back to divinity!?

I have always enjoyed writing non-academic essays. The main reason for this liking is no one cares how factual it is, it’s just the joy of writing and being able to express my own common sense based on personal observations. So it might be completely wrong, but as I am not an important person in the world no one is going to take my shit seriously. So today I will be writing about my journey from being a very orthodox ritualistic kid to a man of little inhibitions and how I see my personal journey as a reflection of the society at present.

So as a kid I did not understand half of the things around me, mostly this remains true till date. But what was more discomforting was I did not understand myself, I just knew I do not fit in and hence all my efforts were to fit in. And what spectacular device we have devised in such occasions, religion! Mind it I am not talking about faith or Dharma, am talking about religion with gods and codes of conduct. In my thinking one of the reasons of inventing the concept of god, in addition to worshiping something more powerful and unknown, was to be able to blame someone or something for all our problems and in return not getting any answer.  In other words I am saying we invented god as a perfect punching bag that will defy laws of physics by not showing any reaction to our constant action, i.e. punching. But that must have happened a long time back. May be we were still living in the dark caves, just knowing to survive we need to hunt, and increase our own kind in number. Exactly like I was as a kid, not knowing what lies outside the territory of my parent’s and family’s love. But then we started to grow up, instead of walking we invented wheels, we domesticated other animals, at certain times other humans (read women). We started understanding there was nothing godly in fire as we being humans could make it whenever we wanted. But we still did not understand the nature quite well. So we still clinged to the idea of god, prayed, sacrificed, propagated in his name. And whenever we failed we punched him hard. Things were going pretty well, with me personally as an early teenager when I thought I understand a lot, and as a human race when we could grow our own food, make our own shelter. But still we could not make nature our domestic servant. So we continued with god as almighty and from time to time punched our own gods, and at times punched others gods too, as by now we had plenty of objects created for punching. But then somehow we got to a point where nature seemed to have given in, or so we thought. And hence all the ideas of not believing in the existence of a bearded man, or a woman with ten hands, or someone who should not be described started to be questioned. It is not that this was the first time in human history we were questioning god, since ancient times few of us had seen a flaw in this concept, seen a trial to discriminate using this concept. They existed and shouted but never taken seriously. But now we were civilized, our factories were puffing smoke as dark as the monsoon clouds. This made us feel like gods may be, after all there was a time in human history when we prayed and sacrificed to see the beauty of that black cloud. Finally we were “grown-ups” with half or even less understanding of the nature that we worshiped and feared for so long. It is like when I started to earn and did not really need my parent’s support I could tell them to hell with your ideas, the thing that I could have never said when they paid for my medication. So we had nice concepts like atheism, skepticism, agnostics, socialists, communists and so on and so forth. In the joy of being an upstart and newly independent young adult now we just punched god, with no love or respect left. We did not try ever to question our own independence. All over the world we were trying to bring people who will never ever believe in the power of god, it was just us, the self-reliant, self-sufficient and arrogant beings. The only good thing about the concept of gods is it is just a concept. They in reality do not come to world and kill us, they do not get arrogant as long as the creator of god remains humble. But when we took charge, we were real, as real as the pain I feel when stabbed. Finally we were godless and fearless and with no compassion. And hence all our liberal “isms” failed one after another in different parts of the world. The fall of communist Russia, is just not the fall of one country under communism, to me it is the fall of whatever we as living beings wanted to stand for, a society without the need of god and discrimination. Right now we are confused again, just like the men in cave thousands of years back. I would say even more confused, as we see we have nature in hand, and then the next moment it slips out with a violent jolt. Is there any way otherwise for us than to turn again to our gods? To find validation to use it once again for punching for all that is going wrong? I sincerely hope in my personal life I never get to this point where I will have to go back to the concept of god just because I am confused again. If I ever go back, I want to go back with love not fear as I was never god fearing.