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immanence & transcendence (& shirk) [update]

[updated for clarity] I have been thinking a bit lately about how people practice their faiths. One of the issues that keeps coming back to me is of one’s vision of God, which should be the defining part of any religious understanding in my opinion. I would categorize the understanding of God into two, not mutually exclusive, categories – the imminent and the transcendent. I personally consider God’s presence to be one of imminence, which in turn feed my God consciousness (taqwa), and that helps me to realize God’s transcendence. I understand there are people who feel humbled by God’s…

Gaza Crisis [1/29]

This will most likely be my last major link round-up on the topic. There are individual threads of the cost of the crisis that I may develop, but with the current incursion over, the need for relatively quick, major round-ups has dissipated. One of the things I tried to communicate through my sourcing was that the conflict is not a religious issue. I consciously choose to limit the number of Muslim sources to indicate that there was opposition to Israel’s actions that was not based in a conception of a Cosmic War. I also wanted to highlight the number of…

Muslims don’t hate Macs

Via Jason O’Grady, I see that MEMRI is up to their usual business of inflaming anti-Arab feelings (for some background see these posts, here, here, here, and here.) Now, I have no reason to think that MEMRI is making up this posting, that’s not their MO, they cherry-pick inflammatory texts to translate. It is unfortunate that there is no further information as where the text they are translating came from, but I am willing to take it at face value. The material if factually inaccurate (the cube has already been built, the store has been open for several months, there…