Are you of the rational, logical breed? If yes, then probably you will enjoy it relatively more. How often have you met completely irrational, illogical, stupid people in your life? And how often have one of these folks been in such positions of stature/power that you keep wracking your brains, how in the world they got there? Well, here is one crazy thought – What if our so called God (with all due respect) was completely irrational?!
How many times have you been told that what matters is how much good you do to others, and you will reap what you sow. Hence, you should be good to others and that is what really counts.
How many of you believe that stupid rituals in every religion or insignificant and unimportant, and what matters is that you are true to yourself and true to humanity? That the ultimate worship is the worship to our fellowmen?
How often have you thought stuff like – well, I really don’t care if God exists or not. If he doesn’t, bingo! If he does, then he better be all powerful and all that, and hence the source of my thoughts, and hence he himself forced some mortals on the earth not to believe in him!
Well, I believe or relate to most of the stuff above and hence the idea of an irrational God does disturb me a bit. We can go on and on endlessly debating why God cannot be irrational and all that. But for the purpose of this discussion, let us assume he can be irrational, just in the way the most utterly stupid Mr. XYZ at your work place can exist.
What if God did not value what we, the so called rational intellectuals, value? What if he, instead, valued all the stupid rituals that religion enforces on us? What if he actually decided heaven and hell based on the number of times we took his name plus the product of the number of times we visited a temple and a sanctity score of the respective temple?!!
Imagine, I walk up to God after I die and he waves me off to hell.
I protest “But I have lived such an honest life.”
God says “Who told you to be honest? Frankly, I never did.”
I protest again “But I helped so many people, I did so much for others.”
God says “Why didn’t you live for yourself? When did I ask you to take the responsibility of the whole world? Why couldn’t you leave it to me and let me do my job? Why did you have to always poke your nose and interfere in what I was doing? You have been such a pain. Besides, you seldom visited any temples – by abode. Were you super busy?”
I defend “But I didn’t think it was as important as helping the needy or working for the betterment of the society”
God laughs “Yeah! So you thought!! Not even an iota of respect for me. And what about your prayer count, it is abysmally low. You are in the bottom 0.5 percentile!”
I defend “But I thought you don’t need to keep praising and remembering you. You were always with me. (Or that I was busy coming in top 0.5 percentile of a so called CAT exam!)”
God smirks “Yeah right! And the people who prayed a dozen times a day, were they all fools??! And what about that brilliant theory of yours that you don’t even care if I exist!”
I am hapless but manage to utter something like “B-b-but that was so logical. You were the supreme force and you made me that way and made me think that way”
God says “No you fool! You had the free will, your mind was free. You who did not even want to accept my existence, burn in hell!”
What would you do/feel in such a situation? Would you regret for a moment about having gotten the whole concept of life, universe and everything (i.e., 42) wrong? Or you would still stand your ground and take all the pains that come with a smile?! Would you be able to ignore the blatant injustice that a religious terrorist who killed hundreds of innocent people ranks higher on a certain irrational God’s irrational scale? Certainly you would not be able to blame it again on fate and move on!!
- ANAND GAUTAM
