Rant#6 – And Man said, Let there be God.

There’s an underlying order to all the chaos in this universe and that order, is my God.

~ Fessonia

Respect. Humility. Reverence. That’s how the story began. The lightning and thunder drove man scurrying back into his caves, setting his home ablaze while the rain that followed hushed it all, and gave him food. So he bowed. The realisation that humans are just another species at the complete whim of the world gave us the foundations for the concept of a higher power. As long as man set himself on a lower rung than that of this all pervasive power, all was at peace. But he couldn’t let it go, could he? He had to project himself onto this power. Humility took the first hit. ‘God’ turned from a concept, a simple graze towards the sky into a ‘being‘, mostly human-like, with a human-like home and human-like desires and storylines.

What. A. Bad. Idea.

The ‘being’ soon became ‘beings’ and each had specified feelings and purposes beyond merely making it rain or making the moon wax and wane. The moment the pronoun switched from ‘it’ to a ‘he’ or ‘she’, he or she could now make demands, have mood swings, take a stroll on the human world if they wanted to and get angry, oh! the things they do when they are angered. And so grew the customs, the rituals, man would do anything possible to not anger the heavenly beings. The occasional rifts regarding who had the kinder God often were reasoned using arguments regarding whose God punished worse. Irony was a concept lost on man when it came to matters of the supreme.

Soon enough lightning was caused by electric discharge from clouds, rain was merely the evaporated ocean condensing back to land, a shot of synthesised chemicals kept you alive longer and controlled explosions landed man on the moon. What purpose was to God serve now? Moral police-cum- afterlife real estate. His major duty is now to make sure each one of us lives the smoothest life possible, while constantly making note of what sins we do when, so that we can be sold a piece of heaven or hell, or sometimes back on earth in a ‘lower standard’ post our death.

See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe, ’cause God is tribal ; God takes sides. (…) I figured out way back if God is all-powerful, he cannot be all-good. And if he is all-good, he cannot be all-powerful.

– Whomever came up with this dialogue for Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman.

It was an idea set out to keep man under check. It taught him gratitude and kept him grounded. Such a noble invention. It’s a real shame the amount of corruption the concept has been subjected to. However I wouldn’t blame God for all the violence on religious grounds that occur around the globe, for that is what everyone does anyway. Pointing fingers at God is an easy way out, blaming the guy who can’t speak for himself. It helps shift the blame from us in any situation. Pretty neat, eh? An endless supply of excuses out of thin air. Any issue that bothers enough people turns out to automatically bother God as well. The mere fact that there is ongoing debate regarding which lives matter and who can love whom is highly unsettling. Governments invoking the ‘wishes of God’ as legit reasons to allow few and condemn the others is beyond childish.

Then to make matters more interesting, God has an arch-nemesis. The Devil. Given how God forgives all, while the devil punishes those who sin, maybe it’s time the big G and D switch roles.Would the world be free of crime if all the courts granted plea to every criminal ever? Yes, sometimes we commit mistakes and we put our lives on hold, wasting ourselves in self pity and guilt. The notion that an all powerful being who oversees all, has granted us forgiveness is a wonderfully helpful first step towards moving on but are all actions worthy of absolution? In few faiths we have a fix for this conundrum – As you sow, so shall you reap, Karma, the cosmic balance, it comes in many names and forms. Ultimately its an extension of the ‘Santa doesn’t gift naughty kids’ principle. While a shimmering trophy at the finish line is a sure-shot way of making sure people stick to their lanes, does it really hold true as an ideal or does it trim around the weeds leaving the roots untouched? Shouldn’t man be kind and good simply because that’s who he is and not because he’s expecting a reward when it’s all over? If a man can be good expecting a metaphorical, cosmic reward, then he can damn well be turned by offering a more real, immediate reward. Karma creates circumstantial saints, and while some of them never stumble onto an alternate opportunity and remain honest men all their lives, it is still an insult to those trying to live life by their own integrity. “You would be sent to hell” or “You would be reborn without limbs” is not what we ought to preach to our children in order to make them ideal men. God-fearing isn’t the same as having a good conscience.

Maybe I’m completely wrong, leagues and leagues away from the truth even. Maybe they all did walk this same earth, weilding mighty weapons and mightier personalities and retired to their respective spots in the sky once their stories ended and are now gazing upon me writing this blog. If that indeed is the case, doesn’t it seem awfully cruel the way the world is being run? An omnipotent, omnipresent power looming over us as the world is run down by corrupt and selfish men doesn’t exactly seem fair, it makes me feel like I’m in the hunger games, like a gladiator about to be torn into pieces by the charging lion as I hope for my king to call it quits, like a confused pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto wondering how in seven hells did a jumpjet just fall out of the sky. Keep the good people happy and the bad ones miserable, eventually everyone’s going to be good and harmony shall prevail. How much simpler can it get? If someone did have unlimited power to twist fate and create reality, shouldn’t that be the ideal way to run the world? All that power but for what? Either God is just as helpless as we are or is a mad-scientist awaiting the conclusion of his grand experiment.

Do you think that God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he has created?

~ Dr.Romero (from the second Spy Kids movie! )

We used to have believers and non-believers. Today, the world isn’t so simple though. You have atheists, those who deny the the existence of God ; agnostics, those who believe that the existence of God is unknown and perhaps, unknowable. There are cults who worship people ; scientology, which I can’t begin to understand. There’s even a Spaghetti religion (Look it up, I’m not kidding) with its own codes and festivals. One of my favourite theologies is that of Albert Einstein. He believed in a simplicity in the universe. Everytime there was a seemingly complicated solution to a problem at hand, he denied it right away, no matter how logical it seemed merely because he saw the genius of a higher power in how simplistically the universe runs itself. His longtime quarrels with Neils bohr over the accuracy of quantum mechanics arose because the prevalent randomness and uncertainties in the quantum realm contradicted with his notion of a clockwork-reality.

I believe in a natural order in the universe. I sense the possibility of a higher power everytime there is a peak or dip in the plausibility of events, like I’m being driven towards a place or pushed towards doing something. The world works on causation and effect – seemingly random things occuring one after the other to eventually get you to just where you ought to be. Some coincidences are just too strong to be mere coincidences at times. Everytime I sit and think back about all the key events that had to happen for me to be who I am and where I am right now, all the things that happened beyond my control, no matter how much I fought back then and how thankful I’m for them now, makes it seem like there’s a broad ‘plan’ behind it all, something much bigger for us to perceive or meddle with. Maybe we are in the Matrix, or we are all variables in a computer simulation of our alien overlords or maybe, just maybe, God awaits us all.