Is Jesus God?

“Is Jesus God?” A friend who seems to be experiencing certain spiritual stirrings these days asked me with an apprehension that sounded genuine. It looked as if the answer to that question would determine the worth of his life hereafter.

I told him I was the wrong person to consult in this matter since I am a confirmed atheist. [Honestly, I’m not so sure about that. For all practical purposes, I live like an atheist. But I’m more interested in religion and spirituality than most ordinary believers, I think.] Nevertheless, I gave him my answer.

In my vision and understanding of the cosmos, God has no place whatever. “In the beginning was hydrogen,” as I wrote mixing science with metaphor in a post recently and I drew my friend’s attention to it. But…

Yes, there’s a significant BUT here. Jesus is God. Jesus became God. And I went on to explain my ‘theology’ briefly.

Jesus was a man like my friend, me, and many others. A man who experienced fear, doubt, sexual desire, anger, exhaustion, loneliness and the longing for an ordinary life. He struggled with all those and a lot of other problems too. I’m quite sure he wanted to marry a pretty girl and live an ordinary human life. He overcame that temptation and many other temptations. He became a greater human in the process. He learnt to love everyone including people who hated him. He taught compassion which he practised too. He forgave even inveterate sinners. He redefined human quests, the meaning of human existence. Thus he rose above ordinary humanity. He became God. He deserves the adoration given him by sincere devotees. He deserves emulation.

That was my answer to my friend.

I don’t know if that satisfied him. Maybe not. Intellectual answers don’t satisfy genuine spiritual seekers. Their hearts are restless until they rest in some divine milieu.

I remember personally meeting a Catholic priest who was performing a lot of miracles at a religious centre from the 1980s onwards. When I met him in 1991 for an interview, one of the questions I asked him was whether all the miracles that happened in his centre weren’t psychological healings. You help people strip off their feelings of shame, guilt, anger, frustration, despair, and so on, and the miracle unfolds within. Healing takes place deep within. Yes, even physical ailments have their roots in the psyche and can be healed once the psyche is cleansed. I had studied much about that before I met the priest.

To hammer down my point emphatically, I asked him whether he could create the leg of a person whose limb was amputated. “Such a miracle hasn’t happened yet,” he said coolly. “If the Holy Spirit wills it, it will happen.”

The Holy Spirit had no place in my theology. But I understood the priest’s point. If you tell an ordinary person that the miracle happens just because they clean up their filthy psyche, the impact of the miracle won’t last beyond the end of the retreat. But add the Holy Spirit and the miracle travels all the way to heaven.

Let Holy Spirit be. Let gods and religions be. So long as they heal. So long as they help people be good.

What has been happening in my country since 2014 in the name of religion is something that my intellect could never accept or condone. Hence I chose to study the matter in more detail and that resulted in the writing of a book: The Simplest Guide to Religion. Unfortunately, the book didn’t find many buyers whereas my blog is visited daily by a few thousand readers. So, now when I undertake a study on faith in general, why people have this irresistible urge to believe at all, I’m thinking of serialising the writings here in this very space instead of making it a book. Over the next few days, you’ll find here posts related to faith – such as: We are born to believe; Belief as a survival mechanism; and Believing and Knowing. I’m also linking the series to Blogchatter’s Half Marathon which starts tomorrow.

PS. The Simplest Guide to Religion has received highly positive reviews from various readers, bloggers, and critics. Here is the latest by a blogger.