Stop. Read. Think.

.1. Please meet my new hero: Roy Bailey. In light of Rushdie's Knightedness, this is quite appropriate.

.2. To the person who coined the phrase: "There is no such thing as a stupid question", I call: Bullsh*t.
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Thanks for making room for a generation of Stupids. (More on this later, Inshallah.)

.3. The following is an interesting philosophical look at predestination in the religious sense.

“The question, “What is the value of [life] if God has already predestined the future?” assumes that in some way God has a future. That is, it assumes that God is situated in time and peering into a preordained future as we [live]. But in order to have a future, one’s existence must be contained within time and, as a result, finite. The reason this question leads to contradictions is that it assumes a contradiction in the first place – that God both transcends and is finite in time. Any question that assumes two mutually incompatible premises will always result in conflicting conclusions. Assume, for example, that a circle is a square. With this assumption in mind, we can ask if a circle has corners. If we emphasize the circle’s roundness, then the answer is no. If we concentrate on the properties of a square, the answer is yes. When the consideration of a question inevitably ends in contradiction, it should be asked if the question itself makes sense.

The word ‘predestination’ alone is problematic. If it is used to mean that at some time in the past God programmed all events for the future, the underlying assumption is that God exists in time [as time is understood by the human mind]. If we mean that God’s wisdom and knowledge encompass all and that nothing in creation can conflict with that, then it has to be admitted. But that is not the primary sense of the word ‘predestine’, which means ‘to determine in advance.’”

And to that I add: Because the human mind can only comprehend that which it has already experienced and that which it is capable of experiencing. We can not conceive of something beyond the very limited constraint of the human condition. We understand ‘time’ in a very specific way; it advances and what is past is lost. Whereas the above asserts that there is necessarily a multitude of ways to live time, humans are only party to one unless you're like me and you time travel in search of the perfect Crack. At any given moment, there are a bazillion different events occurring during that very moment – that is something we may see as a ‘dot’ in time within which there are infinite events. Perhaps the experience of ‘time’ mentioned above and with respect to that which is not human is exactly like the ‘dot’ only the ‘dot’ is the entire history of the whole of humanity, including what we have not yet experienced in 'human time'.

Whereas the human condition is to experience the passing of ‘time’ and the movement in a horizontal model in a multitude of ‘dots’, perhaps the Divine experience of ‘time’ is both horizontal and vertical and so the shape of that ‘dot’ is not one any of us can experience…but definitely something worth contemplating…

It’s basic philosophy and mathematics, really.

I am falling in love with Dr. Jeffery Lang, imagining all of the conversations I could have with this man. I’ve ordered all of his books and look forward to meeting him, Inshallah.