The Inevitability of the
Notion of God
Swami
Vivekananda says “as long as there
is fear of death and fear of loss, the notion of God will be alive”.
If you look at the studies made by
Anthropologists all over the world, in all tribes in every corner, there is the
notion of a God like deity and rituals associated with that belief [refer author
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo].
Now, like the theme of marriage, family,
education of children, native medicines for treating ill health and other
practically evolved beliefs and customs, God is ubiquitous. The level of “Violence” of the God is lesser
with more evolved civilized societies and more with aboriginal societies.
Coming then, to the question of whether
“Your God is better than my God”, [the question asked to Guru Tegh Bahadur (the
martyred Sikh Guru), the answer is, “it is a different spiritual plane we are
comparing and only the actual experience can be shared which is indescribable”.
The Guru paid with his life for that answer. He refused to perform a miracle to
prove that his God is better.
So much for religious bigotry. The proselytizing
religions have propagated over the centuries, their religions through guns,
swords, deceit and by appealing to greed using money. That doesn’t mean that
they are the only ones worth following by humanity.
We often forget that as in other things in
life, “the proof of the pudding lies in the eating”. It is not by the notion of
a God who terrorizes, through heaven and
hell or the proclamations of “love of humanity” that religions shall be
evaluated, but by observing how actually, those human beings professing the
religion behave to fellow humans.
As author Randy Pausch said in another context “see
what they do ,and not what they say”, the record of popular religions is
invariably poor.
The conclusion then, lies in identifying
one’s own shortcomings and spiritually cleansing oneself [with or without the
help of other people or organized religions)
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