No matter where we start, we always have to come here, to the God. All topics mysteriously end after coming here and then we left them to belief. God is an integral part of majority of people’s lives. I mean I don’t even need to emphasize how much of an impact God has over the world’s history, culture and our beliefs. God is an integral part of philosophy too.
You have to play wrestling with this topic sooner or later. I don’t know if I am a philosopher, but I too have played a lot of wrestling with this topic. In all those days of grabbing and grappling with this topic I have learned some things.
People have always questioned if God is real or not. I think it depends on what you mean by a God to most, people with a rational mind believes that God can only be real as a base line source or phenomena over which our whole existence stands not as some being sitting in high skies creating and judging everyone else. Others believe God to have a personality of some sort.
I have to say though, that the God as a word has a meaning, which relates to the latter far more than the former. God means a being with a will to create, manage, and to destroy all existence, a being with some sort of personality. So, can God like this exist in our reality? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not.
What we want?
But most of us want God to exist. Why? Isn’t it obvious? Life is so miserable, there’s so much pain, suffering and because of it, there’s fear of it. So, we all want an eternal hope in our favor. You know light appears most valuable in the darkest of alleys. But to me the purpose defeats the cause here. I don’t know if a God exists or not, I don’t know if there’s an all-powerful being somewhere in some hidden dimension or in every dimension and everywhere as they say, but one thing I do know for sure is that if God exists, God doesn’t care much about you or me, or anything for that matter.
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Do you know how many people die every day, or how many people suffer far worse than that? Do you even realize how much of our history is filled with atrocities, abuse, pain, suffering and misery? Sure, God works in some mystical ways, mystical ways that makes us miserable.
Now there are so many justifications given by religious and spiritual philosophers to adjust pain and misery with the plan of God, like pain is necessary because it’s the fruit of our Karma or pain and misery sculpt and carve us into better humans and make us closer to God, well I have to say that project misery is handled very well.
Though, these refutations don’t actually answer anything, they only push the question a little further away. WHY did God make us the way we are to begin with, couldn’t he just make us perfect like himself? Why would he make us go through all this just to be closer to him, couldn’t he just haven’t separated us from him in the first place. Why all this drama?
Why would he make us such that we suffer ourselves and spread suffering? The most common argument I have heard in the defense of God in this matter is that if he gave us everything from the start it wouldn’t have worth much, as things that you achieve yourself are always more valuable than things you get without any efforts.
This is a good argument if you are talking about a son or a daughter of a millionaire, but it doesn’t work with god at all, because then the question that comes is, is god good by nature or did he himself also achieved it by hard work or something and if he achieved it then this goodness is something different and even higher than god himself, and if we are all fragments of God why did he fragmented himself? Why don’t just let us all be the Gods too? Why to throw us into this game, was he bored?
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The justifications that we come up with.
Most people who answer these questions only throw their sentiments as a facade of real explanation; there is only one meaningful conversation that I have had regarding this matter till the date. It was something like this; someone said to me that God doesn’t interfere in any of these things. He is too high on a scale to deal with these mundane events and creations. Then I said to him this means he doesn’t care about you, why do you still call him God and worship him?
He answered it’s for our own benefit. If we worship him, he may interfere and save us from our destinies. Well, that’s fair enough I guess, but then I asked him how you think everything came up to be the way it is. Even if you say God does not interfere, still, you must agree that God is at least the source of everything because that’s what a god means.
It still means that God is the reason for everything, so God as a being is knowingly or unknowingly responsible for you, your actions, your pleasures and your miseries. God willingly or unwillingly also determines who is going to prey him and who isn’t, there is darkness in the world both figuratively and literally, because of god, all your faults and mistakes are the result of Gods existence, every wrong thing you have ever done is because of him. Even if you say God does not have any control over any of it, all this happens just because of his presence.
However, this is not the god we want. We don’t want our god to be this useless to us; we want him to be active. We want him to be consciously changing and creating stuff and also willing to save us, so we don’t accept a god who is nothing more than a machine himself because that defeats the purpose of our belief in him. God needs to be all powerful but for whom, of course for us. We need him to be able to change everything or else how will he change our misery and sufferings.
