Skip to main content

God is not a ferryman



All my friends – with one exception or two – seem to be very God-fearing people. My WhatsApp space is replete with religious messages every time I open it. Some messages are prayers or spiritual messages related to COVID19. Some are warnings and threats issued on behalf of none other than God. Quite a few are prophesies made on the basis of certain scriptural verses or the visions that certain preachers claim to receive from God directly. I rarely open any of these. I opened one this afternoon because it happened to be a very large file, the video of a prolonged speech by a Catholic priest. The speech went on for an hour or so. I listened to half of it. The message that accompanied the video was that the priest was making an accurate prediction about the present happenings and the future of the earth. It turned out that the priest was opposed to all such predictions, miracles and other misuses of religion. So why did the sender of that message mislead people by giving a false introduction? I don’t know. Maybe, he was trying to grab some attention from people.

I noticed, however, that there are a lot of people who have suddenly become religious because of COVID19. I know that their religion is just a temporary shield that will fall off the moment the virus vanishes from their neighbourhood.

This is precisely my problem with these religious people and their preaching. They make use of god(s) and religions as if these were some ferry boats just waiting to row them across to a safer shore.

God is not a ferryman, please. Neither is he your replica to send a virus when he is angry with you and then perform a miracle when he is pleased with your slobbering prayers. If you wish to believe in that kind of a puerile god, keep that belief to yourself. Why send such silly stuff over to me?
 
She's a miracle too
My god is a divine presence within my being. It’s not a silly old perverted irritable man. It’s a soothing breeze, a gentle caress, a healing touch, a warm embrace, a soul-stirring melody… It has no religion. It doesn’t need prayers and sacrifices. It needs you. It is you.

Don’t ask god to work miracles. You perform the miracles. Love is a miracle, for instance. Compassion is. Goodness is. You decide what miracle you want. And perform it. You are the miracle worker. The world can be a better place if you leave puerile notions about god and discover the real god. May this lockdown help you in that. Amen.


Comments

  1. Durga Prasad DashMarch 28, 2020 at 2:05 PM

    God loving or God fearing people are divided into three categories - arta, artharthi and jignasu. Some are desperate, some are greedy and some are genuinely interested to know what stuff is this God made of. Of course the underlying presumption in all cases is that there is an entity called God, even thorough its form and concept may vary from culture to culture.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 28, 2020 at 3:17 PM

      I'm not sure I belong to any of those categories because God, for me, is not an external entity. God is a projection of ourselves. Or God is the best of me, for me.

      Delete
    2. The Moon's BOYFRIEND March 28, 2020 at 7:04 PM

      It's true and I'm with you for that, the thing is that, the people are not interested in taking God that way cause if they do most of the things that they do will pretty much sound awkward. So they just go on with the crowd.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 28, 2020 at 7:34 PM

      Yes, Tony. It's easy to go with the crowd. Most people choose to do that because that's easy. I chose to be genuine. I needed that.

      Delete
  2. JACOB POOTHULLILMarch 31, 2020 at 8:36 AM

    Well proclaimed.

    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
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more