The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
55. Every conceptual system works within a frame whose limits are often invisible to its proponents.
56. My name for the Ultimate, Unlimited Frame is GOD, Who is also the Ultimate Framer.
57. Faith in GOD as the Ultimate often becomes degraded to serve the interests of particular groups.
58. Reductionism of this sort occurs whenever believers seek to reify the limitlessness of their faith.
59. Believers in atheism aim to ‘frame’ God within a straitened version of what they call rationality.
60. Religious believers who try to be ‘scientific’ also end up exchanging the Infinite for finite objects.
61. The Infinite is implicit in the physicalist cosmos by way of meaning, data, and randomness.
62. The atheist demand that God be physically visible or provable is a theological category error.
63. Believers may ask to see GOD, but only to increase their faith, not to challenge His existence.
64. GOD’s ‘appearance’ to us is usually in proportion to our capacity to accept Him.
65. As with knowledge comes more responsibility, ignorance of God is the ‘least bad’ fate for many.
66. Spatiotemporal distance, city life, secular society, self-image, and our character blind us to GOD.
67. By looking ‘out’ for GOD as a separate entity, we miss His Immanence and Personality.
68. The Qur’an’s ‘GOD-talk’ is meant to dispel this blindness by challenging our egocentric habits.
69. GOD-as-Subject is Alone and Unknowable. He names Himself that He might be known.
70. GOD-as-Object is Transparent, partially knowable, and reflected in the mirror-world of things.
71. Through His Spirit, He also reveals Himself to us by our own self-awareness as subjects.
72. Monist mystics have misinterpreted the intensity of this self-awareness as union with God.
73. A firm intellectual structure can avert such mistakes and help deal with the dualities of daily life.
74. All of us depend on conceptual frameworks, and no amount of facts can dispense with them.
75. Living “in and with the supersensible” still occurs despite the modern decline of religious faith.
76. Nature and scripture both consist of signs from GOD, and hence do not invalidate each other.
77. They do, however, utilize different, complementary frameworks in their pursuit of truth.
78. Both bodies of knowledge employ hypotheses and testing, but with different levels of precision.
79. The modern dominance of physicalist rationality causes major cognitive dissonance for believers.
80. When our faith in GOD’s Transcendence loses focus, it can begin to feel culturally irrelevant.
81. More than just ideas, therefore, we need the Qur’an’s emotional, moral, and spiritual guidance.
The GOD You Already Know 