Skip to main content

Atheist before God


Fantasy

Atheist died and found himself before God.  God smiled at him more affectionately than any human being had ever done while he was on the earth.

“I never imagined you existed outside human illusions and delusions.”  Atheist said with his usual candour having overcome his surprise.

“On the earth,” God said slowly as if he was pondering over each word he uttered, “I don’t exist much except in human illusions and delusions.”

“Oh!”  God’s reply was another surprise for Atheist.

“Do you think if I actually existed on the earth as I really am there would be so much evil perpetrated in my name?”

“Evil,” said Atheist. “And that too in your name.  That is exactly what me lose faith in you.”

“I know. Because you had no faith in me, you were a good human being.  What if you had also started fighting in my name?”

“Where am I?”  Atheist looked around.

God laughed.  “In the presence of God.”

“Heaven?”

“Call  it what you wish.  Names matter little here.”

Atheist hesitated for a while and then asked, “I’m not sure I’d be happy here.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I’d like to be with religious people.”

“There are no religious people here.  Very few reach here after death and most of them are atheists, agnostics and other genuine seekers.  Even here they go around finding their own ways of existence.  You are totally free here to do what you wish.”

“What about religious people then?  All those who fought, killed and died for you?”

“Everyone reaches the kind of hell or heaven that they have created for themselves.”

“Didn’t you create hell and heaven?”

God laughed.  “Illusions.”  He paused and then said, “Hell or heaven – it’s the individual’s choice.”

Atheist pondered a while.  “Why did you create human beings?”

“Creation is not a choice.  Creation is an unfolding of what lies within one.”

Atheist felt sympathy for God.

 Atheist Before God was my suggestion for Indispire Edition 139.  The topic found only one taker.  The topic lingered on in my mind and here’s the result.  


Comments

  1. The moment I noticed this prompt, I wanted to write on it, though I am not sure what I would have written.

    Good that you wrote on it. Good that I got to read a nice post on this.

    Recently I read something and saw some videos suggesting that the life, the world, and our consciousness itself , is just a virtual reality. The word "illusion" suddenly reminded me of that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. First of all, Saket, I'm grateful for that single vote. Thank you also for commenting here. After all, nobody else commented. Probably a sensitive topic :)

      My firm belief is that there's nothing after death except the funeral fire and its ashes or the maggots that will feast on your body underground. That fate is terrible. Hence we need fiction. We need illusions.

      Delete
  2. My take. Life is just a dash between two dates, that's all. We create our own understanding and projection of existence as if we are the centre of existence. Perhaps, the cosmos doesn't much about us. We are not even a minute speck in the dust of the universe!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The real seekers go on searching, Farouk. They have no egos. The infinity belongs to them.

      [This is no claim that I have no ego. On the contrary, this is an effort to keep my ego under control.]

      :) :) :)

      Delete
  3. And it is a beautiful and thought provoking encounter

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sir you believe that god is just an illusion.good keep that. But surely there will be a day when everyone seek the help of god.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Solipsism gives us the meaning to everything including this illusion of life and god or does it?

    Also, I would love to read your posts on Quora.

    ReplyDelete

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