Skip to main content

Dear God

Dear God,

I lost faith in you long ago.  You did nothing to reinstate my faith.  You don’t care either way, I guess.  When millions of innocent people have been killed brutally in your name (which may be spelt differently by different people) and you never seemed to bother a bit, why should the loss of faith by someone as insignificant as me bother you?

Nevertheless, I’m curious.  Do you really care about anything at all?  I can put aside the earthquakes and tsunamis and other natural calamities in the name of natural laws which you might not like to fiddle with.  I prefer to see you as a law-abiding entity.  Then will arise a question: are you the creator of the cosmos or are you just a part of it?

If you are the creator, couldn’t you have done a little better work?  Couldn’t you create creatures capable of a little less evil and a little more goodness?  Why was evil necessary at all?  Or is goodness impossible without evil?  Are you also a blend of both?

What about the other guys up there?  In my country there are some 33,000 crore versions of you, it seems. Do you all fight with one another for supremacy?  For more acreage of the heavens?  Do you have elections to choose a leader or do you fight wars like our ancestors did to decide the occupier of the throne?  Do some of you indulge in manipulations and swindling like your creature here on earth do?  Do you find us, your creatures, amusing or silly or just not worth bothering about?

Do you hold some occasional conclaves like we do in the United Nations Organisation or OECD or OPEC to pull out the thorns planted in the flesh by one another?  Do Krishna and Jesus and Allah have a drink together?  I mean, at least a cup of coffee?  Or do you fight among yourselves allocating soma to the Indian gods and wine to Jesus and his variations and halal liquid to Allah?  Do you organise ghar vapsis for bringing back gods who might have deserted the fold for some reason or another at some time or another?  

I have a lot more questions.  But I’ll ask them once you answer these.  Hope to start an enlightening dialogue with you.

Yours sincerely,
Tom (Dick or Harry)

PS. Written in response to the latest ‘indispire’ theme [Unsent Letters] at Indiblogger.




Comments

  1. With the recent happenings around this world these questions are so obvious to come into our minds. But I have decided that none of these should make my faith dwindle.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I admire you, Namrata. You are able to retain your faith in spite of all ....

      Delete
  2. LOL this was good one. A letter for the ONE and only God of all gods.Enjoyed reading it with a smile!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If there indeed are as many gods as India believes in, then there has to be a Narendra Modi or Hitler among them, Nina. My letter is addressed to HIM.

      Delete
  3. Your faith as an Atheist is stronger than the faith of a believer.
    Your questions are far more spiritual than all the rituals of all religions done together.
    As for the good v/s evil, I feel they cannot do without each other..
    For HE has given us free will to accept any of them as our brother..
    But if we want to get rid of Evil, still..
    Than better we stop distinguishing between everything and nill..

    Just scribbled some rhymes.. hope they are nt too bad :P.. btw nice letter.. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Roohi. I'm delighted probably because in spite of all the intellectual and rational objectivity I uphold I still have a very subjective and "evil" ego that likes to be boosted. :)

      I liked your highlighting HE for god. Long ago, as a student to priesthood in a Christian philosophy seminary, I raised the question whether god was necessarily masculine and was told that I was running the risk of being a heretic. Such is religion.

      Delete
  4. Having been a believer myself, I asked so many questions. Finally I have realised that the version of God we are taught about is so skewed. I have decided to have more realistic beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. God haunted me for too many years, Jaibala. I couldn't escape, I thought. Finally I managed to.

      Delete
  5. I really wish that he answers to your letter real soon ...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I keep changing my views on it, while I have to confess I find it comforting to believe he does exist .. :)

      Delete
    2. Can you send me a response imagining yourself as God, Sangeeta? Seriously, I would love that.

      Delete
  6. As a kid I believed in god and in his magical powers.. but as I grew up, reality struck me hard.. when see the world and sufferings and things that are happening in the name of religion and god, I strongly believe he is not there.. There is a supreme power.. it could be sunlight or anything that is helping us survive.. I am not saying Rama, Krishna were not there.. I believe they were just kings not gods.. There are saints, messengers but I believe they are just good people believing in good.. There is no god.. If he is, he wouldn't just create us , watch us fight and kill and have fun.. right???? I liked your idea of god being a part of the cosmos not the creator.. May be he is as helpless as we are

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shruti, many years ago I wrote a poem on the theme of god being a part of the cosmos. It's one of my favourite poems (our of my own, I mean). Let me paste it below. It was published in an anthology of poems at that time.

      God's Love Song

      I willed my being into an extension
      And the cosmos was born in a Bang:
      Every birth is a terror and a joy,
      Every creation an extension of a core.
      I live, move, and have my being
      In all that is, and that shall be,
      Much as in the core that sits here.

      Hypothesis is what the creation was
      When I let myself go in a bang:
      An overflow of love infinite.
      Experiment is what the creation is
      When I add patterns in the mosaic:
      A sporting game of love unremitting.
      Abel was I, much as Cain was.

      I am the turbulence of the rolling waters,
      The rage of blasting bombs and fleeting bullets,
      The hunger in the eyes of widows and babies,
      The roar of the clouds, and the grace of the rainbow.
      And the nailed wail on the crucifix.
      Evolution is what the creation is, of
      The hell and the heaven that I am.

      Delete
  7. I guess your post has been submitted to IndiVine instead of IndiSpire.
    Do write to Team IB & they will shift it to the list of all posts for the same topic.

    Incidentally, my post has a similar premise! Even I have shared about letters to God with questions like- if He's the creator why does He destroy?
    Someday, hope all our letters will get replies...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was my mistake. I realised it after posting.

      The answers may be destined to be mysteries.

      Delete
  8. "Couldn’t you create creatures capable of a little less evil and a little more goodness? Why was evil necessary at all? Or is goodness impossible without evil?" these are my questions too. Why bad things happen to good people. And bad people get away with whatever they do? I have seen it multiple times. But I was taught that we need to be good and good will come to us. When I realized that this is not true in most of the cases my faith is shaken. Wish Almighty read your message as in the movie Bruce Almighty :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are many experiences in my life too which show that wickedness is much more powerful and hence successful than goodness. The other day, after reading this post, a friend of mine rang me up to argue that truth will win in the end. I said, "We have that motto (satyameva jayate) inscribed on our national insignia for decades. Has truth really prevailed?... Even if it does, in the end, it would have taken much painful toll on the honest persons..." I read a lot of philosophers in order to get a satisfactory answer to this problem. Finally I accepted the view that 'God' is also evolving with the cosmos. After all, God is a human creation!

      Delete
  9. If you are the creator, couldn’t you have done a little better work? Couldn’t you create creatures capable of a little less evil and a little more goodness? Why was evil necessary at all? Or is goodness impossible without evil? Are you also a blend of both? impressive and true questions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. God's agents on the earth (priests, preachers, reformists) are usually more evil than the simply layman!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af