GOD

Haha, I had written this a long time back, and I find some of it silly now, but I think it is still an interesting piece. Take a look :)

There are around six billion different human individuals in the world today, and all of them are part of some faith system, or are agnostics and atheists. There are HUNDREDS of different faiths, some say religions, in our world, and each of them is a distinct system of belief. Each of them agrees on certain rules, like that of murder being a sin, marriage being a holy contract, etc. The fundamental ideals are in many cases very similar; at least, the original ideals in what are called the ‘Holy books’ (such as the Bible for Christianity, the Quran for Islam) are (but not if the ideals themselves are twisted, as in Islam to pass the necessary oppressive fatwas). But the implementation varies. Yet all these faiths are at war with each other, killing millions throughout history and thus violating their most holy principle- thou shalt not kill. In my view, this is completely irrational and unforgivable. It is as inconceivable as for two factions of the same army, say the cavalry and infantry, to suddenly begin killing each other BECAUSE they belong to the same army and serve it in different forms- on horse and on foot, or with spears and with swords. It’s perfectly senseless.

Before going to WHAT god is, let us first ask WHY god is. Why do we need a God, first of all?

The one major reason is that fear of a supernatural presence watching over everything you do keeps you from committing ‘sins’. Fear of God makes a ‘good’ man, or rather an obedient one. How many times have we heard someone being described as ‘God-fearing’? and the quality is supposed to be one worth praising.

The contradiction here is that being forced to be good is not that good a thing at all, definitely worse than being good of our own account. Is it not better to develop the capacity to judge and assume full responsibility for our own actions and accept our mistakes, rather than doing something just because if you do not, someday you will land up in ‘hell’? Or that you will be ‘punished’ for your doing it? You should be good only because you WANT to do it, not because there is a threat hanging over your head if you don’t.

Another, more ‘acceptable’ reason for needing a God is that it gives you something to look up to, something to give you hope to hold out in your worst moments, to give you faith that things will get better. An ideal is something that everybody needs.

The third reason is possibly to have somebody to blame for all mishaps and difficulties that you face. The knowledge of believing that someone up there has created the world and exists to uphold ‘justice’, to bring you some reward for every trouble you go through, to punish all the ‘sinners’, makes life infinitely easier, or at least brings relief. Again, this is not tolerable because problems exist either due to our own or others’ mistakes, in which case we must accept our own or get recompensed/forgive the other, or due to unpredictable circumstances. It is absurd to heap all the blame for everything on a non-entity in your life and expect compensation for it.

I will come back to the second reason in my conclusion.

Now for my views on God; As far as that is concerned, I would say to believers that both, for saying that god exists or doesn’t exist, you need proof. You cannot say that god exists, because there is no proof, but that does not mean that god doesn’t, because there is no proof for that either.

I personally believe that what people call ‘God’ is simply energy. We all accept that we haven’t yet discovered just how ‘life’ is created, or rather, what makes us live. We know what chemicals and functional units we are made of and know the purpose and working of all the components that create our bodies. But what is it that makes us capable of thinking and feeling, beyond those immediate sensory desires and instincts that are caused by hormones? There is something beyond us. I prefer to think of it as another form of energy. This is in accordance with science. Energy is inter-convertible but cannot be destroyed- is what the law of conservation of energy says. So what makes us click is just this- a new (or undiscovered may be a better term), living, thinking form of energy.

Mystics claim to have performed ‘miracles’ and many instances of inexplicable events are reported frequently. Perhaps this is just an application of harnessing that energy inside you, the latent energy that makes you live. In fact, this proposition is found in many ancient Hindu scripts. If looked at closely, none of the holy Hindu books directly talk of God. The shlokas and chanting in many cases are of energies in different provinces. They urge the reader to look for the ‘atman’ inside them. The mythological stories of sages who were able to tap this energy after years of penance and one of a teacher telling his pupil of the power of a seed to bring forth a huge tree with the doctrine ‘tat tvam asi’ or ‘thou are that’ suggest references to the same. There are also countless indications to this energy being harnessed through the power of sound vibrations, which is what is chanted during worship in the form of verses in Sanskrit, and the ultimate vibration/resonance being ‘Om’.

