When lightning struck

A popular goddess in India

Fire chose to dance in my front yard on Sunday. The sky grew ominously dark in the late afternoon making it look like night. Then came a thundershower. The heavens rumbled furiously. The lightning turned into a dance of fires and the accompanying thunder deafened our ears. Maggie and I were watching it from inside our house. When the orgy of the heavens relented, I stepped out to take stock of the damage. A few of the tiles outside the house lay shattered to smithereens. The fury of the lightning had dug two deep holes in the wall. A flowerpot lay broken and the schefflera in it was thrown aside. Soon I would discover that the damage was much more than all that. Quite a few of my electric appliances were damaged irreparably.

I took leave from school on Monday in order to bring a semblance of normalcy to my home. I learnt that a few houses of my neighbourhood were similarly affected by the disaster.

Then came people’s reactions and comments. Most people were concerned. Some were plainly curious. A few were indifferent. One here and another there  spoke about god’s vengeance. This last group fascinated me the most.

God is unhappy with me and hence I was punished. This is their verdict in short. What a pathetic god that is! I mused aloud to Maggie. Maggie needed a bit of counselling because she seemed inclined to agree with this inane view of silly people.

“People’s opinions on God’s attitudes closely mirror their own beliefs,” I explained. I have done a post-graduate course in psychology and hence can bring in significant information from psychology. Maggie knows that. She listened.

When people say that god wants this or that, what they actually mean is they want this or that. Psychology has proved that with whatever evidence it is capable of. Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago concluded bluntly enough after his research on this topic that for many religious people the question “What would god do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, Epley found that when religious people try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

People create God in their own image. The prophet Hosea saw God as a jilted lover because he was a jilted lover himself. All the biblical prophets re-created Yahweh in their own images. It’s not only the prophets who do that, however. Most religious people, most people who believe in god do that. For the envious believer, god is a jealous entity. For the short-tempered person, God is short-tempered.

People use God to justify their own attitudes and actions. When people interpret the disaster in my life as God’s punishment for my irreligion, they only mean that they are angry with me for being different from them.

Epley surveyed commuters at a Boston train station. He studied the attitudes and beliefs of university undergraduates and 1000 adults from a nationally representative database. In every case, he found that people’s own attitudes and beliefs matched those they suggested for God more precisely than those they suggested for their fellow human beings. If you are interested to know more about Epley’s studies, here is an article from the National Geographic: ‘Creating God in one’s own image’.

Next time when anyone tells you about god’s choices, remember that they are the speaker’s own choices.