"The Concept of God"

The concept of god, if explored, opens up a Pandora’s Box. What is God? Is He for real? Has anyone ever seen God? Is he the creator? Is he the destroyer? The world is full of atheists and the believers. Recently, as I was watching a national geographic program, the universe, an astrophysicist said something really interesting. He said that matter or energy can neither be created nor be destroyed but can only be changed from one form to another. He also said that we consider god to be eternal who was, who is and who will be. He said that if we compare Energy and God, they are nothing but the two sides of the same coin. God is nothing but the energy which exists in the universe that creates and destroys planets and stars and other celestial bodies.

God is the manifestation of our own idea of righteousness, justice, equity and, above all, perfection. In a human mind God equals perfection. “God” is the extreme of anything positive we can think of. So, where did all this begin? As the human race evolved into sophisticated beings we developed something very unique which is the very soul of the modern man. That uniqueness as we now understand is called “Conscience”. We developed conscience which is the ability to segregate our lives into grey and white areas, i.e. good and bad. All other things originated with this newly found conscience including the ability to comprehend nature’s diversity. This ability to comprehend nature’s diversity gave rise to a feeling of respect and grace towards the one who created this diversity. The concept of God begins with this development of conscience. Humans began this journey thousands of years back when they were still primitive. This journey entailed experiences of thousands of years of existence.

The early humans started worshipping the unknown as soon as they developed conscience. Worshipping gave rise to plethora of stone idols symbolizing the creator, the sustainer and the destroyer. All sorts of prejudices and dogmas began to surface with this rise in worshipping culture. By this time, humans were spread all over the globe and lived in hunting groups thereby giving rise to a large number of idols and deities. As we advanced into a more sophisticated existence on earth, we started developing envy, vanity, conceit and other similar feelings. These feelings gave rise to all conflicts, including battles and wars. All other virtual wars like ideological wars, religious wars and so on continued thereafter. Humans got more and more unreasonable and prejudiced about their beliefs, culture, traditions and so on. Since that time until now, the human race has continued their conflicts. Their conflicts have spread to ideology, religion and the God itself. Every other religion is now skeptical about the validity and cogency of the God of some other religion on earth.

The concept of God, which got created to give hope, courage and a sense of righteousness to the fellow humans, has now been completely misinterpreted at different parts of the world. With all the prejudices, the actual reason for the creation of the concept of God has been forgotten and the situation is only going to get worse with the passage of time. Different groups in the contemporary world claim that their religion and their God is the only God. Who is going to tell these fanatics that there is no such thin g as a real God? God is the figment of our own imagination and nothing else. Will they ever stop violence in the name of God? Will we ever have the courage to accept that there is no GOD??????