{"id":96720,"date":"2011-01-08T08:04:09","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T16:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/conversations-about-god\/"},"modified":"2014-04-13T01:00:57","modified_gmt":"2014-04-13T08:00:57","slug":"conversations-about-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/96720\/conversations-about-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversations About God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenting on my remarks about Qutb, Paul Rahe asked a question. I paraphrase and I apologize, Paul, if I’ve misunderstood, but it seems to me he’s wondering whether so-called moderate Muslims are, basically, just faithless<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n

I went for a walk with a friend this afternoon. As we walked past a mosque, he mentioned that he knew the imam. They had served in the army together and they used to pray together.<\/p>\n

Are you a believer, I asked? <\/p>\n

He said he was. He had had times of doubt, but he had always come back to believing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n

What, I asked, did he mean by that? What exactly did he believe?&nbsp;<\/p>\n

It didn’t seem to me that this was a question he’d often been asked.&nbsp;He said that he supposed it meant that he believed there was a life after this one, and that we would be judged for our conduct. He couldn’t murder someone, for example, because it was forbidden.<\/p>\n

Could you murder someone, I asked, if you didn’t<\/i>&nbsp;believe God was watching? <\/p>\n

No, he said, he supposed not. He might be a bit more flexible about the other commandments, though.&nbsp;<\/p>\n

I suggested to him that he was already a bit flexible on some of the others. <\/p>\n

He agreed. He thought some of them didn’t make much sense in the modern world–you had to think about the spirit of the law, not just the letter.&nbsp;&nbsp;He said that he believed God wanted him to be a good person, and that he tried to be a good person. This, he said, was what all religious people believed. “That part’s the same for them all, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n

Is this a bit unsophisticated, theologically? Of course it is.&nbsp;<\/p>\n

Is he faithless?&nbsp;<\/p>\n

Beats me. I’m not in his soul at three in the morning.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commenting on my remarks about Qutb, Paul Rahe asked a question. I paraphrase and I apologize, Paul, if I’ve misunderstood, but it seems to me he’s wondering whether so-called moderate Muslims are, basically, just faithless.&nbsp; I went for a walk with a friend this afternoon. As we walked past a mosque, he mentioned that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1025,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1025"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/http\/ricochet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/round-lake.dustinice.workers.dev:443\/https\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}