Does God Exist?

Richard Dawkins is challenging the idea that a Deistic God created the universe and set it in motion and then keeps aloof. In other words, according to him we believe in an absentee God who seems to be indifferent to what is happening in the world. But if He in fact does create individual souls ‘off and on’, then he should face the problem of evil that exists in the created universe in the form of sorrows and sufferings, injustice, exploitation, birth-based deformities. Why should there be any birth-based differences that make some more privileged than others?

Besides, aggressive atheists who deny the existence of God do so because believers have been committing horrible acts of commission and omission in the name of religious creeds and God. Despite this, it is said that the so-called all-powerful, all-good, and all knowing God remains silent. Therefore, God’s silence is equated with God’s non-existence by materialists and atheists.

Howeveer, the wonderful structure of the universe and of the things and beings in the universe does seem to suggest the existence of a Grand Design, which needs explanation. Can it be due to matter and motion? Though human reason is capable of understanding a lot, it points to the existence of Universal Consciousness or Cosmic Intelligence, and this, say nay-sayers, is more faith than fact.

The theistic world view gives cosmic support to the believers. After all, the question of all questions is whether the universe is friendly or inimical to life in general and human life in particular. Long before the ‘Sun’ in the solar system was seen as the friend of humans. So the believer bowed before the Sun and said, “Aum Mitrya Namah” – O Lord, I bow to you, our friend. Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is a grand hypothesis to explain the origin of species on this planet. He never claimed that he could explain the ‘arrival of life to evolve in favour of the fittest’ in the world. How did the rudimentary amoebas evolve; out of nothing? Biologists aver the principle ‘life begets life’. Can they reduce biology to physics? Can they accept biology as a branch of physics? The usual and answer to this is ‘no’. Moreover, physics itself is becoming a science of the minute following the discovery that atoms can be split! The concept of God is not a stupid idea. It cannot be done away with so cursorily. It was the agnostic H Spencer who applied the concept of evolution to the evolution of the cosmos. Later philosophers formulated different ideas of evolution, as did S Alexander in the idea of Emergent Evolution, H Bergson in the concept of Creative Evolution.

The tiny logic and intellect of man should not be elevated to the status of God or the Cosmic Intelligence; perhaps its role in human affairs ought not to be dismissed or underestimated. Such a stand has its own limitations.   German philosopher Kant refuted the traditional rational argument addressed in support of belief in God. Yet he formulated the Moral Argument. For belief in the existence of God – and morality are special to human beings. Unless we accept the moral in the universe it is very difficult to make the universe morally intelligible. The discussion cannot be left in the hands of priests and pundits. Education in humanities will help believers liberate religion from the clutches of the priestly class. For aren’t modern liberation theologians willing to learn from Karl Marx to solve the issue of hunger and injustice?

Courtesy: Speaking Tree

Experience of being in Mother’s Womb

In the mother’s womb, each child is centered in reality; each child is profoundly blissful. Of course, he is unaware of it.... He’s so one with his bliss that there is no knower left behind. Blissfulness is his being, and there is no distinction between the knower and the known. You become aware only when you have lost something.

It is very difficult to know something without losing it, because when you have not lost it, you are so totally one with it. There is no distance: the observer and the observed are one; the known and the knower are one. Every child is in a profoundly blissful state.

Why don't we know the Condition of when we were in our Mother's Womb?

Psychologists also agree with this. They say that the whole search of religion is nothing but a way to again find the womb of the mother. The child is in absolute tune with the mother. The child does not know that he is separate from the mother. If the mother is healthy, the child is healthy; if the mother is sitting silently, the child is silent. The child has no boundaries of his own yet. This is the purest bliss, but it has to be lost.

Purest Bliss

The child is born, and suddenly he is thrown off-center. Suddenly, he is uprooted from the earth, from the mother. He loses his moorings and he does not know who he is.… Now he starts becoming aware of his boundaries — his body, his needs. Sometimes, he is happy, sometimes unhappy; sometimes he is hungry and crying and there is no sign of mother anywhere; sometimes he is on the mother’s breast, again enjoying oneness with the mother. But now there are many moods and many climates, and he will start to feel the separation.

He has to find out who he is. A whole life goes in trying to find out who one is. This is the most fundamental question.

When the child is born, they immediately cut the umbilical cord. It should not to be cut immediately because it leaves the child in a very weird situation. He cannot breathe on his own and yet the connection with the mother has been severed. The natural process is that he should start breathing on his own perfectly well, and then the umbilical cord should be cut.

There is a natural way to know when the cord has to be cut. The moment the child starts breathing perfectly, the umbilical cord stops pulsating. Slowly, slowly, the more the child breathes, the less is the pulsation, the less the beat.… Once the child has taken on the breathing process for himself, it pulsates no more. Now it is dead. It can be cut.

Nowadays, the moment the child is out of the womb, the umbilical cord is cut. The child is not breathing yet; he starts doing it with such a jerk that it shakes the whole being of the child...and it never becomes rhythmic, never, in his whole life.

Avoid the Shock

The first shock keeps vibrating, and that causes a thousand and one diseases in the body, and the mind. He has to breathe and he does not know how to. His whole passage is full of amniotic fluid, mucous …and just to help him, they hang the child upside-down by his legs and slap him on his buttocks, just so the amniotic fluid goes out. This is all so violent…life starting by beating, by hurting the child. Such a gap has been created in his being that the natural breathing has stopped and he cannot breathe on his own. Then we go on repressing emotions in that gap, and it becomes bigger and hard like a stone.