The Invention called God

Who is God? What is God? Where is God?

 

The search is on for the most popular person on this planet.

 

Different religions, different places, different people but the concept of God is amazingly the same. It’s strange that a seven year old and a seventy year old define God fairly similarly.

 

He is the creator, the protector and the destroyer. The giver and taker, the savior, the truth, the supernatural, the most powerful (more than any superhero ever conceived), kind and just, friend and father, love and friendship, solution to every trouble, answer to every question, the best of everything. He is the only perfect thing in this universe. He is divine peace, the salvation. He is life and he is death. He was there before the beginning; he will be there after the end. He is as small as the atom and as vast as eternity. He is time, space and matter, neither alive nor dead.

 

Down the evolutionary line, the moment we can start calling man as man, he has known God. Earliest gods were nature gods-Sun, rain, sea, wind and fire-made gods because they were both the source of life as well as destruction and because they were out of his control. But now we know that sun and moon are no more than celestial bodies and water and fire, states of matter. Still God remains.

 

Man invented God. Everything out of his control, anything that is unexplainable, out of proportion to his imagination is God. All miracles are God.

 

Fear is an important factor in the invention of God. Man needs him the most when he is afraid, scared, in trouble. And who can end all his fears- our superhero, God.

 

He is a role model, the dictionary of good and bad, encyclopedia of right and wrong. He is the good in everyone. He is man’s conscience- the best map with all the right directions.

 

So man created God when he was afraid, when he was amazed, when he was lost for answers or when he needed directions in his life. God is his ambition, his courage, his kindness, his humility, and his sanity. He needs him to go ahead and achieve something (from passing an exam to winning a war). He is man’s zeal and his drive to achieve perfection, the perfection called God.

 

Now let us consider this. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. And if there’s no necessity there is no need for invention (except for creativity, and inventing God in a stroke of creativity would result in no more than a superman). Suppose the impossible happens and the world becomes perfect, will man still need a God.

 

Yes, because God is something more and something else than all this. God is hope. God is faith.

 

Hope, that feeling which tells you that everything is going to be all right even when nothing is. It is the thing that keeps man living when life is not worth living. God is something that man can fall back on and start anew; he is his support when he has nothing to hold on to.

 

God is not about power, fear, reason, perfection or morality. God is about faith. It’s just that all these things make him God enough to have faith in. Faith in anything is God. Everyone has faith in at least something whether he believes in God or not. (Some people just have a problem with calling it as God- our friends the agnostics and atheists)

 

God is man’s companion when he is all alone. Prayer is his conversation with God. Man can talk to him whenever and wherever he likes. It’s like talking to a friend, someone who knows all your secrets, all your fears, all your shortcomings, all your needs, all your desires and still accepts you the way you are and listens to you no matter what. He is the one who knows him inside out. He is the only one on whom man can depend totally without the fear of betrayal. He is the only one before whom he can put his most unreasonable and weirdest demands (like before a Santa Claus) and ask the silliest questions. Man can share with him his deepest fears, his pain, sorrow and his joy. And he can be weak in front of God. (You may say it’s just like talking to oneself. Well, it is)

 

Man needs God just to tell himself that there is someone who is watching him, who cares for him, who will always be there for him no matter what and will set things right for him if something goes wrong. God is the outcome of man’s loneliness. (Who wouldn’t love the idea that a superhero is with him all the time)

 

God is a thought that each one of us creates inside our heart and mind, a thought that we keep for all our lives, a thought we have the ultimate belief in. (The agnostics and atheists will love denying the supernatural and accepting the psychological part of it)

 

The great ancient search will go on to prove his existence. But no matter what, God will never die. Man will keep him alive.

There are six billion of him on this planet but all very lonely (so lonely that they are searching for life outside this world). And as long as he is lonely he will keep God with him. That’s why he invented God- as his companion.

 

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