On God

So today was just one of those days where you just wake up and you're inexplicably carrying a tub of mayonnaise over your head (which was clearly meant as a prank by someone) but it makes you start questioning everything:

[Superb yawn]

"WHOT!?!"

"Why?"

"How?"

"Where am I?"

"Am I alive?"

[Slide open's the lid, dips in a finger, licks mayo off finger]

"I AM FUCKIN' ALIVE!!!"

and just like that you somehow get an orgasmic appreciation for everything life, mayo, the green leaves, the phosphorescent Rose and as you stare at the red morning horizon... and you start humming this song, this lost tune, lost as the whistle of the passing train, roams morning through your bones of a song  you liked very much in the distant past:

God, I am nothing but a boy in my room
But when I stand at the windowsill,
I look at the moon
And I know something is rising to another dimension
Going out of my mind way across the midwestern expanses
It dances out under the stars. It's a prayer, and it's there when I'm riding in cars
And when I'm listening to music, when I'm watching TV
I don't know how to say it. I get down on my knees.
In my room In the evening, when no one's around, and then I turn on the radio I turn up the sound
I say "No, no, don't fall through
I need you
Call me up right now."
I'd call you but I don't know how ...

As you feel this indescribable feeling of awe, elation, sadness, and wonder, gratefulness, you start thinking about God.

You are reminded of how crazy it is that a collection of silly little words & letters strung together can make people feel so many things. Those same letters meaning so different things at different parts of your life.

When I was a child, I believed, like one believes in the tooth-fairy. I believed what everyone said, as one would usually do at that stage, as "believing" was generally translated to "being a good person".

At that stage, the world was simple, all I cared about was that there were so many religions, so many gods and so many holidays on my school calendar. On every Tuesdays, I vividly remember, we would visit the temples (I was a Hindu). There would be sweets involved in thw whole ordeal and all you needed in life back then was more sugar.

Then when I was a teenager, I didn't believe. You know with the puberty and the hormones kickin' in, coupled with INTERNET and SCIENCE made a dangerous atheistic combination. At that time my thinking was like -

"It just seemed harder and harder to prove and believe that anything might exist like that [God] and where does that leave us, on our own, which to my mind was much more, responsible than hoping that someone, will save us from ourselves so we don't have to make our best efforts to do it ourselves... "

Thus graduating from high school as a staunch atheist with the kind of arrogance only a 21-year-old has the naiveté to feel.

But I guess somewhere in the middle when I was filling all these holes in my life I started to feel like there was something missing. A feeling that's best described from this WBW blog:

What I missed at the time is that “atheist” isn’t something. It’s just “not something.” By declaring myself an atheist and calling it a day, I was basing my whole spiritual identity on what I wasn’t. Yes, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not from Uganda. If someone asked me where I’m from, answering “Not Uganda” would be unhelpful. Likewise, if my only spiritual identity is, “I don’t believe in the divine components of the world’s large, ancient religions,” that makes me a spiritual nothing.

At the time, of course, I saw no problem with being a spiritual nothing. Spirituality was for religious people, and I was a science guy, so who cared anyway?

What I didn’t realize is that I had inadvertently flushed down the toilet a critical part of the human growth experience.

[To describe spirtuality: The first part of that question—What was this world?—became the job of science. The second part—What does it all mean?—is the job of spirituality.]

Soon somewhere in the middle of getting into books, and philosophy, and Dostoevsky I sorta grew out of my atheistic phase and for a while I was like... I don’t know. I mean to put it into words, I was kinda an agnostic. "Agnostic", is a pretty new word, it means "gnosis": to know and "a": opposite, meaning "I don't know".

I went full Stoic like basically live a good life, have fun,  be nice, be kind. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, and take no thought for any of your concerns, then it is open to me to take thought for myself: and my concern is for what is best. If there are no gods, then who cares, still you will have lived a noble life.

In short, you won't go in hell, be nice anyways.

I think I have had this conversation inside me for a long time and I think, wether the "idea of a god" is a rational one.

I know part of me paradoxically feels good wallowing up on the egotistical rationalizing self on this argument while the other feel to weird and corny and cheesy to just "believe". But then I remember the rationalizing tendencies I have in an argument and I ask myself "Do you wanna be right or do you wanna be content/happy?"

When someone says "I have faith in God" and someone replies "Well there is no evidence of his existence." I believe that to be an improper interpretation of faith. What is faith afterall? Faith is believing in something in the absence of its evidence right?

It is meaningless to me whether or not God is "simply fiction" because we are a race governed by stories - A quote from one of my fav creators that has stuck with me - Fiction is just in our DNA. The stories we tell ourselves are inescapable without letting go of the ego.

And if it is about the stories we tell ourselves, why not tell the better ones? I just felt this deep craving inside of me to believe, finding it almost imperative to believe in something, in something greater than yourself, that something is how I see God.

I’m still totally atheist when it comes to all religion-created conceptions of a divine higher force of a man in the sky. But personally, for me, I define a God more as the poetry of life, or the weird lyrics to a song, or the moments when I truly contemplate facts like:

There are about as many atoms in one grain of salt as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth" Or that there is no "I" and I am a universe of atoms and an atom in the universe.

These "whoa" moments which make me feel some intense combination of awe, elation, sadness, and wonder. More than anything, they make me feel ridiculously, profoundly humble—and that level of humility does weird things to a person. In those moments, all those words religious people use—awe, worship, miracle, eternal connection—make perfect sense. I want to get on my knees and surrender.

That is what I think when I think about "God", it's poetry of life to fall back on when all else in your life fails you, including yourself.

The problem arises when it's not enough for us to believe what we believe but we start feeling obligated to you know hit you over the head because you don't believe the same thing or to treat you as somebody who's less than what I am, and this logic goes both ways for the theists as well as atheists.

After all if it gives hope to the hopeless, a purpose of life to some, or a reason to do and be good then I don't see where the problem comes from. An image of transcendental embodied good to which even the great tyrants of the past bowed down to is as I think a psychological necessity in the absence of which there is total chaos.

In the end the ultimate aim is not the right belief but the right action.

I think as I'moving through life I'm realizing that we create our own beliefs, dreams, our own purpose and storylines to get through life... even if all of it's just a beautiful lie.

---

Bonus

Movie Recommendation

Blade Runner 2049: You've gotta watch this film bro! It's truly a work of art. Watching this movie triggered a landscape of identity crisis with me. Are we more than the sum of our biology? Is it real? What does it mean to be real? What defines life? Is life defined by living? Are we more than the sum of our biology (AGTC or 0101)? Can you buy Joy? Can you buy Joy? Is 'human consciousness special?

I think this is a paragon of what a movie should do. A movie is like a pov that generates empathy, it tells you what it's like to be a different age, gender, class, and this does exactly that.

I think that's what I got out of blade runner, a piece of fiction: something projected on a screen that I know is fake but of it makes us feel something real... does it even matter?

We create our own purpose even if all of it's just a beautiful lie.

Music Recommendations

This album might just be one of the best albums I've listened to this year. Everything with this album hits me. From the Jesuses and the semen-stained mountain tops to the tomatoes and ashes raining from an aeroplane. A masterpiece from the beginning to the end

Moreover, check out this cover of my fav. song from this record.