Thanks debunker & osmanthus.
Indeed, Abu rejects the Quranic version of God, he just doesn't want to admit it.
Strictly speaking what you have written above only applies if one takes Quran at face value.
I asked The Tailor the same question and this was his response:
Quote from: Kenan on March 21, 2010, 02:32 PM
Can this be related to "in order to be truly moral one has to ignore God" and "only an atheist can be a true believer"?
A standard Sufi response would be: I think there is quite a lot of truth in your statement (1/4 of a shahada, in fact). I guess one way of putting it is -- if you have REALLY removed ALL association with the name of God (as the Qur'an sometimes instructs us to), what else of God is left for you?
A big nothing, it would seem. And a big nothing is equivalent to absolute fullness. So atheism certainly does fulfill some of the obligation. That, plus faith/love/submission in interplay with this Nothing/Fullness would be "true" Islam. The interplay -- even as I have sketched it -- gets tricky of course, as it is also a form of association, so I should really apostatize from what I just said in order to fulfill a new interplay between a further nothing/fullness ... and so on in loving infinitum ...
At the level of morality, I DEFINITELY agree that to be truly "moral", we must ignore any form of God-as-superego -- any form of God as a judge that stands outside of reality, ticking boxes. The moment we imagine such a "father-figure" creator, we land ourselves in all kinds of trouble.To be truly moral is to understand that, ultimately, judgement is whatever your have chosen your life to be -- judgement IS your life as your free will has determined it, and morality is absolutely internal and constructed by you and you alone. To understand this is to be self-aware and entirely responsible for the choices we make: we never make them because we will get a "naughty tick" or a "nice tick" from an external observer. That said, for me, the space in which these judgements, these lives are lived -- is Divine. We are "living" God's judgement in the sense that all our judgements form a "mass" unfolding of choices/lives that constitutes human evolution. Our psychological experience of the universe is one of judgement. God is not judging outside in trascendence -- rather, God's judgement is immanent to our situation -- it IS our situation. We are all in the fire of judgement: we are all in the fire (but God has made us "garments to protect us from the heat"). The universe is God's judgement unfolding. And when we "grasp" that feeling of "living out" this unfolding -- then we experience God's love (because this unfolding for me is always a form of love). The implications are quite large for a religious person: it means, for example, that a constraint on your life to "please" God has ZERO value in and of itself -- the only constraints of value are ones that are taken in conscious "grasping" of the way ALL life (everyones' lives) constitute Love unfolding. When we grasp this, the fires of judgement are "balanced" by the water of love (north balances south) and we get a feeling for this Divine thing that is above all ascription.
One of my favourite philosophers Slavoj Zizek (a militant Marxist atheist) together with his friend John Milbank (a 'Radical Orthodox' theologian) complied a book called "The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?" in which they debate everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia.
"What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief."
—John Milbank
"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism:
in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."
—Slavoj Žižek
Topic: Islam or Atheism - The Big Debate