The Divine

Faith – an armor impregnable to the swords of reason and logic. If I really really believe that in my hand I hold an invisible blue cat that perpetually vigils me, loves and empowers me when I need it to, listens to whatever I have to say and ask - patiently, and with roughly 50% probability fulfills my prayers – and no matter what anyone says, it is MY belief so everyone else MUST respect it – will the burden of the proof lie on others, and will the absence of evidence to prove me wrong imply that I am right? Is my belief universal or is it just an idiosyncrasy cultivated unwittingly by myself?

The concept of God is much the same which is why (if true) something so universal is so ludicrously subjective with opinions about Him and His “mysterious ways” much different across religions. Just like contemporary media, is it not possible, that the very scriptures envisaging the foundation of God and religions might have been taken a bit out of context? Is not possible that the author meant that Ravan was so learned and intelligent as if he had 10 minds? Why is it that Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings considered fiction but books depicting monkeys building bridges and one super-monkey making a trip to Himalayas and bringing back a mountain, considered sacred – when both intrinsically uphold the triumph of good over evil? Is it not strange (and borderline convenient) that all the mystical appearances and physics defying antics have ceased to be observed in contemporary times where technology can help capture them much more scrupulously leaving no room for subjectivity? 

People we love break our trust and leave us in the darkest of abyss wailing in gut-wrenching debilitating pain. But God, God loves us all, and listens to everyone with unremitting patience. But does repeating words from a sacred text establish a communication with Him? And why is there a need to pray? To thank him for whatever He has given us or to cajole Him for whatever we need in life? In either case, doesn’t God being omniscient already know all this?  Don’t we consider Him to be smart enough and hence don’t want to risk not reiterating the obvious just in case? Isn’t that time better spent making our own or someone else’s life better or happier? Is there really a need to go to ultra-commercialized temples/mosques/churches and attach huge “divine” value to selected pieces of stone when God is omnipresent? And are we implying that Gods are really so low on self-esteem that they need perpetual prayers and get easily offended by caricatures, novels and words of mere mortals? Where do we draw the fine line between faith and superstition?

Do we really have a “force” which oversees us all and maintains a balance of justice? Adolf Hitler exterminated 12 million (innocent) people – and then died by committing suicide by shooting himself – a way a lot of random people with much less blood on their hands die every year. Is there any shred of evidence or any way to prove that he got a commensurate punishment? This is where certain religions bring in a master-stroke of a concept of “janam” or rebirth – that much like an accounting balance sheet whatever good or bad you do in this birth gets carried over to the next one and then to the next one – another huge leap of faith with no way of proving or disproving whatsoever. How is Hitler’s pain and punishment distributed across his later births? Is it a uniform distribution? Or is it a decreasing exponential distribution with the most painful births first thus implying that one of the most miserable and crippled persons on earth right now might have been Hitler in his/her previous birth?

Other concepts at loggerheads are that of God and Karma. If we were to believe in Karma - whatever happens to us is a causality of our own actions and deeds, then why do we need a God and His decree? Is God then merely an accountant keeping tabs of all our activities? The huge concern with the theory of Karma is the wrong and insensitive transfer of blame. The brutal rape and murder of an innocent girl can then be attributed to some of her own bad karma in this (or previous) birth thereby transferring a part of the blame from the abominable perpetrators of crime to the girl herself. Really?

We hate holes in our understanding and we hate unanswered questions. The concept of God is a much convenient way of plugging all the loopholes in our understanding of life – so much that most of us just accept it the way it is taught to us as kids and never even question it even when we grow up to be equipped with arsenal of logic and reason. On some level we are so busy, and this concept is so “well-accepted” that doesn’t even merit our time to ponder over, though it quintessentially guides the way we lead our lives – be it praying, visiting places of worship, keeping fasts, not consuming non-vegetarian food or alcohol, facing a particular direction while sleeping, etc. And on some level, we are also too scared that if we dig deep and ask questions, it might convulse the very foundations of our (small) understanding of the way the world works that we have believed in since our inception. Our adult lives are already too complicated with mundane issues to add divine ones to them. Maybe we conveniently want to believe this and depend on science to eventually prove that all of this is in fact correct. A headline of a Hindi local newspaper when the ‘God Particle’ Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012 was – “scientists finally prove that there is God in each and every particle of the world”.

Few things which are common across religions are that we must not lie and (un)knowingly cause pain to others; we must live with love, peace, equality and harmony; we should respect elders; and try to spread as much love and happiness. Isn’t all of this elementary common sense and something we must do irrespective of a belief in the presence of a higher power? The dark side of religion needs no elaboration.  (The second largest religion in the world doesn’t consider women to be equal to men.) Do we then really need a God?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes, and lies in – Fear and Hope. Fear is the biggest deterrent and people must be convinced that if they do wrong there is a force greater than the bendable legal system (created by mere mortals) that is omnipresent and somehow brings wrongdoers to the sword. If the fear of God’s wrath disappears, it is not difficult to see that in the battle for power/money and the ‘survival of the fittest’, there would be no incentive for anyone to not annihilate the rest for their own advantage leading to utter chaos and disintegration of the society as a whole wherever the legal system is not robust. Though there is little evidence to show whether Hitler or psychopaths in general are fundamentally devoid of this fear, (watch out – this is correlation and not causality)  it doesn’t warrant a leap of faith to assume a certain correlation between the two. A deep-instilled fear of a higher power is hence a necessary evil.

Hope – in our mundane and painful lives, especially in difficult times, we need hope to keep us going. The hope that if one does good things or follows the commandments of a “sacred” book, God will ensure that good things happen to him/her. And that whenever shit happens, it is merely God’s way of testing one’s patience/character. Since He only has our best interests in mind, He must have designed a dawn for this pall of darkness. To alleviate ourselves from the sorrows of our lives, we need hope in the form of a placebo - God.

We have an innate desire to cling to ideologies and “follow” people or groups. However unfortunate it may be, pragmatically speaking, we are better off following an abstract irrational concept as a super-power rather than following mortals which entails the possibility of them believing that they are as powerful as Gods themselves. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Moreover, if we assign (or had assigned) the status of Gods to say Sachin and Ponting, or Newton and Einstein, or Pele and Maradona – people will yet again divide into groups and fight irrationally over the supremacy of one God over another, those close to the “Gods” will become preachers of the God’s ideals/philosophy and when the Gods die everything will be much to the subjective interpretation of these preachers. In short, the society will eventually boil down to the same construct as it is today. Ironic, dismal, but most likely true.

Irrationality explains everything and hence explains nothing. God is the irrational answer to every unanswered question. The problem is that we try to find person-specific answers to whatever happens to us. But in the world we live in, the things that happen to us are not merely a causality of our own actions but also a causality of actions of many others as well. And maybe it is this hugely complex inter-connectedness that makes even the attempts to try to find answers to these questions absurd. There can be multiple theories about how the universe works, the origin and purpose of life, and the governing dynamics of everything,  but the magnanimity of the preposterousness and the opulence of the leaps of faith makes the theory of God one of the lesser plausible ones.

Irrational. Improbable. Equivocal.

God.

P.S. 1 – This is not an exercise to try to convert believers.

P.S. 2 – Tolerance for the aforementioned ideas, non-indulgence in taking offence, and discussions are welcome.

P.S. 3 – Hinduism, being one of the more tolerant religions, has been tapped into for most examples.

P.S. 4 – The use of ‘He’ and ‘Him’ to refer to God is unintentional. Though it is more likely that it is a ‘Him’ than a ‘Her’ given the shoddy design of the universe comprising so much pain, violence and suffering.