God, Religion and I

I am an Atheist. I do not believe in the concept of God, neither a religious one, nor an unexplainable super-natural force. By birth, I am a Hindu and I grew up learning all about the umpteen Hindu Gods. Even to this day, in spite of turning into an Atheist, I enjoy all the mythological stories of Gods, Humans and demons that the Hindu religion has to offer. Today, I enjoy them only as fiction.
The reason for turning into an Atheist is quite simple. This was not an over-night change. I usually spend a lot of time thinking about a certain subject, especially when I have read a book, seen a film or a TV program, after a conversation and so on. After I read the book "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Browne, I started contemplating about religion and God. The book only helped kick-off a thought process; I was not influenced by the ideas in the book. The following are my conclusions.

Origin of the Concept of God
The explanations given below are only my hypothesis for the origin of the concept of God.

· In my opinion, God is a concept introduced by Human Beings to explain the many unexplainable phenomenon that occur in Nature. Humans have always tried to understand the world around them. When certain facts of nature could not be explained, one of the concepts that might have emerged is that of a superior being that has created or caused that phenomenon. Humans usually do not like to leave a subject unexplained. For example, some questions that have crossed every Human mind is: How was this universe created? Where does it begin? Where does it end? How did all the constituents of this universe come to be? Given the Human level of understanding, these questions cannot be answered. Leaving them un-answered would leave Mankind with a nagging sensation in the mind all the time. A superior being or force (call it God) as the creator of all this seems like the best answer, till we really understand the real thing. This answer gets passed on from generation to generation. When passed on unquestioned, it becomes a belief.


· Consider early Human beings who were beginning to wonder about the world around them. The concept of God may have had its beginnings in a situation of one, where a curious child pesters the parent for answers to simple questions such as, why it rains, the cause of thunder and lightning and so on. The parent cooks up the concept of God as the cause for them all, just to get the child off his or her back. When such a concept is introduced during childhood, it grows with the child and gets quite deep rooted and passed on to further generations.


God – Exists versus Does Not Exist
Quite recently, I was having a philosophical discussion with a group of friends, and I being the only Atheist, was trying to present my case to the group. In doing so, one of my unprepared sentences was – “God either exists, or does not exist. No one knows for sure, and I choose to believe the latter”. Having mentioned that, I moved on to other arguments. Over the next few days, that sentence kept bubbling up in my head at odd times. I could not make any sense out of why that was happening. When it happened, I did not delve into the subject, the sentence would just pop up and go away as quickly as it came. One night, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, this question again popped up, but this time, it did not go away. A complete explanation began to form in my head. I could not stop this train of thought, and it went on for quite a while. One portion of my brain, which was tired, was saying that we need to sleep now, but this thought process just went on and on, until I had a complete explanation.

“God either exists, or does not exist”. The probability of this is 0.5. This is the same as the probability of the results of a coin toss. Let us, for a minute, again head back to the early Human beings who were wondering about the world around them. They had a whole lot of questions, which needed answers. Consider two such people, Person A and Person B, who one day find a coin partially buried in sand, with just the heads side up. Let us assume that, no one disturbs this coin and it is left untouched in the sand. Also, assume that no knows that it is actually a coin and that there is a Tails on the other side of the coin. Person A has a sudden brain wave when he takes a look at this coin in the sand. He stops Person B and says – “You know what – We have been wondering about rain, thunder and lightning, clouds, Sun, Moon, wind, Earth and so on. I have now found the answer to all these questions. Do you see that thing with the Heads on it, that is the cause of all creation and every unexplained thing that happens.” Person B cannot believe this and comes with a “Huh? How do you explain that?” Person A says, “We are not in the era of scientific advancements, so don’t ask me for explanations. This is my theory for all the unexplained phenomenon, don’t ask me for any proof”. Person B still remains a non-believer. Person A now goes off and finds a group of people A1, A2, …An. He successfully convinces them. He starts a new movement calling it “cents” and the heads that shows up as the ultimate power that creates and controls everything in the universe. Person A becomes the ultimate authority on the “cent”. Person C, who learns about this new movement, does not like all the importance that Person A is getting, even though he is a believer. He goes off to find persons C1, C2,….Cn. He convinces them that even though, Person A is right about heads, we need to start a new movement called “pennies” and makes himself the ultimate authority on “pennies”. Person D who is as ambitious and power hungry as Person C, starts his own movement called “paise” with D1, D2,….Dn as followers. Soon a lot of arguments begin among the followers of the different movements, about who is right and some conversions take place. Some people from “cents” move over to “pennies” and vice versa, and so on. Person A, now realizes that the movement is under threat, unless the followers are controlled. He begins to make rules that the followers need to follow in every day life, lest they displease heads. For example, he says “You should wear this cents symbol around your neck at all times and visit the cents holy shrine every Sunday, otherwise heads shall become angry and he shall punish you like he punished A2. A2 was not wearing the symbol and one day when he was standing under a tree, the tree was struck by lightning” he also added, “Heads also does not like people getting converted to pennies or paise. They will be considered out-castes”. Person A being the ultimate authority, was able to bring these rules into force and control the followers. Person C, not to be out done, made his own rules of wearing the pennies symbol at all times and visiting the pennies holy shrine every Friday. Similarly Person D made his own rules. He also brings forth a new theory in which the ultimate power is not just one paise; there are also other powers like “10 paise, 20 paise, 50 paise and so on”. All the followers were brain washed and controlled. This grouping of people also brought about intolerance towards followers from other groups. What started as intolerance, quickly grew into hatred and violent clashes between the groups. Over generations, more and more rules get cooked up. More ways of controlling people are found. People continue to align themselves to groups, get brain washed and follow the meaningless rituals and continue to hate the people of other groups. Science advances and begins to explain some of the phenomenon which were previously attributed to heads, such as rain, thunder, the round earth and so on. The unexplained phenomenon hugely out-numbers the explained ones. Moreover, science only successfully explains the “How” of any phenomenon and not the “Why”. For example, we know how clouds are formed and how it rains. We do not know why clouds are formed and why it rains. So heads continues to rule.

