Izetbegovic:
"Since morality is our act out of duty,not interest, there is a question why would a man act against his interest if there is nothing above or out of it? The idea of good cannot at all be defined logically. Kant proved mathematically that no duty can be derived from pure mind. Nobody, as far as I know,managed to successfully challenge this theory.Because doing good often does not pay off. if it did, selfish ones and scum would rush to be examples of virtue. Remember how the people we admire,real or characters from literature,were all sufferers, Socrates, Antigone, Jesus etc. So, if there is only this life, if there is no God,those sufferers are not heroes, but plain losers and their sacrifice is of no meaning or use.
As a young man I saw a film in which a man loses his life because he refuses to betray his fellow fighters. Then I thought about the controversy in my own soul.All the time I was on the hero's side, which practically meant that I wanted him to face the firing squad. Between death and betrayal, betrayal seemed worse. Why? There is only one reasonable answer: because there is something greater than life. In a universe without God, this man's sacrifice is deprived of any sense. And obviously it is not, we all feel it.
The problem is consistency, actually inconsistency. Believers should be led by duty, those who don't believe by interest. This is the only logical thing. But it does not always happen like this. People say one thing, do another, so we have many immoral believers and moral atheists. Nevertheless, one thing is for sure:no moral system can be founded without God. You have to call upon something above life and interest, and every calling upon something upon something above life is some sort of theism or faith....
The equality of people is a religious category. Peole are equal and represent value only if they are created by God. As a product of nature, the way they are, they would be completely unequal and there is no room for the "holiness of human life", so Stalins's 'cistka' are absolutely 'logical'etc....
I could conclude:there are moral atheists, but atheism as a teaching, a view of life, has nothing to do with morality. Of course, this is my opinion, you ask me and I tell you what I think."
-Interview for Ljiljan, Sarajevo, July 1999, which appears in "Inescapable Questions," pg 515, by Alija Izetbegovic
Alija Izetbegovic was a Bosnian Muslim intellectual and activistwho was imprisoned, for his written word,by the Communist regime of the Former Yugoslavia. With the fall of Communism, he served as president of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war of aggression waged by Serbs in the 1990's.
May Allah reward him abundantly for his efforts and make the distance between him and his faults like that of the distance "between east and the west."
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