I am often confronted to identify with my birth religion, Jainism and condoned for my inability to offer respects in line with identified customs. To the extent, I am sometimes prodded to give in at least partially. And when I do, it is celebrated, like a triumph of good over evil making cessation of the spirit who vests in me refraining me from thinking straight and acting normal. All of us are atheists and have never believed in most Gods humanity has idolized till today. I have only gone one God further.
Unfortunately, to every believer, the world must be divided into two groups – the God-fearing men and the ones who condone the almighty out of ignorance and arrogance. The underlining perspective in both the cases is that God exists, dividing all of humanity, between believers and nonbelievers. This juxtaposition is not a fair starting point for this debate.
But, all creation must have a producer who now continues to direct that show, they argue. There is an urgent hoard in all mankind to outdo the other in pleasing Him for His attention as if His blessings are a case of limited stock. I do NOT believe in any of it, and theoretically, even if that were to be true, he couldn’t be so naïve to dole out privileges based on your time or position in that queue. Mahaveera & Buddha spent their life trying to get rid of their ego. How could the same almighty then ask of us to pamper His with prayers and songs in his valor? It simply doesn’t add up.
Before I prod further on the subject of my atheism, I would like to delve the history and origin of religions. All religions of the current day with the exception of Islam originated between 500 BC until the birth of Christ. To me, it is not mere coincidence that all religions came to be up within a relatively short span of time. It was around 500 BC that humans across the world mastered the art of farming and no longer required to wander as hunter-gatherers over vast lands in search of food. Also, one square kilometer of land could feed a hundred men, as against a handful when they hunted other animals in the food chain for their survival. Thus, wandering was no longer necessary and this development gave rise to settlements. Soon settlements grew larger with villages and towns giving rise to the civilizations like the Roman Empire, Mauryan Dynasty and the Egyptian civilizations.
With the growing populations now interacting with each other, the need to bind them under a common law became a greater necessity and thus were born great leaders –thought leaders. They were mortal beings just like I am, but we must by nature look upon someone for inspiration. These thought leaders provided just that. With time, the awe turned to idolization and humans found it easy to spiritualize them also casting away upon them their unknown fears under the garb of Faith. Over generations of fictionalization, their mortal deeds became miracles and thus they came to be known as God. It is fair to then say that humans created the Gods of today for its own selfish needs.
So far so good, both the purpose and the practice could only have done good for mankind. This God now played a dual role one of guiding humankind to live an ideal life by the examples He set during His lifetime and to secure the unknown future of mortal humans in exchange for the trust they placed in His faith. With time the balance of this scale tilted, the former role started to take the back seat and the latter seemed to overpower. Come the 21st century, with our overt dependency on His powers to further our well-being, the continued admonishing of his original teachings constantly being altered to suit our reading and the greed of the current day thought and political leaders broke these religions into divisive units to further their ambition leading to chaos we witness in society today.
Jainism the religion I was born into is the story of Mahaveera, who denounced his kingdom in search of eternal peace. What he discovered through meditation, renunciation, penance and humility was Nirvana – a state of eternal peace. Once he achieved that, he spread his message and path for others to benefit. 2000 years later, we witness his followers idolizing temples in his honor, outbidding each other to earn the chance to smear his modesty with money and gold and singing songs calling for his blessings for their material well-being. And in this race, the original message is long lost and banished for it does not gel with modern living and definitely not easy to stay on. Human necessity to place the trust on their God for the unknown is so urgent and overwhelming that the original teachings which could be of value have been forgotten.
The story of Hinduism is not very different. The Hindu scriptures acknowledge the Gods we ideate with divinity were mortal too, yet we ignore every thread of evidence connecting them to us. Recounting the tales of their heroic conquests over all evil, we celebrate them as sons of God, enlightened beings and in some cases God himself. Like in the earlier example of Jainism I cited, in this case too I am certain is that stories around them have been spun and edited to ensure that their heroism continues to exhale inspiration. In this case too tellers laced their stories with miracles, finally setting them apart and above rest of all mortal life into what we know as God. And whenever the faith of that power overshadowed revealing their mortal truths, we showcased them in Synagogues, Temples and Mosques among other high altars, permanently distancing them from us and along with it the simple truth that their experience could very well have been ours.
Buddha the enlightened one explored a practice which gave with the peace and universal knowledge conquering his mind for good. He preached it too with the intention of spreading his knowledge for others to benefit from and has been followed since. The irony is that what is celebrated as a way of life for 2000 years has failed to create even one more Buddha. The reason is rather than following what he practiced, we got busy with idolizing him to with complete disregard for his message. Today the name of Buddha is being milked to divide an entire society to meet political ends. Making him divine allowed us to use his brand for social purposes and continues to perpetuate the pain in and around us.
We have fooled ourselves long enough and will continue to do so in the name of faith. It simply suits us and yet we are not ready to be fooled completely. Such is our nepotism that as parents we want their kids to learn about Darwin’s theory of natural selection as much as they want them to attend the Sunday choir at church. Faith is the shoulder we use to rest our failures and our inability to guide us beyond the invisible hallucinotic horizons of life. While faith is a weakness of human ability to reason when we submit to the idols we created to shield our sins and blindness, the same faith delivers the fear that holds mankind from slaughtering one other. It keeps the equilibrium.
The urgency of this article is also driven by the recent canonization of Mother Teresa as Saint Teresa, how we launched a compassionate mortal being to be another saint to decorate our churches. Same is the case of another peasant Sai Baba who lived his life on alms only to be idolized after his death to the travesty of Godliness. Should he be living today, he would be crying tears of blood witnessing the scale at which his modesty is shred to tatters in temples built in his name thronged by ignorant people living in the fear of spirits.
