<matthew.public.lowe@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
> I am interested in the ideas of virtue and desire, and am curious to
hear what you think your faith tradition has to say about these ideas.
Comment:-
Desires refer to the motives that animate living organisms. The Primary
Desires are built-in and account for the nature and behaviour of the
organism. But in human beings, owing to experiences in interaction with
the
environment channel these desires to produce Secondary or Tertiary
Desires.
For instance, there is the desire for self-preservation that manifests as
food seeking. But to do this human beings have to go shopping and even
before that they have to earn a living. These activities are not the same
as
seeking food or eating it. Desires are also given particular Tastes.
Different people have different tastes. The Secondary or Tertiary Desires
can become independent habits. For instance we can eat because of the
smell
or looks of the food rather than because we need it. We can eat because it
is dinner time and in quantities determined by the size of dinner plate or
convention and not because we are hungry. We can even acquire desires that
flout the original desire and harm us. We can acquire tastes for things
that
are bitter which we would normally avoid such a fermented beers and we
could
poison ourselves even deliberately by committing suicide flouting our
self-preservative instinct. So desires can be good or evil or catalytic
(not
itself good or evil but may lead to either depending on cir***stances). As
evil refers to what harms us and exists only because of ignorance or
unawareness of what is good for us, we attribute it to Satan - that which
deceives and creates illusions, delusions and hallucinations.
Virtue refers to what is good and is the opposite of vice which refers to
evil. Good and evil refer to a purpose. That which leads to the fulfilment
of that purpose is good and that which obstructs or flouts the purpose is
evil. The Purpose must be an objective one for virtue and vice to be
objective. The main purposes built into human beings are
self-preservation,
reproduction (preservation of the species) and self-extension (growth,
improvement, development, evolution). These built-in purposes derive from
Universal Nature of which we are part, the materials, forces, and laws of
which we are composed, and with which we interact to adapt and grow and
evolve. The cause of these purposes is therefore ultimately whatever
Creation, the Big Bang. Considering the whole of existence which by
definition cannot have an external cause, the Objective Purpose derives
from
an Intension. We say, therefore, that virtue consists of conformity or
obedience to Allah, the Fundamental Reality.
Hamid S. Aziz
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