Open Thy Eyes and See Thy God

Blurting out of a TV in a typical Indian home, in a typical weekday, is a cry to a deity in the times of despair. It is, in fact, a bargain, a trade off. The deity lifts a character out of a danger and as a return; he/she shall break 100 coconuts or donate to the “hundi” or of a special puja. Miraculously, the deity hears this plight. The despaired, pained character is happy and a beautifully choreographed sequence of scenes shows those 100 coconuts broken or the money being poured or the puja being sincerely performed. And to that, there might also be a diapason of a traditional Indian devotional song in the background, typically Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma or Mahaganpatim Manasa Smarami in Kapi.

The prolixity of believers in the matters of faith is truly remarkable. For them, the ubiquitous God is anthropocentric, the ultimate ombudsman of the universe. The creation, the destruction and the present of the universe is governed by His rules. For the opulent, God is pleased by diamond studded hats and gigantic monoliths. For the deprived, God is pleased by purity of the mind and soul. This God of theirs has a date of birth. Still, he existed before anything came into existence. God assoils the guilty when they plead for forgiveness and those who do not, face his rage. God gives you marks, gives you jobs, cures cancer and tumors, and gives you promotions. If your life is tardigrade, it is a test. Every natural calamity is a fracas in God’s mind. The universe, even with its more than evident hamartia, is God’s masterpiece. God is the catholicon for all the world’s hurdles. The fiducial trust in Him is a solution for everything. God transcends all privity. God, through his message to the world in his various books, gives you the rules for procreation and fornication. The ultimate sin, when performed (simultaneously) with a monocle and a book in hand, is acceptable to Him. God speaks to his subjects through the lens of religion, the ultimate doctrine for the pupil. Religion tells you everything. How to treat people, both who follow and do not follow the ultimate cop of your religiosity – the Book. The book is the one on which the demagogues swear upon in a secular country. It is, in fact, God who is dictating me, while I write this sacrilegious and blasphemous treaty on blind faith. Blind faith that people embrace irrespective of the book they embrace. Blind faith, that continues to build a parallel economic infrastructure. Religion, the Book and blind faith are also an addendum to the preexisting, umpteen levels of demagoguery. Religion, the Book and blind faith are an escapade for laze, for God men, to shower their false might and tartuffery.  

The reason why one cannot prove the absence of God is probably the same reason why one cannot prove His presence. But what one can prove is the unprecedented following of blind faith, even in this age. One may not be theologically qualified enough to question the existence of God. But one can definitely contest the adherence to blind faith. Blind faith may not be a new concept to the world, but times change. Evolution is the only undeniable fact in this universe and yet it is bewildering to see that the God they worship has not Himself evolved to suit the needs of the present age. The question here is not to change the way one worships or chooses to place trust and belief in a deity, but in the way one simply chooses to ignore dialectic epistemology of human understanding of the power that transcends the understanding of us, the supposed and truly, the lesser mortals. No one can deny that the advancements in Europe and the Americas, economically, religiously and spiritually (one can always check the donations that EU and USA makes to the Pope and the Church). Yet the believers choose to neglect that this came about through education, through order and through absence of disparity. Yet, however, we see a starkly different following of principles in the developing nations, caught, still, in the ever adhering appeasement to the unseen Almighty. Can it be more evident than the fact that Malala is shot in the head by fundamentalists for choosing to study science? Or in the fact that a nation that boasts of diversity being the quintessential cause of the perpetual unity has a deep, deep divide in the cultural and social fronts, just because a Book asks the people, who constitute the majority of the nation’s population, to be divide? And the travesty that this notion of highly misplaced sense of justice, of age old jurisprudence of misanthropy and misogyny finds its repercussions in the present is a shame.

We have the dubious honour of denial. It is a natural consequence of the condescension that emerges out of the screening technique that we developed, naturally, through the same evolutionary roots that forgets to leave blind faith behind. The same screening that has unfortunately given rise to elitist behaviour in an already deeply divided and cascading social structure. Inadvertently, a society that has chauvinistically cultivated the barbaric habit of disparity has a non-ocular opacity that cannot understand the flaws with its traditional belief system. There is no point in singling out the cause-effect relationship being established here. The fact that even religious methods and practices have their expiry date is disputable only in the minds of those fundamentalists. What strikes the observer the most is that even now, a pupil is awarded the advantage (rather the misfortune) of distinction. The distinction being awarded on the basis of the highly probabilistic event of coitus leading to his/her birth in a lineage which was supposedly established by the rules of a chauvinistic society whose morals and principles stood the test of time, in the minds of, again, these non-ocular opaque fundamentalists. Such elitist behaviour has its repercussions on the eradication of economic disparity. One cannot expect a higher authority (datum being the “lesser mortal”), whom we accuse of being in a perpetual siesta, to exercise their discourse to look at the society on the economic lines, for the society chooses to identify itself on the lines drawn by the same chauvinistic principles that divided them ages ago.

The case in point here is just one of the observations that emerge out of blind faith. And it must not be surprising, since the disparity on the lines of societal divide that does not form its basis on the fact that a man has to fundamentally earn bread and butter is a matter of utter shame. Disputes are many and as such, cannot be discussed at length. In fact, this particular dispute was a passing thought that despised blind faith and the subsequent far reaching repercussions. We are a bunch of condescending and sadistic lot, conveniently pointing the Almighty for our stupidity.  I leave you here.