Redefining God

In Bertolt Brecht’s Stories of Herr Keuner someone asks Herr K if there is a god.  Herr K said, “I advise you to consider whether your conduct would change in the light of your particular answer to this question. If it would change, then I can help you at least to this extent, that I say, you have already decided. You need a God.”

When Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov declared that “There is no God and hence everything is permitted,” it was a painful realisation that God was a need for most people to give the necessary reins to their behaviour.  God is a moral police who tells us what is right and wrong and why we should do the right things.  That’s why we find the gods in various scriptures giving too many commandments. 

As many thinkers have pointed out, however, “A God whom one needs, is not needed.”  Catholic theologian Hans Kung, in his magnum opus Does God Exist?, explains this thus: “… God can never be a function or a means to an end (for the education of children, for politics, Church and so son), if he is to remain God.”  Kung also refers to certain thinkers and theologians who argued that “A God who is there, is not God.”  What such thinkers argue is that God is not an entity like the Qutab Minar or the Chilka Lake or even the “love between two human beings.”

Most people view God as an entity: a moral police, a solace, a protector-preserver-destroyer, and so on.  Such a God may fulfil certain meaningful functions in our life and make life’s drudgery easier.  But that God will remain a tool, a means and little more.  Such gods can turn deadly in times of strife.  They become our beloved possessions in need of defence.  Instead of the God protecting us, we protect our God by fighting wars and jihads. 

Mahatma Gandhi said, “I do not regard God as a person.  Truth for me is God… God is an idea, Law Himself…. He, therefore, does not rule our actions and withdraw Himself.  When we say He rules our actions, we are simply using human language and we try to limit Him.”  It is only when we can rise to such a level of understanding God that we will be genuinely spiritual.  Anyone who has reached that level of understanding will never indulge in any kind of violence in the name of gods. 

Today, as the country waits with bated breath for the reaction of certain religious people to the verdict on a godman, it is good to think about our god and religion.  Let us liberate god from our jejune clutches so that God will liberate our souls.