Whoever turns away from My remembrance,
then he will have a miserable life.

The Qur’an 20:124
(Translated by The Monotheist Group)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A recent discussion between Jordan Peterson and Mohammed Hijab called “Talking to Muslims About Christ” mentioned this quote.

Jordan was talking about differing religions, saying it’d be wise for us to see what we can jointly celebrate and manage that in a spirit of ignorance and hope. He then mentioned Carl Jung’s idea, “What you need most will be found where you least want to look.” He tied these statements together by saying we’re mostly likely to be ignorant about what we’re most afraid of, and that as an advocate of a given religious faith, one of the last places we might look is in the wisdom of another faith.

He followed that up with a typically deep JP question:

“But who are you to be such a committed advocate of a faith that’s so complex that there’s no way that someone like you could understand it?”

Which I thought was brilliant, because how many of us are such knowledgeable scholars in our own faith that we’re in a place to have an intelligent discussion of how it could really be “right” or “wrong” compared to another faith?

The conversation then swayed in the direction of whether or not the most fundamental truth is objective in the scientific sense and Mohammed proposed that:

“If you don’t believe in Truth with a capital ‘T’ in the correspondence theory sense…”

(a belief is true if there exists an appropriate entity--a fact--to which it corresponds. If there is no such entity, the belief is false)

“...that there is a God, and that’s a true statement like two plus two is four [...] and He created the world, He created you, He’s sustaining the universe, [etcetera]. If you don’t have that level of certainty, then you will end up being in existential angst and you will end up being depressed. Because that’s what the Qur’an says.” Then he went on to reference the quote above.

I bring this up because I thought it offered some understanding of where this fiery (and sometimes murderous) belief in “The Truth” comes from, and maybe the place from which we can sympathize with those on the other side in trying to understand them.