Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #242 – You Will Have Eternal Consequences from a Perfect God
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Some people when they start to think about God, or they start to think about freewill, and predestination, or all these sorts of issues, they exhibit an extreme degree of skepticism or let's say, unrealistic expectations as to what they can understand. It's as if some people will not be satisfied until they can actually be God, right? Or have the perspective of God, right? When they say, Oh, why did this happen this way, like some people mean by that, that I won't be satisfied until I understand it as if I'm God, like, I want to understand the motivations that lead God to do this, or lead God to do that. And those folks are barking up the wrong tree, because there's a
certain acceptance that needs to take place. Now, here's a caveat, a caveat in Islam, you know, we are not, we don't go to the same extreme that Christians go to where everything is just well, you just have to believe and don't ask those questions and whatever. We believe in asking questions and thinking about things and you know, much more to a much greater degree than than most strains of Christianity. However, however, there are limits, there are limits to what you can understand, right? For people who are hard materialists and believe that thought occurs in the brain and believe that thought is, you know, whatever the firing of neurons that go on in the brain, isn't the brain a
muscle? Okay? Isn't the brain a physical reality, or at least the locus of the brain, the locus of thought is a physical reality doesn't any sort of physical muscle or appendage have limits? Right? And there is, you know, some discrepancy between individuals as to ability and capability, right? If you go to the gym, and I go to the gym, maybe you can best benchpress I don't know, whatever, 200 pounds, maybe I can't maybe I can only best benchpress like 150, maybe the strongest dude in the world can benchpress I don't know, 500 pounds, okay, but there's a certain limit that no human being can benchpress, right, that's literally limited by the physicality of the muscle, or the appendage
or the tool or whatever. Okay, so if the locus of thought is the brain, let's just take that, like, for a second as as, let's imagine that that's, that's completely certainly true, then it has limits. It's a physical organ, and it has limits as to what you can comprehend. And we accept this and other spheres, right? It's like, what you can see what you can understand. Even just, you know, history, right? The you know, it's not possible to be able to comprehend the perspective of every human being on Earth right now, let alone the perspective of every human being that's ever lived. So what makes you think you're going to be able to understand the perspective of God, right? So we need to not
fool ourselves. And we need to have sober expectations as to what we're capable of, and what we're not capable of. And we need to not get trapped with dead ends, write the questions that really are important to somebody that come to bear on faith, and whether they should kind of accept a faith or submit themselves as some sort of revealed religion, or, or whatever is that, is this reasonably likely to be true? And does it make sense that this is expected of me? Because a lot of people all have these sorts of excessive mental gymnastics or, let's say, dead ends that they pursue, right? Really? What are they? How do they function, they function as an excuse to not reckon with having to
be morally responsible or morally accountable, right? That's it at the end of the day, religion is about accountability, you're gonna have eternal consequences from a perfect God. That's it. And there's nothing that's going to make you act right or behave right. When war breaks out, when you're starving when everything's going crazy. When there's violence, there's nothing that's going to make you act right and behave morally, except for religion. That's it. And so the question is, are you going to submit yourself to moral accountability or not, you can distract yourself with all these theoretical questions and trying to comprehend things that you can't possibly ever, ever comprehend.
Or you can ask yourself, Do I need to submit to something for my eternal life? Or do I need to submit myself to a moral regime that comes from a source that's outside of of human folly? Right, an ethical sort of standard that's outside of human folly? Right And okay, maybe you haven't agreed at this point that religion is outside of human follow folly. But the claim is that it is the claim is that it is and maybe the things that you should be investigating aren't trying to understand God from God's perspective, but trying to verify whether these things are actually produced by human beings or whether they actually come from some other source