A God so high and divine…. a god so indifferent.
Now, this is a god who is not bound to anything or by any law because all laws are his own laws that he can change them whenever he wants. This is an all-powerful god, there is nothing this god can’t do, but is this god all caring also? Because if he is then again why doesn’t it seems so?
This god can eradicate all misery at once, he is all powerful after all, but it doesn’t look like that he is even remotely interested in doing so. Many religious people have tried to refute this with different explanations, but I find, none of them are logically sound neither they are appealing enough. But still there could be an answer.
I think if this kind of god exists, it is obvious why he isn’t interested. There is this thing with, something being so bigger and higher than something else, which makes the higher entity indifferent to the lower entities.
Have you ever been to a higher place over a crowd? How does the crowd seem from that place? It looks so small and insignificant. To a god so above from us his consideration for us will be close to what we feel about ants which is ….NOTHING, as the distance between two points increases their sense of relativity decreases. What are microorganisms to you? What is their pain to you?
What is their suffering to you? You simply can’t relate to them, and you can’t relate to their problems either. For a god so high above, not only your problems are insignificant, but I believe they would hardly make any sense to a god at all. Imagine, what are the problems of a drove of bacteria for you, let alone a single one.
I don’t think this god does exist, why? Well, why would a god like this even bother to create something like us in the first place? The only plausible type of God that can exist is the god as a source of everything not as a personality, not as a being and not as an entity; however, I don’t think this type of God can even be called as a god.
This type of God does not have any will, only a presence that’s determining everything else and thus this kind of God obliviously does not care about you and I either, not because this god is malevolent but only because this god just can’t do that, it is just a source of everything there is. This god is a subject of science more than a subject of religion or even spirituality. So, whatever your choice of god is, one thing is certain, neither of them seems to care about us.
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Prayers do come true from time to time, but probability proves that there’s nothing divine in that, because the number of prayers that do come true are nothing in comparison of the number of prayers that don’t. Everyday someone’s prayer is being answered, but then so many others don’t. If you are going to throw pebbles ten times at a pole from a certain distance, it is highly probable that you will hit the pole at least once or twice.
Even if all of your prayers have been answered till now, still, you know the limits of chances that are in your favor. Most people will never ask for something that is highly improbable or plain impossible. Like you will never ask for wings like birds, because you know that’s not going to happen, you only prayer to God for things that are possible even without a god.
But still there are few exceptions, sometimes we do ask for impossible, for example, thousands of different people have been praying every day for world peace and eradication of evil and misery and such from hundreds of years, and yet there isn’t much answering going on in this aspect, actually even we know that it’s not possible, but we do it just for the sake of doing it.
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So, in conclusion.
No matter what you believe in but one thing I want you to understand is, that if god exists, it is the sole reason of everything that has happened, happening and will ever happen.
There is no exception to this, and we all know that the world is a hard place to be in as it is, but then there are also so many unnecessary sufferings in it that they are hard to even fathom, like having an incurable condition from your birth or getting birth in the lowest tier of society or with a dysfunctional nature that is only going to bring more and more misery to you for the rest of your life.
In Hindu religion we render these kinds of miseries to past life Karmas just to keep our sanity, but this sanity is not coming from this explanation, it’s coming from ignorance, after all ignorance is a bliss, they say. Nobody asks that even if this misery is due to our past sins, isn’t it the god that is actually responsible for those sins, god made you such, so you committed those sins, god made you flawed.
All the elements that influenced you to commit those sins are also created by god, and the creation of influence itself is also god’s doing. If god exists then god is the reason for everything and if god is not the reason, then this god is not a god, then it’s just another part of reality determined by other laws and forces. Then it’s just another set of cogs in the vast machinery far bigger and far more complex than it.
So, no matter what kind of god you believe in, I would like to politely tell you that if this god cared about you even a little, it would have never sent you in this world in the first place.
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