Maybe this is a becoming a digression (and leaning toward Hindu doctrine as I am more familiar with it), so let me move on and leave you to form your own opinion about the last paragraph.

Assuming that the energy theory is correct, a question here is why do the physical, tangible forms (human forms) of God exist if ‘He’ is simply pure energy? My opinion is based on the question- how can you worship energy? It is not something that is absolute, definable or distinct. Moreover, it does not have a visual form. It is not possible that anything non-visual, non-absolute, indistinct, indefinable can be worshipped because it is not material, not actual, not substantial enough.  Thus began the identification of each form of energy with a different human figure. Even accepting ‘God’ as a supernatural being (and not energy), the same result is reached because that is difficult to imagine as an absolute too, as in the earlier case. So a human model was taken (for the form of a God) and some other, ‘divine’ features were added. An interesting account here is that of Raja Ravi Varma, the south Indian painter, who was the first to portray the Goddesses Saraswati and Lakshmi in a painting (though the actual first visual representations of gods were in ancient sculptures), through a model(a south Indian woman). He was the first person to give those goddesses their human forms, and even today the same figures are used, with only minor changes.

The next question is how the forms of these gods came up. By this I mean those exact descriptions (although exaggerated) of how this or that god looked and the mythological stories about them. Through-out history, there have always been outstanding men and women performing incredible acts of bravery and changing the course of their communities and of history too. Maybe their exceptional feats brought them immense respect and awe and the stories of their lives spread, surviving the generations ahead, although the stories would have gotten more and more exaggerated with each generation, making them sound superhuman. These legends, passing on through thousands of years, would make them seem like gods, and taken so. (Reference- The Immortals of Meluha). The same goes for their appearance- some basic features exaggerated to unreality. A common feature with Indian gods seems to be their multi-armed persona. I don’t have a concrete explanation, but I can give a little (not literal) example in this context- that that image could have evolved from a description of them being equal in combat to five pairs of arms, or five people, and so were shown that way. Or maybe since their arms moved really fast in combat (like they show through slow motion action scenes in movies, haha), people portrayed them with several pairs of arms.

I want to end with this conclusion-

‘Religion’ is just a multi-faceted way of practicing ‘faith’. Gods provide a means to it. Keeping aside the question of whether gods do or do not exist and also the query of why we should worship them, each person should be given the unrestricted freedom of choosing what he wants to do in this regard. Religion must not be compulsory or forced. Religious leaders (assuming they really believe in and are loyal towards their religion) must recognize this too: everyone in the world and indeed every faith in the world has their own way of practicing a similar goal, and as long as it is not creating conflicts, the united doctrine to follow should be- Live and Let Live. They should focus on what the common premises are, not exclusively on those elements create rifts on account of not being agreeable.

The ‘WHY’ of god; of the points we considered- the only one that has some positive outcome is that of taking God as an ideal to be followed, respecting and emulating the values which should be, and consider that one flawless image when in doubt or despair. Again, it is not that only God can fill in this image- if you have a real, existing ideal it is even better. But certainly, believing in god just because you want SOME reason to why disasters occur or some entity to blame or believe in, as the situation demands, is no reason at all and is not a valid one. The same goes for following religious rules and believing in them simply because you are scared that you will go to hell if you don’t, or will go to heaven if you will; how does that matter at all? Your priority should be to live your life fully and well, irrespective of what waits for you after your death.

The ‘WHAT’ of God is a belief of a personal nature- you should choose to believe what you want; whether you want to be an atheist, agnostic, a believer in whichever faith you belong to, a straggler, or have your own perception of what you think god is.

So finally I would just say- don’t let the world dictate what you believe; form your own opinions and inferences, set your mind free of restrictions-that is what matters most. Your views will evolve as you grow, and that is how it should be.