Like many muslims I believe that, at its core, Islam calls for justice, mercy and peaceful, compassionate coexistence. It is distressing therefore, to me as a Muslim, to see extremists from within the faith practise brutality and hatred against others. They provide ample material for anti- muslims bigots who then seek to degenerate and dehumanise all Muslims- including those who are working to build bridges in our society and who defending universal human rights. While Islamists terrorist seek out Muslim human rights activist in order to kill them, anti Muslim bigots act as if we do not even exist. For the bigots, all Muslims and Islam are deemed to be the problem. Such an attitude is little to defend and protect the middle ground that Islamist extremism seek to destroy.
During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. The world is not black and white, nothing is what it seems, and we are not cartoon characters that can be divided into goodies and baddies, but complex and multi-faceted beings with many weaknesses. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. He sometimes speaks through others and we would be wise to listen to those we trust and to our own inner voice, God’s voice. No matter how difficult or painful life sometimes becomes, we must never lose faith.We may not always find justice in this world, but compassion and forgiveness are such important qualities. They help us to dissolve so much of the negativity that we hold. Practising them mostly benefits ourselves.
A man protects his fish from rats by keeping it under a cat's watch. How wise!Another buys a gun for security reasons, but decides to kill a ghost with it. How smart!One prays to God for safety, as he climbs a palm tree with sewing thread. How intelligent!Man does not want the truth, and God does not want lies, yet there is no third option.One pretends to be rich, yet has nothing. That's pride. Another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth. Humility!Not all that glitters is gold, and not all gold glitters. Watch, with the eyes, and also with the heart.Just because all things are lawful, don't make them expedient. And because a thing is right doesn't mean it edifies.With Faith, Wisdom comes highly recommended!
Are you finally admitting that you can sell a man hope? Have I at last succeeded in teaching you that?'He laughed and flicked his whip again, harder. He was in a better mood than I had seen for months.'No, Camelot, not hope. Hope is for the weak; have I not succeeded in teaching you that? To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; that way lies betrayal and disappointment. They didn't want hope, Camelot; they wanted certainty. What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no selfdoubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right, that's what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.
The Apostle “Paul’s antidote for wimpy Christians is weighty doctrine. . . .everything that exists—including evil—is ordained by a holy and all-wise God to make the glory of Christ shine more brightly. We don’t make God. He makes us. We don’t decide what he is going to be like. He decides what he is going to be like. He decides what we are going to be like. He created the universe, and it has the meaning he gives it, not the meaning we give it. If we give it a meaning different from his, we are fools. . . . our eternal joy and strength and holiness depend on the solidity of this worldview putting strong fiber into the spine of our faith. Wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians. And wimpy Christians won’t survive the days ahead.
Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power--a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence--that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the next morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches.
Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature’s wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve.
As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake.
“We are not sheep or cows. God didn’t create fences for us or boundaries to contain our nationalities. Man did. God didn’t draw up religious barriers to separate us from each other. Man did. And on top of that, no father would like to see his children fighting or killing each other. The Creator favors the man who spreads loves over the man who spreads hate. A religious title does not make anyone more superior over another. If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith. If mankind wants to evolve, we must learn from our past mistakes. If not, our technology will evolve without us.”
“All these angels start coming out of the boxes and everywhere, guys carrying crucifixes and stuff all over the place, and the whole bunch of them - thousands of them - singing “Come All Ye Faithful” like mad. Big deal. It’s supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can’t see anything religious or pretty, for God’s sake, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage. When they all finished and started going out the boxes again, you could tell they could hardly wait to get a cigarette of something. I saw it with old Sally Hayes the year before, and she kept saying how beautiful it was, the costumes and all. I said old jesus probably would’ve puked if he could see it.”