Skip to main content

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.

Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaAugust 30, 2017 at 12:04 PM

    God is definitely a need for most of the people and sadly God is also a mess to fool those ready to be fooled in his name.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 31, 2017 at 7:01 AM

      That's why I'm suggesting to redefine God. But most people will prefer to clutch their favourite idols and remain deluded!

      Delete
  2. G. VarkeySeptember 21, 2017 at 8:42 PM

    Hi Tomichan,
    The real problem is people fail to understand the true God. Jesus claimed to be God and said He will die and rise up on the third and fulfilled that promise. Even many people claiming to be "Christians" do not want to know the true God because their sins will be exposed.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more