But in a summation, all the Gods we know were either fictional creations of a creative mind with a message or a mortal story glorified to suit its reader. And since I claim these Gods to be mortal, that makes me an atheist. So how did the universe come to be? Who is the creator of this universe? Unfortunately, unless I have an answer to this question, I will continue to live under the burden of being anti-social or a Kafir.
Now I would launch into a rather theoretical rhetoric which really explains, at least to me, why I am an atheist. We have always grown up to believe the Sun rises and sets over earth’s horizon, while we all know the scientific truth is just the opposite. Human mind is doctored, and over thousands of years to think in a certain way. To us life seems finite. And like life space, time and energy must have dimensions too but their boundaries are a mirage to us, just like the horizon of the rising sun. And their extents are so wide, we call them infinite. The truth to me is the exact opposite.
Life itself is mirage, of perceptions and perspectives. Time is constant. It neither starts nor ends. So is space and energy. Let’s take the example of a term ‘lifetime’. For a fly it may be a day or two, for a dog it may be a few hears, for a human it is a few decades and for a turtle it is a few centuries. If the earth and sun and the universe as we know it had a heart beat (though I do not believe they must have one to qualify for being mortal) a lifetime for them would be a few billion years. And since what we can see of time is relative to our position, we are unable to see it’s simply a constant and therefore borderless. While time, space and energy are constants, their measure infinite and therefore any attempt to evaluate the value of those constants futile.
The life we adore so much and its possessions even more, yet all it of it is but a mirage. We are all made from cosmic dust. From dust we come and dust we shall go. This has been acknowledged in the Geeta. As humans I comprehend life as a few decades and the time scale of the universe long enough to remain long after we are all dead. But if I were the universe this entire time and all of history is but a blip, a constant or an instant. And that is what time is, an instant and a constant. It is the perspective which gives us our units of measurements.
The life which beats in us is dust interacting in a set of chemical reactions. It can neither be created or destroyed. From the current mind, we occupy it seems mortal to us, but no constant can be mortal. Thus life and death itself are a mirage. If a cell inside your body dies, you care less, a new one will take its place soon. But for the living cell that is all it was. Likewise, from the perspective of the universe a dead body which walked on earth once is no loss for it will quickly be preprocessed. From our perspective it is an irreparable loss but from a larger pedestal like the universe it is immaterial. And yet, both are still a mirage. While the universe is the maximum we can visualize and it is everything for us, but if space is a constant, it is but a small dot on that scale. It is a mirage once again. And like time, space too, is a constant.
The duration of time we spend between birth and death is a race to acquire knowledge and possessions. The quest for this possession leads us to love and hatred. And the seeming outcomes perpetuates our ego which become our undoing. This ignorant quest makes us so busy and creates a mirage so colossal we forget to see the oncoming death. The fact is from the moment we are born it is a race to death. We know it all too well and we fool ourselves even better, like in the case of the rising sun. We would refuse to give away a dime to a popper for free, ignoring completely that everything we seem to own is but a merely a lease with an expiry date.
With enough possessions comes the knowledge of its uselessness. We begin to sometimes acknowledge this reality, for an instant at times. If we stay on that path and thought long enough, the instances become longer and the need for possessions fewer. A small donation made with gratitude and without expectation of return is a selfless deed, it is an example of that acknowledgment. That one instance of gratitude in our mind becomes the embodiment of all knowledge though only for an instant. Enough time passes at it, the moments of gratitude and renunciation become minutes, and minutes turn hours, and hours turn into a lifetime. The love is replaced by renunciation. Hate becomes unnecessary and knowledge of the practice itself a myth. It is then that a Buddha is born. Each one of us is a universe, it is everything there is. But that the perspective where I see it from is a small part of the universe, and universe here is the constant called space, I can never perceive in full, not from the perspective I have. I am nothing but a mortal being in the universe belittles me, but knowing that I am the universe itself harnesses me. I am time, I am space and I am energy, I am the constant but all these I’s must come without a shred of the Ego or vanity.
Evolution is natural. It does not have a direction. It is simply iterations of random chemical reactions interacting with each other in various parts of the universe and beyond. A series of such random reactions led to us. There are zillions of reactions which may have led to other forms and beings, we are but just one of them. A simple random reaction. The constant of space, time and energy are also infinite giving nature room, time and energy to carry out these random experiments leading to evolutions. As Charles Darwin put it, nature also guided by the process of natural selection furthered by the necessity to survive. We say necessity is the mother of all invention. The same is true in the case of evolution too, except in this case while the invention itself was a mutation, its survival is a necessity of that mutation.
Coming back to Atheism, among these mutations is a single instance of equilibrium we experience and feel equanimity about it. A single instance of such equilibrium will perpetuate more and so much more until a time comes when that the only thing there is. This travel and experience will be out of necessity and quest of that equilibrium. It is then we realize that the race was to experience that equilibrium. It was the knowledge to know that there is nothing to know. Life is but the mirage. Love too is a mirage and therefore hatred too. Wealth and possessions are cosmic dust which are not merely mine, it is me for I am the universe. I am the purpose of all being. We are racing towards the silent constant, only the direction is random. Like Buddha we will reach there and we will love the silence. Meditation and faith are manifestations of that silence on the way to that constant.
But then what, what after I achieve that silence? We simply live with the knowledge that there is nothing to know.  Until the nature of our chemistry churns us back into the chaos. That is how it is meant to be. Random.