Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa [best free ereader .TXT] 📗

asked question; a question that almost everyone has had to address at some point or the other. The answer to that question is supposed to determine if the person is religious or not, and rational or not.

Kierkegaard captured the dichotomy of the divine dilemma and wrote, “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this, I must believe.”521

Man can defy, denounce, or deny, but not ignore the intangible, unknowable entity of God, or rather ‘The God-idea’, as Annie Besant preferred to call it. We view God in a variety of ways: as an explanation (of the universe), as an excuse (for our foibles), as a helper (when in trouble), as a judge (in after-life), as a scapegoat (for our sins), as a parachute (when everything else fails). And even our denial is an assertion of our innocence. Expressions like ‘Oh, my God’, ‘God knows’, ‘God help us’, ‘God forbid’, ‘Thank God’, all these dot the daily lives of the theist, the agnostic, and the atheist. The real problem for many ‘rationalists’

 

 

 

519 Erwin Schrodinger. What is Life? [with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches]. 1992. Canto. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. p.87.

520 James C. Swindal and Harry J. Gensler. The Sheed and Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy. 2005. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Maryland, USA. pp.204-205.

521 Soren Kierkegaard. Brainy Quote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/soren_kierkegaard.html

 

is really not God, but God as we picture Him to be. Some say that the fault is not God’s but ours, our interpretation of how He is projected in the scriptures. In other words, we have adopted towards God the same double standards we show in the world — ignoring those divine traits that do not suit us, and highlighting those that appeal to our greed. This is the theme that Gerald Schroeder develops in his recent book God According to God (2009). He says that the God revealed in the Bible is 100 percent compatible with the world as we know it today. It is our misconception of God that causes the disparity and heartburn. Eric Hoffer (Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973) said that man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, view with it, and then strive to overcome it. While we keep speculating about how He looks, and interpret or misinterpret and bemoan his alleged indifference to the torrid time we have on earth, the question God must be agonizing over is: How could He have gone so wrong? What ought He to do with this paradoxical and perplexing species, so blessed in its creation and so flawed in its behavior?

Whether God is a pervasive, personal or impersonal presence, a particle or a primordial force, a magician or a mathematician, pure energy or a stream of light (Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda), a ‘Supreme Fascist’ (Paul Erdos) or a Sublime Spirit, the Father in heaven or embedded in every object, omnipotent as the scriptures say, or powerless as today’s ‘neo- realists’ say, the enigma of God is the ultimate mix of magic and mystery. Whether God is for real or simply an illusion or a delusion of a desperate or devious mind, is not likely to be resolved as long as we remain confined to human faculties and endowments. Generations from now, men will continue to be born, and will live and die wondering ‘if He is, or He is not’ and what He has to do with their lives. That ignorance, that unawareness is all the more galling for the human intelligence as, for example, the Upanishads say that God is the subtle essence of all phenomenal existence and gross manifestation; that He is the one who makes the fire burn, the sun to shine, the wind to blow, that the underlying all-resplendence and all- power, even of the gods and elements, is His power. In the Kaivalya Upanishad, the Brahman describes Himself in the following words: ‘without arms and legs am I, of unthinkable power; I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I know all, and am different from all. None can know me. I am always the Intelligence’; and ‘For me there is neither merit nor demerit, I suffer no destruction, I have no birth, nor any self-identity with the body and the organs’.

Even the Buddha who saw everything, and transcended the bounds of the human condition perhaps more than any other man, could not or did not give a definitive answer to the ‘question’ of God, either because that knowledge is too hazardous to our intelligence or irrelevant to his focus, which was to ease our suffering. But that begs the question: how can God, if He is anything like the one we imagine, be irrelevant to ‘suffering’? Who or what else can alleviate our misery? By ignoring the ‘God question’ has the Buddha done any better?

But the Buddha single-handedly changed the focus of spiritual search. Before the Buddha, the search was fundamentally a concern with God. After the Buddha, we have an option. The Buddha offered another way of cleansing the human consciousness and making compassion the vocation and destination of man. But can we do that without factoring in the divine? That is the question. The answer increasingly is a nay.

