Saturday 29 November 2008

chequered thoughts on 'Belief'

Well, this is my first post to my blog, Chequered thoughts. So, I thought, like all ‘religious Indians’ I would also start with God, the higher being, but with my chequered thoughts added to it.


BELIEF. It’s one thing absolutely essential for a human mind. We as humans need to believe in a school of thought, or create our own, but we constantly need to believe in something, on someone. We are all believers. Most of us believe in some form of God or the other. While some believe in atheism. But even they believe in something.

What I am trying to put down here is my image of ‘God’. How I see him and how I where and why I think he/she (not sure if I can categorize god in this category) exists.

There are two aspects of belief in a higher being. The spiritual one, which all non-atheists usually follow, the concentration of mind on the spirit, on the God, in hope to gain the eternal. And a physical one, in which we try to seek a physical significance to that high being.

Humans have had a tendency of worshipping anything that they cannot explain. Any being or object which we fear, or which has that aura of mystery around it, we pray about it to God, or sometimes we pray to it. Like the fire, lightening, rain. We feared some of these. Revered in others. We prayed to all these elements of nature. The trend continues even today.

As of the current researches (and which really seems to be the truth now), the universe started with a big bang. A small concentrated mass just blew up with a really big bang and started an expansion, which is even continuing till date. That bang symbolizes the advent of time and the start of our universe itself. The mystery around it is only because of 2 main things. One, under what circumstances did that dense particle exploded, and two, where did the particle come from in the first place, i.e., was there time before the big bang too. Here lies the unknown. And therefore an unworldly thing. A mystery that cannot be explained in the near future in any circumstances. Here we can say for now that something godly or a power out of this world initiated the bang. And that is God. Today, most of us will regard sayings like God created this world in seven days with a smile thinking that all this is just old religious belief that should really be given up in this scientific era. But what about the case stated above. We cant explain this. So it leads to only one conclusion that God really exists. This is modern scientific religion and we believe in it.

So, for us God can be said to be a form of energy (though this makes him worldly), which flows in this universe. It initiated the big bang and maybe it still is continuing to control the universe in some ways, even now. (Dark energy, dark matter maybe, who knows). God, a form of pure energy. Let us say that we see that energy through different goggles or through different outlines on a paper. So we interpret it in different forms, in different religions and different belief systems. All belief systems are basically looking at the same thing, but through different visions.