[Serious] The Good

[Belacqua]

the quoted verses are raw just like they are written in the original book that Muslims  read:

This is something I haven't thought about before. When you say the verses are "raw," it makes me wonder about the type of hermeneutics that go into reading the Quran. 
Do Muslims believe that the important meaning will be available to amateurs, or are trained guides necessary when reading? I know that teachers and interpretive texts are important in the tradition.
Among trained Christians, each verse is said to have four levels of interpretation, and (despite common American practice) it is very unlikely that just some guy off the street will hit on the truth of what's written there. 
I'm not challenging your reading -- just curious about how far I can trust myself even to read these sentences. 

(7) And [by] the soul and He who proportioned it

(8) And inspired it [with discernment of] its wickedness and its righteousness,

(9) He has succeeded who purifies it,

(10) And he has failed who instills it [with corruption].

This I like a lot. It says that we are a mixture of good and evil. And here, as we were saying before, only God is perfectly Good. But the discernment is also a part of our natural faculties, with success or failure defined as the proper application of this discernment. 

God is the one sending devils upon disbelievers. So a disbeliever is not necessarily "good but lost". His eyes are actually closed by God intentionally from seeing the right path.

Naturally this is harder for me to see the point of. 

I can imagine that people are closed to the Good for all kinds of reasons. If it's God, though, who is intentionally shutting their eyes to the Good, then they can hardly be blamed for the evil they do. 

Unless God is here inventing a short-term evil to do better good in the long run, I'm not seeing the reason for this. And I think the following two or three things you quote are along the same lines. 

Personally; I believe Islam links everything to "the will of God". In other words; we only live to do his will:

[...]

Despite this concept being "hard on the dignity to swallow"; we are needing food to survive, we are subject to the laws of physics, we are subject to the environment of this planet, we do live to worship God: if we cease to do it we perish. 
Falling from heaven was the start point of our timed test. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree; they sinned against God but they prayed, so they were given a second chance to prove that they are loyal to him. Their second chance is this life on this planet; we live and die then wake up in judgement day to be trialed for what we did in this test.

These parts I find easy to accept, though my personal reading may be too Platonic for your tradition. I'm not sure.

When I read "the will of God" or similar phrases, I just read "the way things are." The will of God is our analogous phrase to describe the principles, orderliness, and goals of the universe. To push against all of this is to do harm to ourselves. To obey it is in fact to do what is best for ourselves. 

People who talk about God like a tyrant, I think, are thinking too anthropomorphically. If God is the Good, and it is always in our best interests to do what is good for ourselves and the world, then obedience here isn't like giving up your own good for the benefit of someone else. It means discerning and aiming toward what really will make us happiest in the long run. This is clear in Dante and other Christian writers, and it's odd to me that the anti-religion people never seem to have read these things. 

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Now to change the subject somewhat:

I looked up Avicenna's views on Good and Evil in the world, because I know he has a lot of Greek influence -- particularly Neoplatonism, which is a system I can plug these problems into when I think about them. 

Here is something I found on line this morning:

Metaphysical (and particularly Neoplatonic) connotations are evident also in Avicenna’s exegesis of Sura 113 in the Qur’an which relates to the problem of evil. According to Ashʿarite doctrine, God - as an omnipotent Being - has to be credited with the creation of both goodness and evil.26 In order to set his metaphysical ideas closer to such a stance, Avicenna comments on the verse ‘Say I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn’ (113:1) and distinguishes between a primary and a secondary intention in God’s will. Avicenna comments:


‘The daybreak shatters the darkness of privation by the light of existence (bi’l-nur al-wujud) which is the Necessary Existent and this is a necessary act in God’s ipseity, intended by a primary intention (bi’l-qaṣd al-awwal). The first emanation of existents is from Him and this is His decree (qadaʾhu) and there is no absolute evil (la sharr aslan) in it with the exception of what emanates hidden under the radiance of the first light. [...] Evils (shurur) do not occur according to a primary intention but according to a secondary one (bi’l-qasd al-than’yya)’.28

Initially, the discourse on evil is addressed with references to the emanative scheme: evil (or impurity - al-kadurat) emerges with the first emanated being and is said to be attached to its quiddity (mahiyyat) and to be generated by its ipseity (huwiyya). All causes in the emanative process are said to be led by their collisions towards evils which are necessary to themselves; this, Avicenna stresses, is nothing but God’s qadar and His creation (khalq).29 Interestingly, Avicenna uses the term creation rather than emanation in order to link his metaphysical idea on evil with the content of the successive Qurʾanic verse (113:2): ‘[I seek refuge] from the evil of created things’. With reference to this verse, the philosopher explicates that evil is placed in an aspect (nahiyya) of creation, according to a specific determination (taqdir). This is so because, Avicenna explains, such evil is generated only from the materiality (ajsam) of things which is due to divine destiny and not due to God’s decree (kanat al-ajsam min qadarhi la min qadaʾhi).30 This statement reveals a clear Neoplatonic undertone: in effect, Avicenna states that evil emerges in those beings that need to receive measure and determination (al-shurur al-lazima fi ashyaʾ dhuat al-taqdir) that is to say, those beings that possess a body (badan) and are therefore connected to matter.31

https://iis.ac.uk/academic-article/avicenna-matter-disobedience-matter-and-evil-reconciling-metaphysical-stances-and-qur-anic


This seems to me to be close to the idea of evil as privation, but not quite. The Neoplatonic idea that God emanates the world, and his essence is combined with Prime Matter, seems crucial here. As we said before, only God is good completely, so the essence imprinted into matter will naturally lack that full goodness. Then each created thing, just by dint of it lacking the entirety of goodness, will have a particular tendency toward doing bad, in its unique way. 

I have no idea how much Avicenna is taken seriously in the Muslim world today. He's useful for me because he's working with Greek concepts that are so similar to the Christians of the time.