Epigraph:

Remain ever inclined to Allah, not associating anything with Him. And whoso associates anything with Allah, falls, as it were, from a height, and the birds snatch him up, or the wind blows him away to a distant place. (Al Quran 22:32)

Source: The Spectator

By Jonathan Sacks

The West is suffering for its loss of faith. Unless we rediscover religion, our civilisation is in peril

I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists.

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

Whatever happened to the intellectual depth of the serious atheists, the forcefulness of Hobbes, the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche? Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

…

I have no desire to convert others to my religious beliefs. Jews don’t do that sort of thing. Nor do I believe that you have to be religious to be moral. But Durant’s point is the challenge of our time. I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other. A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also. That should concern all of us, believers and non-believers alike.

Read the whole article

The Muslim Times’ Chief Editor’s comments

This article to me is a commentary of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famous line “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” and the author briefly does allude to Nietzsche in his article.  Nietzsche’s line is part of his writing, Parable of the Madman.

It also sounds to my ears a crying appeal to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community to guide the world out of the present day chaos in so many spheres.

I have argued in many of my articles that a debate between Christianity and atheism, leads to Islam.  As an example, let me link, Debate: Does the Universe have a purpose? 

What Nietzsche predicted more than a century ago is now coming to fruition.  Allah says in the Holy Quran:

And as to those who disbelieve, their deeds are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty one thinks it to be water until, when he comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing. And he finds Allah near him, Who then fully pays him his account; and Allah is swift at reckoning.  Or their deeds are like thick darkness in a vast and deep sea, which a wave covers, over which there is another wave, above which are clouds: layers of darkness, one upon another. When he holds out his hand, he can hardly see it: and he whom Allah gives no light — for him there is no light at all. (Al Quran 24:40-41)