Talking to an agnostic about whether we should obey God's laws and believe in Him

https://open.substack.com/pub/clairekhaw/p/should-we-obey-gods-laws-and-believe?r=8t05d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

16:00  AJ joins.

18:00  Sufi story

23:00  Rumi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi

33:00  Slave of God

34:00  Free will

38:00  Exoteric and esoteric

40:00  Bahaullah and the Bahai Faith

45:00  Bhagavad Gita

48:00  The Mahabharata

40:00  I confuse Zen with Shinto Buddhism.

53:00  Spirituality or rules?

54:00  Al-Ghazali

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali

56:00  Instruction manual

57:00  Book of Matthew on entering by the narrow gate

59:00  Analytic philosophy and metaphysics

1:00:00  Al-Ghazali

1:07:00  The Incoherence of Philosophers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers

1:12:00  Notes and writings

1:15:00  The truth is political.

1:18:00  Morality

1:19:00  Perjury

1:20:00  When to be silent and when to speak

Euthyphro

1:22:00  Changing the rules and the interpretation of the rules

1:23:00  Every rule has an exception.

1:24:00  Religious groups

1:26:00  The paradox of religion

1:30:00  Rules are safety rails.

1:31:00  Social control

1:33:00  Atheism and theism affects our thinking and conception of the long term.

1:35:00  Making logical inferences

1:37:00  Was the Universe created?

1:40:00  The Big Bang

https://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=21&verse=30

1:47:00  Falsifiability

1:51:00  Is God transcendent or immanent?

1:52:00  Mutazilites

1:53:00  Taqwa

1:54:00  "The quality of mercy is not strained."

The good life

1:55:00  A moral and political hierarchy

1:58:00  The Koran

2:01:00  A Hypothetical Supreme Authority

2:02:00  Culture wars

2:03:00  The Koran is the best available guide to humanity.

2:04:00  US constitution, club rules

2:05:00  Instruction manual

2:06:00  Causation can be traced.

2:07:00  The most powerful being conceivable

2:10:00  A continuing war

2:12:00  Amalekites

2:13:00  Judaism is not an organised religion.

2:14:00  Christianity is for absolute monarchs, Islam is for constitutional republics.

2:16:00  Sharia theocracies

2:17:00  Constitutions

2:18:00  Objective criteria for measuring national well-being

2:21:00  UAE and the crime rate

2:22:00  Marriage and divorce

2:23:00  Female  emancipation

2:26:00  Roman Empire

2:27:00  Constantine the Great would have chosen Islam if it had been an option.

2:28:00  Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy.

Rumi and Al-Ghazali

2:29:00  Power corrupts

2:31:00  Cognitive dissonance

2:32:00  Iran

2:33:00  Iranian Revolution

2:34:00  China and South Africa