Probing Islam - Giving Us Hope

<body> <table border="0" cellpadding="30" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="table94"> <tr> <td> <h1>Hope</h1> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="table95"> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top"> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p>In spite of its often bloody, blood-thirsty history, religion is good for you, it gives hope. Sincerely followed, it ‘reflects your heart’s secret desires’. They, those secret desires, though you rarely perceive them, are ‘desires with feet-in-Reality’. The hope, to the religious, is based on a belief that true understanding can be sought, will arise, should be followed. We do falter. The prayer comes to mind that Sir Jacob Astley is reputed to have said, before an English Civil War battle: ‘I must be busy this day, Lord; if I forget thee, do not thou forget me’. This living a religious life, even better the spiritual life, is no easy path. It is a lot more difficult than being just intelligent (as a character in the film Red Planet said). We are human, with human frailties, which constantly re-appear. The religious strive, albeit intermittently, and this is good. However, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, others, do not want to ‘take over the world’, religiously-speaking. Missionary zeal, tele-evangelism, use of modern technology provide a platform, but none of those accepted religions aim for a planetary transformation. But for a thrusting minority of the politico-religious side of Islam, this is a stated intention. Can the ‘ordinary’ Muslim (and there are apparently 1.2 billion of them out of the planet’s 6-7 billion population – enough to make you take this ‘minority’ seriously), live life well and die naturally, without striving to ‘take over the world’ ? Of course they can, and such are the physical pressures of primarily ‘just living’ for most of this 1.2 billion, they do just that. They are human first, activists mostly not at all. They are blessed, as are all humans, with fundamental discrimination, meaning in the Sanskrit, 2-3,000 years before Christ, ‘unshakeable knowledge of true or false, truth or untruth.’ They know that harm one, harm all. The spiritual, when it peeps through properly, undeniably, shows you the honest other, shows you that Yes there is a struggle but No you are not that struggle. You are beyond. For some it moves on, dawns in permanence; true knowledge, the guide. What a relief. So for all, religious and not very religious, there is Hope, always. And one Hope of course is that Mankind’s latest religious violent delusion called ‘Islam’s modern extremist religiosity’ and its totalitarian vision of ‘taking over the religious, even the secular world’ will be dissolved, not soon, but we can hope, within the foreseeable future. </td> <td align="left" valign="top"> <img border="0" src="images/hope.jpg" width="200" height="315" hspace="10"></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </body>