Tom Facchine – The Comment Section #02 – An Attempt To Regain Control Over Religion

			Somebody asked if the default or the starting point for human spirituality and religiosity is
monotheism, then why have human beings time and time and time again veered away from that
monotheism, towards the worship of idols are of various types material and non material. And I have
a few things that I think about or meditations that I have on that and I think maybe the overall
theme is that the impulse for idolatry, and that's, in the most broad definition possible idolatry
is an attempt to regain control over religion, after it had been put in the control of a third
party. Okay, so, actual genuine religion or actual genuine obedience is something that is outside of
		

			yourself. It's an external authority, okay, we have Allah, and Allah is reality. There's no
debating, he gives us guidance out of His mercy and love. He's trying to convince us He's not just
going to tell us and then you know, to * with everybody else, no, he's going to actually try to
convince us, we have a duty, our sincerity. If we have preserved the gift of our heart and our soul,
enough, we're sincere enough to realize and submit. And if we haven't, if we've neglected or
mismanaged the gift of sincerity and our heart and our soul, then we're not going to be able to hear
it. Okay? So, this sincere person submits to the external audit, right? The authority outside of
		

			ourselves, that this is what you need to do. I'm going to tell you, what I want to see you do, how
you're going to love me how you're going to demonstrate your love for me, okay? This is just like a
relationship, right? It's like imagine if you go to a you go home to your spouse, and you're like,
Okay, I'm going to show you my love by dumping, you know, the potting soil over the floor. And it's
like, you're just making more work for me, what are you talking about? This isn't how I want to be
loved. Allah has exclusive right to tell us how he wants to be loved, how he wants to be obeyed,
right? It's only Allah gets to decide that, okay, so every impulse to idolatry is an attempt to
		

			retake that control back into human hands. Okay? Because if you have an idol, somebody has to speak
for the idol. The idol can't speak by itself. Who's gonna speak for the idol? It's got to be a
human. Right? What is the idle want? What is the idle? Like? What is the idle not like, that's got
to be a human behind at the end of the day, okay? It's also avoiding accountability, because there's
not just one, there's also multiple and this is something that the Qureshi used to do before the
bath before the message of the Prophet Allah, he set out to say that, if they made one idol upset,
they could always go to another one. Right? And so they were never really held accountable for their
		

			actions. It's just like, we do this as kids with our parents, right? If you go ask your parent, ask
your mom, can I have dessert? Can I have ice cream? She says, No. What do you do? You go ask that.
		

			We're the same. It's the same with religion. Right? If there's multiple authorities, and they're
each competing, and they're each equal, now you stand a chance. Let's say you wanted something. But
idol number one said no, through whatever reason, or the or the people, obviously, the idle can't
speak itself. But the people who are responsible for communicating supposedly the Oracles or
whatever you want, for communicating the the will or the desire of idle, number one, they say, No,
you can go to Island number two, no problem. And you can keep on going out on number three, or
number four, and you can keep on doing whatever you have to do to serve your interests and justify
		

			doing what you already wanted to do. Right? So every impulse to idolatry is about these sorts of
things. It's about reintroducing human control, where before there was no human control, or at least
very little, like we're talking about human interpretation of the divine message. That's a
categorically different thing of a different order than an idol who can't speak. And now you need a
class of human beings to interpret or divine divination, right? The will or the desire of the item.
Right? It's an entirely different thing. And so it's trying to bring back into the control and that
and create recreate this sort of conflict of interest where we really just want to hear what we want
		

			to do and we really just want license to be able to do what we already have kind of decided