Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

of ‘divine decomposition’. Paul Tillich, the German-American protestant theologian and an avowed anti-supernaturalist, said that the only non-symbolic statement that could be made about God was that He was being Himself, since He is beyond essence and existence; therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny Him. To say that God has died is to say that He has ceased to exist as a transcendent, supernatural being and has become fully immanent in the world, heralding an essential identity between the human and the divine. Such a ‘denial’ is, in effect, an affirmation close to Advaitic philosophy. Just as we deny God because He did not, for instance, stop the Holocaust, God too can abandon us for disobeying every command of His. He is alive but we have erased Him from our canvas by the way we live; and the chief instrument of that ‘killing’ is by the way we have incorporated into our lives that body of knowledge that claims to be His direct word — religion. But God is too big for any one religion — or religion itself; or any book or word, even His own. And between His ‘Word’ and ours, something has terribly gone wrong. Or is it part of divine dispensation or displeasure? In the Bible, it is said “Therefore, as I live, saith the Lord God, I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee: sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue thee” (Ezekiel, 35:6). Religions continue to inspire the noblest of our passions and aspirations; yet they can turn demonic and betray our inhumanness when our capacity for self-transcendence yields to malice and violence. Religious myth and ritual could then be marshaled to energize and rationalize the destructive choices and actions. And we seem to carry, within us, a far lesser sense of shame and guilt about ‘divine’ murders and massacres, than those due to other causes. Faith-empowered mayhem and martyrdom has come to mean holy bloodletting. Any pangs of crisis of faith seem, at best, fleeting. After all, we are doing all that for ‘His sake’, how can He object and find fault with us? One could well argue that our perception of the divine is also not immune to inherent human debauchery, or that, had it not been for the ‘fear of God’, man might have been a man-eater on the prowl.

Meanwhile, God seems quite happy to let us quibble and quarrel, unwilling or unable to set the record straight. Once again, we are left guessing the ‘mind of God’. In his book And Man Created God (2000), George Mynchenberg argues: ‘if there is a God, we know it not’, and that the creation of God became necessary to explain things man could not explain any other way. The Scottish critic William Archer said, “I suggest that the anthropomorphic god- idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring”.532 The famous science-fiction author Arthur Clarke wrote, “It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.” 533 Nietzsche asked, “Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?”534 American philosopher George Santayana (The Life of Reason, 1905) wrote, “That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a

 

 

 

531 Cited in: Theology: The God is Dead Movement. Time Magazine. Friday, 22 October 1965. Accessed at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941410-1,00.html

532 William Archer. Quotes. Man Created God. Accessed at: http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Man_created_god.htm

533 Arthur C. Clarke. Quotes. Man Created God. Accessed at: http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Man_created_god.htm

534 Friedrich Nietzsche. Quotes. Man Created God. Accessed at: http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Man_created_god.htm

 

subject.”535 Stephen Hawking identified belief in God with a deficiency in mathematics. Does that solve the mystery why so many believe in God, deficient as most people are in mathematics! But it is, after all, mathematics that appears to resolve the puzzle about Providence. Physicist Stephen Unwin, in his book The Probability of God (2003), claimed that by applying a mathematical equation developed over 200 years ago by philosopher Thomas Bayes, and the basic rules of the Probability Theory, he had ‘subjectively’ calculated that there is 67 percent mathematical probability that God exists. That subjectivity and the 33 percent deficit were more than sufficient for skeptics like Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins to twist the ‘probability proof’ and argue that God, of the kind we usually allude to, does not exist. And then we have Mark Hamilton who said that man will soon become God- Man, a mind-driven super-intelligent being, a magic blend of God and Man; one could even say the best of both. In our desperation to ‘find God’ we are leaving no stone unturned, no means unexplored, sacred or sexual. New Age gurus like Ken Wilber and David Deida have written books on ‘finding God through Sex’ and claimed that one can deepen the relationship between man and God and achieve oneness with God ‘through waves of deep sex’, of ‘lovemaking as transcendent of human condition’ and of ‘awakening the One of spirit through two of the flesh’. It is easy to be judgmental and denounce them as drivel, but then that kind of ‘sex’ could be fundamentally different from the one we crave for.

