Minute with a Muslim #309 – Religion OR Spirituality

We need religion, because we need an authority outside of ourselves to check ourselves.

The whole spiritual but not religious movement is a reaction to Christianity. Because Christianity for centuries and centuries and centuries, has been overbearing when it comes to how they're organizing religion for you. First of all, it's based off of revelation that's not authentic. And second of all, is based off of really shoddy interpretations of that in authentic revelation. And so you had centuries and centuries where people we're being told, you have to believe in this very man made sort of ideology, or else you're, you're going to hell, so people got fed up at one point. And they're like, you know, what, I'm better off doing this on my own, okay, I'm better off interpreting

these things, or accessing these things on my own. And as Muslims now coming into the space in North America, that's not necessarily our story, right? We've always had religious kind of interpretation has always happened in the public sphere, right? accessible to whoever is able to climb the ladder of Islamic scholarship, right? Whether you've been a slave, or a freed slave, or from this group of people, or that group of people, rich or poor, we've always had an equal access, or at least a relatively equal access, and Equal Opportunity sphere, for people to educate themselves become trained in the religion and argue with equal weight to other people that have training in the

religion as to how to properly interpret these things. Right. So then to come in and to think well, all organized religion is the same and organized religion can't really speak to me, and I don't want anybody to kind of, you know, rein in my experience would be like, Well, okay, if you're the only one at the head of it, you're the only one making the decisions, what I've called before, like the playlist suffocation of faith, right? It's like, well, I like this video and that video, and that makes me feel good. And that affirms me, you're going to end up

only selecting the things that affirm you, that's basically the long and short of it, if there is no space without organized religion, okay? It's just that now you're the one organizing it, as opposed to either a lot organizing it for you, or a group of qualified individuals organizing for you now you're the one that's organizing it, you're organizing your playlist, whether your playlist is made up of yoga, or Reiki or crystals or this or that whatever sort of thing that you feel and experience as spiritually valid. You're the one who's organizing it. And the idea behind religion is that you can't do it by yourself. Because you are going to have a conflict of interest, you are going to have

ulterior motives. And it's extremely difficult for an individual to parse out, when am I being sincere? And I am really, really going to accept the truth even if it's challenging to me, even if it is tough for me to hear. And when am I going to just kind of like in a wishfully thinking sort of way, go with one sort of practice or one sort of belief or one sort of thing because it kind of benefits me in some ulterior motive. So we need someone outside of ourselves. In order to kind of keep us on the straight and narrow you need an authority that's outside of yourself to be able to balance between affirming you and challenging you affirming you and challenging you. And that's how

you grow because if you never challenged yourself, you're never going to grow