My Journey in search for "Good"

[Armanaziz]

Salamun Alaikum.

By way of introduction, I would like to post a brief account my "Personal journeys in discovering true Islam".

From my very childhood my mission was to be a "good person", and I have tried to be a religious person, i.e. a "good muslim", because I thought good people are religious people. But as I grew up, my conviction started to get shaken. Firstly, I discovered, I don't know what "good" really is. And secondly I discovered "apparently" religious people are not necessarily always good people or people with sound judgement. So I had to start searching for answers. For me the primary question was to tackle what "good" is, rather than what is a true religion. Only if I know what "good" is will I ever know if religion is good or bad.

So, I had to take an internal journey in search of "good"... is it really a myth? Is our sense of good and bad a mere illusion created by our society or are there things fundamentally good or bad? I came to learn that Socrates asked this question a long time back - "Are good deeds good because God said they are good, or did God recommend good deeds because fundamentally they are good?" I was searching answer for the same question.

The story of my journey of logic is a facinating one and someday I intend to put all these in a paper - but the conclusion that I reached from all my deliberation is as follows: Good and Bad cannot be mere illusions created by society. We humans have an inherent basic sense of good and bad (Unique to our species) built into ourselves. Just like our vision and hearing this is a sense that we inherently poses to guide us in using the extremely powerful tool we have - our intelligence.

This inveriably leads me to the conclusion that the process of creation of man cannot be a haphazard coincidence. Whatever forces of nature has created or evolved us must have carefully endowed us with this sense of good and bad - the sense of morality and rationality. It must have done so as part of a bigger scheme to see how we use our intelligence - whether we pay heed to the sense of morality and rationality or whether we surrender to our whims. And thus the forces of nature cannot be blind coincidences - they must be reflection of an intelligence beyond and above anything we can imagine. It has got to be the same intelligence which has created the universe - the One, Only and Supreme  -no matter which name we call Him.

Thus I have decided to surrender myself to my creator by wholeheartedly accepting what is good and rejecting what is bad making the best possible use of my rationality and intelligence. That - to me is my resolution. That to me is my world-view, my Deen (arabic). I wan to be a good human being. To me being a good human is synnonymous to being a good servant of my Master. There is absolutely no difference.

However being a good human is not a like guided tour. There are numerous alternate paths and options to choose - which all seem good from different moral perspectives. I am extremely afraid if I depend solely on my own senses, my desires / whims may lead me astray and I may divert too far to come back. Am I missing out on any additional supporting material that would help me stay on right course? I would not want to take any chances - after all I have only one life to experiment with.

To me there comes the role of religion (millat) and scripture. The creator of the Universe has also created or at least allowed to be created numerous paths and religions and sects. It is up to us to choose the path and the interpretation that we find most appealing to our morality, rationality and intelligence. Then if I remain faithful within the bound of the religion without compromising our inherent morality and rationality - I can at least rest assured - if ever my Master asks me about my life, I would be able to say, yes my Master I sincerely tried to the best of my ability which you gave me.

So, my response to the age-old question of Socrates was, good things are good because God has taught us to perceive them as good - not because He said so in any book. If we have a real book from "God" - it cannot be but a reminder to our inherent morality and rationality. If anything in our religion / rationality contradicts our fundamental sense of morality (crude example - someone encourages me to be a suicide bomber) - that, to me is an alarm bell. We must rethink. It has got to be either we misunderstood the scripture or we are following the wrong path.

Being born in a muslim family I have been taught to pray everyday to my Master again and again and again to guide me to the straight route. That I do pray with all my sincerety and I believe in backing up my prayer with my own action. My search for the straight route starts with the book that I have been taught to believe as the direct words of Allah. Once these ideas became clear to me, I suddenly realized that my family, or religious teachers never really encouraged me to dig deep into the book. Rather they encouraged me to blindly follow their "prescriptions" - which often have ideas that conflict with my sense of morality. So I have decided to keep true to my resolution - my deen - and check for myself the holy book to see where in it do we differ.

So far the book of Allah has not disappointed me by an atom's weight. I am convinced this is the true words of my Master - perfectly alligned to my sense of morality and making the highest appeal to my intelligence. My journey continues.

May Allah guide us all to the straight route.

Best regards,
Arman

[Deliverance]

Salam,

Good story from a good guy,thank you and the end of our journey we realize everthing is good how it is.