Person B, who was a non-believer, never aligned himself to any group and continued to question the theories. One day, he decided to find out what exactly, that thing sticking out of the sand is. He finds out that, it is a mere coin and that it has a tails on the other side. So Heads, is no ultimate power, it is just one side of a coin, and all these movements are meaningless. People hate each other over a silly coin. All the other people call Person B an atheist and say he has no place in their well-structured society.

I said to myself: Replace heads with “God” and tails with “No God”. Replace cents, pennies and paise with religion names (in no particular order). What we have is our entire system of God and Religion. Just like the coin has two sides, one head and one tail, God either exists or does not exist. Just like we can never predict with our current level of intelligence and understanding of this world around us, what the result of the coin toss will be, we do not know whether a God exists or does not exist. Given this, it is quite easy to comprehend that creating an entire religious structure on a concept, which we are not even sure of, and basing our social structure and Governments on that religious system is meaningless. The religious systems group people and any grouping system when applied to human beings is not with out competitiveness, intolerance, hatred and eventually violence.

At this point, I came to a conclusion. Three crisp phrases which would answer the question that kept bubbling up in my head, and I am sure, every human has the same question – “Does a God exist?”

Don’t Know – I don’t know the answer to that question, nor does any one else, for that matter. I will even go out on a limb and say, we probably will be extinct before we ever find out the answer. I hope I am proved wrong, and we do find out.
Don’t Care – Given that we do not know, it is futile to try and find out if God really exists. Over generations we have been trying to find and even fighting and killing each other over this. Another reason for not caring is provided by the next phrase
Doesn’t Matter – We actually don’t need to find out. We can live out short lives peacefully and happily just by accepting the fact that we don’t know if God exists and that the religious systems we have created around this unknown concept are actually quite meaningless.

A life without God and Religion

This brings me to the point where I started explaining to myself, a way of life without the concept of God or Religion.

Belief in One Self is the central theme to this way of life. The one person that each of us know so well and love so much is our self. We know our own likes and dislikes, we know our goals and objectives, we are also fully capable of understanding our own strengths and weaknesses and also the limit to which our strengths extend.

Within our short life spans, we human beings wish to lead a happy and prosperous life. We always want to minimize our disappointments and sorrows and maximize our successes and happiness. In short, we want more positives and fewer negatives in our lives. This “want” for positives can easily turn into “greed” and we end up losing our way. Knowing that there is a very thin line between “want” and “greed” is key to this concept.

The table below will help explain this concept better:




The attributes in the “Positives” box are examples of some of the emotions or things we want. We all “want” love (to love and be loved), we “want” friendship, we “want” success and so on. The “Negatives” box consists of emotions that we would prefer to avoid. The more positives we have in life, the more confidence we gain in our abilities, and ourselves, and the more strength we gain to face adversities. Negatives make us lose confidence and make us more vulnerable and weak. The above list of Positives and Negatives are by no means an exhaustive one, they have been listed to serve as an example

As I mentioned earlier, “want” is tightly bound to “greed” on the negative side. Once we pull “want” beyond a limit, it brings in “greed” along with it. “Greed” in-turn is interconnected with most negatives and brings all of them into our life eventually. So we need to guard against pulling “want” beyond a certain point. Some attributes, such as anger, loss and sorrow are neither positive nor negative, but they are very much a part of life. Again, too much of these emotions can also lead to negatives.

To guard against negatives, we are equipped with some tools. These tools help us in controlling ourselves. For example, accepting a loss is necessary to keep control of our emotions, otherwise we break down and become weak. Similarly, tolerance, patience etc. come in hand when we need to control and protect ourselves from negatives.

Believing in one self and realizing what the positives and negatives in our lives and the tools that we possess will help us control our own life and lead a better one.

I find it apt to end this with the following quote -
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal