“He loves us all. He is kind and great. He sees us through our bad times. He is omnipotent, all powerful, all knowing, benevolent and graceful. Our lives have been pre-ordained, and there is a perfectly good reason for all the suffering, which god shall reveal to us in the afterlife. Have your faith in god, and all will be well. Take his hand! And you shall be in his kingdom for eternity!”
As I wrote that I was beginning to feel this benign feeling of calmness spread over me. I was beginning to feel that I am taken care off. By the third sentence, the sharp edge of my sarcasm began to wear off. Boy! I must say that the lure indeed must be great. No accountability, no need for soul-searching, no existential angst, no worries, just you and bottle of wine in the kingdom of heaven. I would take that any day over an all expense trip to the Hawaii. That is if I was dumb enough to think there was any truth to this preposterous idea.
“I am an aetheist," and I proudly avow my inclinations. That being said, I would like to rant on a bit about my belief (my convictions really). On the issue of god and his kingdom, there are two brands of fools on this planet ( I am not totally sure, maybe it’s three, and may recall this statement on being subjected to any form of inquisition ). There is the average ordinary fool and there is the extra-ordinary fool. Let us examine closely these two broad classification of the species homo sapien.
The ordinary fool. Well since a vast majority belong to this class. You may be it, but maybe not…The kind who is very pragmatic, as long as something works, doesn’t care for changing anything… believes what he reads…does very few things to reason his beliefs…very likely to say things like “I felt his presence”…and most importantly “very uncomfortable at his beliefs being questioned”…Religious fanatics, the priestly class, terrorists, and a lot of average ordinary folks…
The extra-ordinary fool. Well, this class would be the atheists. Going to all lengths, to remove from their minds any hope of a divine answer to this mess of creation. No jingling bells, harp slinging angels, or white fluffy stuff in the afterlife, just dreary and slow decomposition. Whats the fun in that??? No fun at all, but I do believe a lot of truth.
I remember a time, sitting on a bench in HohenSalzburg, a elderly woman and I got into a chat, she was a teaching at a missionary school and took her views on the afterlife very seriously. She carefully, yet authoritatively asked me about my views on what awaits me in the afterlife. I melodramatically replied, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And that’s it.” With great dismay she told me that I should reconsider my views on life and the journey afterwards. I thought I heard fear in her voice, fear for my soul.
Fear, is the mother of most superstitions. The need for our intelligent species to explain that which cannot be explained, urges us create intricate stories of all sorts. I was once told by a colleague, that the value of religion is not in the conception of gods and the mythological stories therein, but the moral values taught in these stories. So, according to him, someone thought of a clever way to teach moral values…but posterity took the stories literally and made one big mess. I agree with him, however not on the assumption that all scriptures were written to teach values, I do think some of them were actually meant to be explanations for the universe. Immensely creative as some of these works are, they are just fiction and equivalent to early man’s bestsellers.
Through centuries, there’s been a need to define god. On an individual level, this was required to quench the eternal questions with simplistic axioms. On the societal level, this had strong political repercussions. People who believe in the same fate can unite more easily. Thus there is no doubt that many military generals have exploited this. The raging lines of war even in today’s world are often on the same line that divides differing religious ideology. I will not explore the political consequences of people’s perception of god. I will only explore the individual’s search.
People shy at the thought of not knowing their fate, so here is a brilliant mechanism wherein they are provided an illusion of knowing. And what they know is guarded by a thousand years of dogma and the veil of the unimpeachable. What is never questioned can thus never change, and it is this immutability which transcends GOD to the upper strata of human conscience. People draw comfort in knowing with certainty that this world is but just a small part of the greater journey, helps alleviate the sorrows of poverty, grief, hunger and loss. I can only envy the piety of a poor man, for it is his soul’s food. But the piety of an educated bloke is contemptible. I guess the habit of deluding ourselves with false hope is an incorrigibly human habit. ‘God’ is this false hope. There is however one phenomenon, relating to this superstition, that I find immensely disturbing; the habit of abnegating responsibility of things done in the name of ‘GOD’. Many people absolve their sins and assume forgiveness. That’s nothing but forgiving yourself, but since we would be exposed to ourselves as being unrepentant and selfish, the forgiveness acquires divine scale and becomes instantly more appropriate. Who would not love a person, who will forgive you for all your sins? Who will not embrace such a god? Who will not bleed for one so merciful? What could be more attractive than believing that all your suffering is by the will of this magnificently benevolent person? Its all too easy. Just a product of the human endeavor to be escapist, and find the easy way out, just a way to be lazy and not tax your mind with the unanswerable. However, to me it seems a lot that is branded as unreachable is reached, a lot which has no explanation is explained. And yet people stick to their dogma. And finally, the idea of god creating man in his own form is nothing but human obsession with creating the creator in ‘human’ form. People should get over themselves…this species is transient…just a stepping stone to the next rung on the evolutionary ladder.
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