Is Your Faith Transactional

There's different reasons why we do good. And some of those reasons are better than others.

Some people, they worship a law, or they do the right thing, just because they want gender, they want the fruits, you know, they want the, you know, the house, or whatever.

And then, but there's a higher motivation beyond that. And the higher motivation is to do it, because you love a lot. And you feel indebted to Allah and you feel grateful to Allah. And so it doesn't have to do with the transaction, right? It's not about what you're going to get out of it. And too much of religion today is made into transactional, you know, into a transactional nature. Like, if you look at Yoga, you look at meditation, mindfulness, all these sorts of practices that have become very, very mainstream, that were originally

you know, religious practices of various traditions. It's all about what are the benefits I can get out of it. And this life, if people didn't think that they could be less stressed, from doing yoga, we wouldn't see people doing yoga, or meditation, right, they want to be less stressed, they want to have more balance in their lives, these are good things, but their relationship to it is transactional. They're not doing it out of just pure gratitude for the fact that they can breathe, or pure gratitude to the fact that you know, they have eyes or to the creator or things like that. Right. So we need to be careful

that we don't let our faith and religion slide into something that's completely transactional as well. Sometimes you see Muslims talk about, like, you know, like these scientific sort of things that come out every now and again, and I don't, I'm not a scientist, so I can't say if they're accurate or not. But the position of the prayer, for example, has this benefit, and that benefit for the spine, or fasting has this and that benefit for the human body, that all might be true. But that's not why we do it. Right? We're not in a transactional relationship with these acts of worship for us, we're going to start to see Salah studios, right, instead of yoga studios, we're going to

start to see everybody now bring their bring your prayer rug, and then throw it down. And then they're going to be, you know, doing who knows what, I really don't want to go that way.

At the same time, at the same time, I was having a conversation with one individual, you know, it's not completely wrong to worship in a transactional way, either, because there's a certain point at which you need people to be righteous period. Right? Somebody kind of said to me, well, because I was trying to make the case for why it's important to have people of faith and why you want people of faith in your community. And my kind of line of argument was that somebody who is concerned about eternal consequences from a perfect creator, is going to do you right? And not oppress you more often than somebody who doesn't believe in those things. Not that there aren't exceptions. But

statistically, you'd rather have even like the fundamentalist Christian, maybe, right, that believes in, you know, a perfect God and the eternal consequences, you know, if someone of a child needs to be adopted, if, you know, there's criminal in the community, etc, etc, right? Because this person has this kind of base degree of faith and the person I was talking to, they kind of came back and I said, Well, I don't think that people should be doing things for those reasons. Right? Just, you know, just for what they get out of it.

That's true. That's not the intent is not to end there. The intent is to climb the ladder, to get to the point where people are worshipping Allah, out of love for Allah, out of gratitude to Allah. But that doesn't mean you check the rest of the ladder out from under you, you need that base level of righteousness because there's a certain just amount of righteousness that you need in a society in order to function. You need people to not oppress each other and not not, you know, bother each other's children or, you know, make advances on each other spouses and all these sorts of other things that happen, protect each other's property, all these sorts of things. If we're going to wait

around, until people are only worshipping Allah from the purest intentions about, you know, out of pure love and gratitude, and we're gonna be waiting a long time. And we're gonna have a lot of mischief and corruption on the earth. No, like the base level of transactional faith is there to protect a certain critical mass of people doing the right thing. But you shouldn't be content with that. You should strive to climb that ladder to the point where you're worshiping Allah, out of your love for Allah.