Right from the time I could call myself conscious, I never really felt a strong connection to the god in temples or in images or in prayers. My mom never failed to make me sit for pujas; she always took me to temple but I could never understand why I felt no devotion to god in the way she did. She says that this devotion to god has been her strength through all the bad times and she fervently believes that god can take care of things beyond the control of humans. She is also ready to believe in an instant of a heavenly intervention as plausible explanations to problems. I think I can say the same about a large number of people.
I, on the other hand, had not found my god in images of Hinduism; that doesn't mean that I am agnostic, but I refuse to believe something which is marred with contradictions, which is beyond the realm of logic. If noone has seen god, how can they make images of the god? I recently read an excerpt from Kuran which says that god cannot be compared to anything in the world. Even in other religion god has been called incomparable including Hinduism. It doesn't make sense either because by comparing the gods to images we limit the gods to what the images may seem able to do. They can be only be as beautiful as human imagination, only as powerful as human make them. If they have only 4 hands they can do only as much as 4 hands can do. if they can travel at the speed of thought, then thats limiting for them as well. No one would like to know that the one they pray to is limited in any fashion possible. On the other hand it would not be fair to god's self that he be called limited after making the whole universe, billions of species, controlling everyone's life... helping everyone in its own special way, I think it would be offensive to limit god's power in any way.
Having established that its not fair towards god to be limited in any form mere mortals may fathom, can we bind the time or state to pray to god? The problem with the world is that we consider our gods like we are. We subject him to treatment which would please us as human race. We think that god is also bound by the emotions we are bound by like greed, rage, vying for attention, love etc. How otherwise we would explain our action of not talking to god will have any effect on his decision for us. How can we think it logical that he will be so enraged sometimes that he will punish all the people in an area by floods and earthquake when its a fact that all those who are effected are the not evil. How can we think that since we need money for our satisfaction, he too will want the same? It is like we have created our god in our own image. Isn't that blasphemy at its worst. Lets for example say, if dogs start worshiping humans someday, and they bring rags and half eaten food from all over the dust bins and offer it to you, would you be happy about it? How then we know that at particular time of the year gods are more favorable and they listen to people who are clean? Ain't these our prejudices we want to project gods as?
Having denied the established thoughts about gods, what is that which I call my god? God is a hope. Hope that things will be better. Hope that we are not lost, hope that we are being watched. Like all hopes its pure, without malice.Like all hopes we are ready to give our lives for it to come true. Imagine your mother dying and your hope that she will be fine. Imagine again someone trying to steal away that hope from you. Imagine the pain, the anger.
But does hope bring about a change? Is hope enough for the change? People who have about change in the societies have not left it on a hope to change things. They have gone beyond that. Perhaps they realized that god is nothing but a hope. Didn't moses went out for a quest to find god? did he hope that gods will someday give the commandments himself? Did Krishna left it to a hope that pandavas will defeat kauravas? Did Jesus left it to people to be enlightened? Did Mahatma Gandhi and other freedom fighters only hoped that the British government will free India? Imagine if they had not done what they did. We wouldn't have known them like we do. They would have been one of the common stock.
God is like a cushion to rest against when you have lost the energy. Cushions can help you rest, but it takes hard work to do anything more.
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