The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
1. GOD occupies the heart of every human being as the culmination of all of his/her highest ideals.
2. Our intimate and immediate knowledge of these ideals is clearer than our knowledge of ourselves.
3. This ‘absolute’ awareness is a witness to a Divine origin and experience that we all have had.
4. This Divinity speaks to us through symbols and analogies, of which the strongest is ‘Light’.
5. Divine Light is too intense for us, so it is ‘humanized’ according to our varying capacities.
6. Life, Love, Power, Truth, and Peace are alternative absolutes manifesting Divine Light.
7. Absolute Divinity cannot be defined or categorized, and to ask ‘what’ He is makes no sense.
8. GOD is described symbolically as a Person, but in truth He is Unknowable and Ineffable.
9. Because of our mental and linguistic limitations, GOD is better characterized by what He is not.
10. Divine Transcendence has no bounds, and thus there is no hard boundary between Him and us.
11. Reaching beyond His Aloneness, He expresses His Perfection in attributes and acts of Love.
12. AL-LAH is at the very heart of all things, and His Presence infuses our identities with His.
13. Divine Love has opened up the space and time in which our hearts can seek His Truth.
14. The existence of suffering seems to negate the reality of a Loving, Omniscient, Omnipotent God.
15. But a world without pain, disaster, and death would be a tepid, static, bubble bath of a cosmos.
16. Much of what we know and enjoy as good arises from its contrast with and opposition to evil.
17. Evil as adversity and evil as wickedness are as different as pleasure is from moral excellence.
18. GOD’s Love, Knowledge, and Power permit misfortunes and redirect them to higher ends.
19. Good and Evil as moral entities (nouns, not adjectives) belong to the realm of the uncreated.
20. Good is an attribute of GOD Himself, and from Him. Evil is the lying invention of Satan.
21. Persons come into being by contrast with their environment. GOD as All is beyond personhood.
22. GOD vis-à-vis His creation is the First Person. Angels become persons by worshipping Him.
23. Devils become persons by opposing GOD. They seek settings where they can pass unrecognized.
24. We become complete persons by knowing angels and devils as our friends and foes, respectively.
25. Our personhood is delineated by our former nothingness, our evanescence, and our mortality.
26. Our personal identity is an act of imagination, constantly narrated and edited for self-reassurance.
27. But the core of this myth is an almost-forgotten, primal reality – a being that witnessed its Lord.
The GOD You Already Know 