Power... Fear... God...

In my pursuit to understand the association between my existence and GOD as a superior being or idea and the influence that we both exert over each other, I ended up scribbling how everyday things and people around me with their unique ways, behaviors, beliefs and faith influenced me and where I stood on a scale, measuring my “Association with GOD” as compared to the numerous like and unlike me. One particular comment from a friend which had me pondering upon was;

“Cause without the concept of god, d world would become a complete pandemonium... Disaster everywhere… Order would be lost… Absolute freedom…”

The statement by its very constitution makes a very strong remark on the nature and characteristics of one of the most dominating specie to have ever walked this planet,

“That we as a race need a constant governing, more like a vision which in turns trickles down to our society, to our community, to our family and finally to ourselves, by the very nature this vision which encompasses every aspect of our living, we are at every moment of our social and personal life influenced if not controlled by it.”

While my journey in search of truth and being able to classify myself based on justified grounds as either a believer or a non-believer in GOD is still on track, I am most certainly a believer in the power of Human Mind (conscious and subconscious), its potential to see definitive patterns in our social behavior and its ability to condition the social behavior of most species on this planet.

So then would a world without the concept of god actually become a complete pandemonium, a complete disaster?

Though it’s a question that majority of us would like view through a microscope of belief and faith, I’d propose looking at it more logically (logic as defined by research).

The modern man evolved in Africa some 2, 00,000 years ago (Out of Africa Theory), while the existence of complex, multicellular life form can be traced back to 2.1 billion years ago. The time period between these two life forms is a process which Charles Darwin termed as the “Natural Selection” in his book “On the Origin of Species”. Now the concept of God was nowhere in existence during the differential period between the above two life forms and yet this period in the history of this planet can be categorized as the most important phase as it saw the most astounding of changes to have occurred and which laid the foundation for the evolution of this world the way we see it now.

We humans who are less blessed then the other creatures from the animal kingdom when compared to the evolution of our sensory organs still managed to survive, grow and rule over all other life-forms. What made this possible? The answer to this question has been a subject of research since we have known science. Something that sets us apart from the rest of the pack has been our ability to communicate and share knowledge among us, I am not proposing that we are the only ones who can communicate and share knowledge, other species are also adept at doing that, but we were able to organize this knowledge and then encrypt it in the forms of our writings, paintings, folk tales etc and then pass it on to our subsequent generations so that they had a ready reference to the experience of their ancestors. It was all the more important to document and share this knowledge, since survival was still the biggest issue at hand and the command over this knowledge had the key to survival and growth.

“There is no knowledge that is not power”

                                                              - Ralph Waldo Emerson

With mastery over the skill of communication and knowledge sharing, the human race flourished from small dispersed nomadic tribes to more populous complex civilizations. This change in social dynamics gave rise to our need to organize the collective knowledge of our civilization into central knowledge centers, this knowledge both explicit and tacit. By all means this knowledge was the most powerful weapon anyone could have in his armory and an individual or a group in possession of this knowledge was equipped to have an unprecedented power.

One of the prerequisite to realize this power was to have an unchallenged command over the knowledge centers which in turn meant a complete control over the source of this knowledge i.e. Human Mind….

In order to have this supreme command over human mind, it was necessary to bring the majority under one roof, to unite them, to glue them together in a way which would make it possible to influence the behavior of this populous majority. This need to control and the resulting power it gave fuelled the concept of God. Every phenomena occurring in nature was propounded as God’s work, the unexplained, the mysterious were all camouflaged under the banner of God. This brand of God gained in popularity, eventually becoming the single universal concept in this world.

Yet another contributor in making the God as the eternal truth is fear…. Man’s fear of the uncontrollable nature as it is the only thing which we have not been able to master. And the concept of God was coined to give people a feeling of security in an insecure world, and a feeling of control over the environment where there was little control. It also aided our chances of surviving in a cruel and unpredictable world.

“Many times when we think we are worshipping God, we are actually comforting our very fragile egos. I’m not so naïve as to assume that we build temple and erect altars to ourselves…directly. But our core needs to be safe, secure and sound mandates that we construct reality systems that will support us.”                                    -    David C. James

So will this world become a completely chaotic place without the concept of god… it existed before any humans walked and it will continue to do so without us… Concept of God is an outcome of our fears, need for survival, lust for control, hunger for power and quest for knowledge…

So by that interpretation, the concept of God is like a pseudo identity that we have created to whom we account all our fears, our deeds (good or bad), our miseries, our accolades and everything that we created tangible or intangible. What it enables us is to comfortably dust of the responsibility and accountability that we owe to this Nature and to our Community (Human Race). By doing this we as specie walk away from any situation clean…..