The unquestionable question - part II

A place of silence where the light isn't comprehended by darkness...

This morning I read in the newspaper that there was a legal conflict going on in Malaysia. According to the newspaper, the government had prohibited Christians to use the name of Allah in their magazines and newspapers, and the editors had started a lawsuit to remain allowed to use the name of Allah. The reasoning behind it was that the God of the Christians wasn’t Allah. It reminded me of our R.C. bishop Muskes who is now retiring and had suggested that we as Christians could use the name “Allah”, and the protests he received from orthodox-Catholic Christians against this suggestion. He replied that in Java it was quite common for Christians to call God Allah, because in the Malay language (a version of it is spoken in Indonesia) the word for “God” is “Allah”. At first reading it made me smile, and then I remembered bishop Muskes’ story from which one could conclude that this was so since Christianity was first introduced in Indonesia, and probably was also a habit in Malaysia. Simply a tradition, tolerated by both Islam and Christian people: God is Allah and Allah is God. Then I realized the differences: Allah had revealed the Koran to Mohammed, and not to Jesus Christ or the Evangelists. Allah has no son, and God has a Son. But there are also similarities: Both Allah and God are unique, there is only one God and only one Allah. They created the universe, rule everything and are omni-present. Within human communities non-believers are not tolerated. Changing Allah for God is in many countries forbidden by law and a shame for the community. Changing God for Allah also occurs, although with less severe consequences. So when Christians call God “Allah” it could cause confusion. Probably the tradition is broken now by the new fundamentalists in Islam who preach return to the “pure” Islam from Mohammed’s time. Returning to the topic of my story, for these people raising the unquestionable question: “Does God (Allah) exist?” is just like asking: “Does or did my mother exist?”, or even more serious because my mother isn’t holy and God (Allah) is. For millions of people God is anchored in their existence, in their identity. Like the chairman of the Dutch Foundation or Islam and Citizenship says: “One’s personal identity is in the first place a social identity”, quoting a Scottish philosopher. People who grow up in big cities and take part in city life by higher education, a job, a social network etc. come into touch with many, many religions, views on life, life situations, and many many people they don’t know from before. These people get doubts about these religious stories and truths and find a way to reconcile themselves with God or Allah in a way strongly disapproved by e.g. Taliban Muslims or orthodox Christians. They aren’t used to, and refuse to accept, that other people have other social identities. They see God’s name as a brand name, and they are the only people who are authorized to use it.
Who is God, who is Allah? I can refer to the paragraph in the Bible where Moses met God in a burning shrub. Moses asked who it was that spoke to him, and God answered: “I am that I am”. Although the bible book Exodus (3,14) runs like an epic story, this answer tells me everything about the Supreme Being. Tells ME, which means that others might understand otherwise. I cannot experience God with my human senses, as something identifiable: “this is God, and that isn’t”, just like we can identify everything this way. What I observe is that some people think that God can be spotted and is maybe hidden somewhere. Goethe was looking for God, he wrote, under leaves and behind stones. The first Russian (communist) cosmonauts were mocking with God when they reported to earth that “they didn’t see a sign of God”. Spinoza was accused of atheism, repelled from his Jewish community and also not accepted by Christians, because he concluded that God was in everything, everywhere and refused to accept God as kind of Supreme Personality. I think Islam comes closer to this conception of God than Christianity, although it assumes as a natural, physical fact that God (Allah) gave guidelines to people about how to live in a book written by Himself through the hand of His Prophet. Again, one has to use his own personal compass, formed by one’s own (social) identity, for an image of God. Books give metaphors, reflections. God is everywhere, also within myself, where I can recognize His workings, e.g. by recognizing the meaning of what the book says and acting accordingly. We can see around us how people are confused about God, and I think by myself they don’t need to. There are people who call themselves atheists because they don’t accept “all those stories and obligations” as true and binding. There are people who find themselves elected or doomed because they assess themselves according to the true stories and binding obligations in the Holy Book. Among them, there are people who want to urge other people also to believe in the stories the way they do. For me, God or Allah or JW speaks to me via the Holy Book in metaphors, just like the silent fir wood I walk through is a metaphor of His Existence. God is Existence, He is Who He is. He is the rock in the ocean of existence, and also the ocean.