The Buddha’s enigmatic silence has not deterred the rest. Unable to pin Him down or capture His essence, we have showered Him with a variety of names and adjectives: a magician, a mathematician, a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; almighty, creator, observer, pervasive, vengeful, merciful, transcendent, immanent, Father up there, omnipotent, omniscient, spirit, light, compassion, love, grace, and a myriad more. As an acronym, God has been described as AWESOME: Almighty, Wonderful, Everlasting, Sustaining, Omnipotent, Merciful, and Eternal. The Upanishads call Him Brahman; in Islam, he is Allah; he is Ahura Mazda for the Zoroastrians; Jehovah for the Jews; and the Father in

 

Heaven for the Christians. Some of the scriptural names have a common connotation. For example, Christos is the Greek version of the word Krishna, the Hindu God. In fact, God has numerous names in every religion. It has also been said that although God’s names are countless, His name is not known to anyone, not even to the gods. But it has also been said that God ‘signed’ His name on everything in creation. He is both immanent and transcendent; He takes every form in the universe, yet His form is inconceivable. A great exponent of Bhakti Yoga (the path of divine devotion), Chaitanya Mahaprabhu said that God has millions and millions of names, and because there is no difference between God’s name and Himself, each one of these names has the same potency as God. Philosophers of all antiquity and cultures and civilizations have exhausted themselves in their description of their concept of God. For Seneca, God is the soul of the universe; for Spinoza, God and Nature are one; for Aristotle, God is not where we believe Him to be, He is in ourselves; for Hermes, all is full of God; for Eckhart, God is all and all is God; for Tolstoy, God cannot be recognized except in one’s self; and for the Sufi saint Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, all things subsist in Allah, much like the Upanishadic Brahman. The two forms of the Upanishadic Brahman are the formed and the unformed, the mortal and the immortal, the stationary and the moving, the actual and the yon.

While such were the hoary thoughts of our ancestors, H.G. Wells (God: The Invisible King, 1917) aptly summed up the modern man’s perception of God and wrote that “God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works in men and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a single person; he has begun and he will never end. He is the immortal part and leader of mankind. He has motives, he has characteristics, he has an aim. He is by our poor scales of measurement, boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity. He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our friend and brother and the light of the world.”522 Perhaps the practical human need for God was best captured by the French philosopher Voltaire who, especially in his sunset years, came to believe that a ‘rewarding and avenging’ God was essential to keep man on the moral path. A society of atheists can only subsist, he felt, if they are all philosophers and since that is not going to happen, he said famously, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”523 Some have tried to see God in Nature, in fact, as Nature itself. Some of our greatest thinkers like Spinoza and scientists of earlier centuries — Michael Faraday, for instance — believed that all natural laws are the principles upon which God designs and controls His universe. Thoreau said his profession was to ‘always find God in Nature’. The debate about where we are posited relative to God covers a wide spectrum of human knowledge — axiological, theological, ontological, cosmological, historical, and practical. Much of religion, and increasingly of science too, boils down to our, one might say, stormy, relationship with God. It varies from the sublime to the absurd, from silly to sacrilegious. Some have likened it to the relationship between a dead father and his surviving off-spring. Others have argued that God once ‘lived’ but ‘died’ several millenniums ago, and that it is his spirit that continues to control the affairs of the planetary system, just as some believe that the souls of one’s departed ancestors continue to play a leading role in their lives. Setting aside such inanity, the truth is that ‘knowing God’ has been man’s mandate for ages. It is at once deemed the most difficult and the easiest. It is the most difficult with a consciousness that is corrupted. It is the easiest with a cleansed consciousness. Meister Eckhart said that no man desires anything so eagerly as

 

 

 

522 H.G. Wells. God: The Invisible King. Chapter I. The Cosmogony of Modern Religion. Section 5. God is Within. 1917. p.23.

523 Cited in: Wikipedia. Voltaire. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

 

God desires to bring men to the knowledge of Himself. In its true depth, it defines us, more than Him. Human thought, from the primal days to this millennium, has always been ambivalent and paradoxical about the ‘phenomenon of God’. And it also starkly highlights, perhaps more than anything else, how limited, restricted and suffocating, so utterly banal, our imagination and vision are. We envision Him to be what the best of us wants to be: superman, mighty, unfailingly kind, unquestioningly responsive to what anyone asks. We want God to at once manifest Himself to us whenever we call upon Him; that His sole business is to help us out. We want Him to be worthy of our faith and give His glimpses; solid, concrete, and tangible, not vague visions. We want Him to measure up to higher standards than what we ourselves practice; all because He is God and we are human. Man’s basic nature is to seek that which transcends his own existence; he worships that which is supremely superhuman, that which has a sense of the miraculous — and God fits that bill.

God’s grace, that is, if He exists, we think, is our natural right, and to give it to us is His reason for being God, forgetting that what is grace is not given freely or under compulsion; it is discretionary. We want to prove or disprove God by His epistemic need and necessity. That is, if we think we can ‘explain’ everything — the origin and design of the universe, the origin of living beings, the advent of man, etc. — He does not have to exist and therefore He does not exist,