By and large, we cannot any longer refrain from the ‘rational’ inference that man has preferred, when the chips are down, the world of desire and decadence to the world of temperance and divinity. The disconnection between belief and behavior which defines the human condition extends to the question of God; we ‘believe’ in God but behave abominably. Both belief and disbelief have become delusions, to be selectively used or misused. The two questions asked by the Greek Sophist Antiphon (5th century BCE) are still relevant: Which actions are right or wrong? Why should one perform right actions, and avoid the wrong ones? Neither the fear of society, instilled by the State, nor the fear of God, which someone like the American author Neale Walsch ascribed to religion, have proved equal to the task of keeping man tied to his moral moorings. Someone have quipped that maybe it is time to give up on religion and go back to God — or God in another man! Another reality we must face up to is that, religion cannot any longer ensure morality, which for long has been closely intertwined. Whether or not religion is needed for morality, today’s reality is that religion seems to evoke brazen behavior in the minds of some of its zealots. We must find new bearings, a new road map, so to speak, in our consciousness to keep man on the moral track independent of fear or favor of society or God, to be thoughtful and sensitive to a fellow man, to go to the aid of someone in distress and, above all, to avoid insulting and injuring, in word or in deed, any living being, particularly those who are in no position to return the ‘favor’. In the best of times, in the previous yugas or ages when being moral required very little effort, this was easy and ‘natural’. We are living at a time and in a world in which every unspeakable horror is overtaken the very next day by something more horrific. American author Pearl Buck (The Good Earth, 1931) wrote that ‘when men destroy their old gods, they will find new ones to take their place.536 Our new gods are money, power, intellect, and technology.

The irony is that most people say God is Almighty, omnipotent and the cosmic creator, sustainer and destroyer, but they still think that their God needs their ‘help’ to defend Himself against the followers of ‘another God.’ They say God is everywhere and in all forms

 

 

 

535 George Santayana. Quotes. Man Created God. Accessed at: http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Man_created_god.htm

536 Pearl S. Buck. Wisdom Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.wisdomquotes.com/topics/faith/index2.html

 

of life, and yet they massacre fellow humans to build a temple or a mosque at a specific spot. And they aver that those who do not believe in ‘their God’ are ‘virtual atheists’. Moreover, the followers are not only convinced that such ‘atheists’ will go to hell, but assume that it is their religious duty to hasten that ‘going’! An avowed ‘rationalist’ would ask, omnipotent and omniscient that God is, He should have known what He was going to get by creating a creature like man. Einstein once asked, “How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?”537 We could also add: ‘and in making man?’ Does He now regret it, looking at the mess men have made and the menace they have become? An enchanting theological question is: does God have needs that man alone, with his vanity and vulnerabilities, pride and ego, can meet? Is God lonely and even incomplete without the evil that man alone is capable of?

All these questions and concepts of old God, new God, and tomorrow’s God, and why God is tolerant to evil are rooted in the premise that God is meant for man and any human failure is a divine deficiency. Echoing the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, man wants to put God in the dock by saying that if He can prevent evil but is not able to, then He is not omnipotent; if He is able to but not willing, then He is not benevolent; if He is both able and willing, then why does evil have its way on Earth? And if He is neither able nor willing, then He is not God. The verdict, in this line of thought is that God is a human creation to neutralize the imperfections inherent in the human condition. That ‘logic’, that ‘verdict’ illustrates our innate disposition to make God one of ‘us’, subject to our ‘cause and effect’ condition, bound by human morality. In other words we ‘know’ God just as we know any other external object. At a more practical level, our gods, as George Santayana said, are fashioned as reflections of our image and to be servants of our interests. If we adopt the Upanishadic concept of Brahman, the all-embracing, all-encompassing, all-inclusive God, without which nothing else is, this agony and anguish would vanish. The Upanishads also proclaim Aham Brahmasmi: I am Brahman, the all-encompassing Almighty. To attain that level of consciousness, one must see everything and everybody, not simply as manifestations of God, but as God. If one thinks of oneself as God and everyone else as man, or worse still as ‘necessary nuisance’, one would be making a mockery of that sacred maxim. The sage Ramakrishna, perhaps one of the most evolved modern-day spiritual souls, clarified modern man’s predicament with his usual candor and simplicity. He compared modern man to the rishis who attained that state of consciousness, by saying, “But in Kali Yuga, the life of a man depends entirely on food. How can he have the consciousness that Brahman alone is real and the world illusory? In the Kali Yuga, it is difficult to have the feeling ‘I am not the body, I am not the mind. I am not the twenty-four cosmic principles. I am beyond pleasure and pain. I am above disease and grief, old age and death. However you may reason and argue, the feeling that the body is identical with the soul will somehow crop from an unexpected quarter. I never feel like saying ‘I am Brahman.’ I say ‘Thou art my Lord and I am Thy servant’.”538 If a truly great spiritual soul like Ramakrishna felt that way, who are we to imagine we are divine essence? As for being human, according to Gurbani, the Sikh scripture,