A History of God by Karen Armstrong

When
the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe God’s activity in the
world or when it said that God “speaks” and “sees” and “sits upon his
throne,” Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally buy
“without asking how” (bila kayf)… Ibn Hanbal was stressing the
essential ineffability of the divine, which lay beyonf the reach of all
logic and conceptual analysis – A History of God, pp 165.

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Neither
Kalam nor Falsafah could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing
his faith, as Al-Ghazali himself was brought to the brink of skepticism
when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s
existence beyond reasonable doubt.

Al-Ghazali joined the sufis
for 10 years (without abandoning his reason intellect -and avoiding the
more extravagant forms of Sufism). He found that the religious
experience was the only way of verifying a reality that lay beyond the
reach of the human intellect and cerebral process. – A History of God pp
188-190
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To
the philosophers, “God is wise” is insufficient because the wiseness is
comparable to the creation. So they use in the negative, “God is NOT
wise”, as in the wise is not the wise as human understood. Moving on,
they conclude by, “God is more than wise”, because we do not understand
what “more than wise” can possibly mean.

God of the philosophers is for the elite, needs certain level of IQ. If unsuitable
people attempted these mental disciplines they could become seriously
ill and develop all kinds of psychological disorders. This is also true
with Kalam.

Hence, the philosophers believed that Falsafah was
the most advanced form of religious knowledge and the royal road to God.
Everybody else should take the Koran at face value and read it only
literally. -A History of God pp 192-196.

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Sufi/mistik
adalah mereka adalah golongan yang mahu ‘merasa’ pengalaman
‘berinteraksi’ dengan Tuhan sebagaimana Nabi s.a.w. menerima wahyu
dengan menggunakan disiplin dan teknik tertentu yang termasuk berpuasa,
ibadat malam dan zikir. Oleh kerana ‘merasa’ itu adalah pengalaman yang
abstrak dan biasanya tidak rasional (di alam fana), maka dianjurkan
supaya pengalaman itu diarah dan diawasi oleh mereka yang ‘ada
pengalaman’ i.e. guru/mursyid supaya tidak tersasar (kembali ke alam
baqa).

Kesan kepada amalan ini boleh membawa kepada kategori
“drunken” sufi seperti Al-Hallaj (Ana al-Haq) atau “sober” sufi seperti
Al-Junayd al-Baghdadi.

– A History of God, pp 226-227.

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Kabbalah. The mystic of the Jews. God is unknowable, inconceiveable and
impersonal. Hence the search of the ‘hidden’ Gid, En Sof which is not
even mentioned in the Bible nor the Talmud. The Nameless One. The
Kabbalists imagined a process whereby En Sof made himself known to
humanity; manifested to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects
or ‘sefiroth’, depicted as a tree growing upside down (see pic). – A
History of God pp 144-146.

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Rene
Descartes (1596-1650) a scientist and an orthodox Catholic; saw no
contradiction between faith and reason. There should be a system that
would enable humanity to reach all truth. Nothing lay beyond its grasp.
It is just a matter of putting the pieces together in a reliable body of
knowledge that would disperse all confusion and ignorance towards God.

He totally ignored the mysterious and the
mystical sides of the scripture which is essential for God to exist.
Thus, the fallout is near. Soon, atheism – which originally defined as
the “wrong” idea about God, not necessarily throwing away the “concept”
of God, and used as a term to insult becomes the total rejection of God
and worn with pride.

– A History of God pp 287-302.
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Jews,
Muslims and Orthodox Christians had suggested, at one time or another,
that it was more accurate to describe God as “Nothing” rather than the
Supreme Being, since “he” did not exist in any way that we could
conceive.

– A History of God pp 352.

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Muslims
in the 18th and 19th century were engaged in a struggle to catch up
with the West. Some saw Western secularism as the answer, but what was
positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in
the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own
tradition in its own time. In the West, God was seen as the voice of
alienation; in the Muslim world it was the colonial process.

– A History of God pp 361.

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