Peace and Justice Post

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Why people believe in a God

Nasir Khan, April 10, 2015

In a ZNet article Badri Raina reflects upon an old humanist tradition that shaped the social and religious outlook of different religious communities – Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists – in his native land, Kashmir, and the contributions of Kashmiri saints and rishis that enriched the Indian thought. He compares those bygone days with the present times when we see a strict observance of religious dogmas in place of a free exchange of ideas on these matters between Muslims and Hindus.

The ideas that Raina advances and the questions he raises about God, divinity and religion are understandable when we see the contemporary scene, not only in Kashmir but also in many other places and amongst the followers of Islam and other religions. His views are primarily of a tolerant, secularist person who is willing to enter into a free exchange of views with some intelligent religious people, including Muslims from his native land. I admire the humanist impulse that underlies his spiritual stirrings and see how the present situation anguishes him. Somehow, he also seems interested in that his intelligent compatriots may explore the rational ways of looking at God, divinity instead of remaining prisoners of their exclusivist dogmas. If that is to happen then the preconditions for such an enlightened approach do not exist in the social and political arenas at present.

In fact, it is quite unrealistic to track God and his divinity to a manageable level. People have looked at him in various ways and have given him all the attributes human beings have. He sees, watches, listens, speaks to some, knows-all, controls everything, becomes happy, gets angry and revengeful; he rewards or punishes us for our actions; he loves to be praised a lot and venerated by all. He is kind, generous and very rich because he owns everything in the universe. Many sacred books count all such qualities of him. We have learnt about his qualities.

But we can inform a theist that if anyone speaks, listens or sees then he must have a tongue, ears and eyes in his physical body because we cannot say that a non-objective being can speak, listen, see or has other attributes of a biological organism. It is common knowledge that we have the capacity to imagine such a being but that does not mean it can have an independent existence. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx pithily wrote, “A non-objective being is a non-being.” Certainly, a theist cannot refute this; he will have no answer. The only availabel answer he will have is to point to some sacred book or some holy men who said this or that and by doing so he will feel that he has proven the existence of his inscrutable ‘objective being’!

So the final solution is not to question or explore but to accept what the authorities say about the Ultimate Authority and that is the end of the matter! But why so many intelligent and knowledgeable people continue to believe in a deity/deities may be due to the force of social tradition and early indoctrination from which they cannot easily break away.