about that? Or is that something that the creator gets to decide? And he communicates it to us? And we have to have respect for the divine to actually be able to care enough to say that, okay, this we can tell is actually authentically from the Divine. And this well, we're

not sure, maybe it is, maybe it's not. And this definitely isn't from the Divine Right? That would be someone who respects actual, you know, the divine creator, whereas somebody who comes in and says, Well, I feel this and so it must be true. Come on, you're playing games. This is not religion. This is you. Okay. So step one is to believe in beautiful things. Step two is to ground your beliefs and proof and evidence, the final two stages have to do with our behavior, and they're complementary halves of the same coin. The first is breaking our bad habits. And the second and last one is forming good habits. And this requires on the inside both a nurturing of a particular kind of hatred

and a particular kind of love, hatred. Not all hatred is bad, right? If someone has bad habits, you're addicted to pornography, you're addicted to a certain substance, you are an abuser, you are someone who even just curses, right you need to develop with inside of you a hatred of that evil and a hatred of those bad habits such that you come to the point where you've crossed the threshold and you're going to break those habits you have the proper amount of motivation to break those habits. And then when it comes to love, you need to nurture within yourself a love of Allah and a love of what he loves to the point where you want to now go out and establish new habits, good habits that

are going to benefit you and make you into an even better person. So these are the four stages of attaining to nobility and realizing our ethical potential first is to believe in beautiful things. Second is to ground our belief and proof and evidence. Third is to break bad habits and the fourth is to develop new good habits.