Of God, Man and Senselessness

Of God,Man and Senselessness
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I am one of those that believe that we all here to serve a higher purpose. Incidents, experiences, coincidences and the sheer joy of nature and human love, reinforces my belief. I do not know whether this has anything to do with religion; I sincerely hope not. I would rather set up direct contact with God if I could , than go through that man-made façade of ‘religion’.

The word religion comes from its Latin roots ‘ligum’, to bind. From ancient times man has bound fellow human beings into belief systems. This is not the forum to discuss the history or the excesses of religious beliefs and the unspeakable acts perpetrated in the name of God through the ages. Belief systems bring out strong emotions. Strong enough to kill. For those interested in a discussion by Stories.com members on this aspect, I refer readers to the forum "Kill in the name of God" , and would recommend readers to follow the discussions thread. When a mother willingly sends her young son to his death in a suicide bombing mission with the promise of paradise given by fellow mortals in Palestine, I look on in disbelief and incomprehension. When the leader of Israel declares in the midst of blood and lifeless human limbs, that he will import another million Jews to populate territory and settlements, I look on in disbelief and incomprehension. Where ‘is’ God in all this? There is religion but no God. Or is there? Is there even a faint glimmer of hope?

I look at the teachings of every religion and there is only good there. With a bit of variation, all religions point in the same direction. In the Jewish holi book Tenakh, there is an important statement called the Shema which says, “ Hear, O Israel: the lord our God is One”. God’s holy name is the Hebrew word Yhwh, or Yahweh which means “ I am who I am”. The word Islam means ‘surrrender to the peace of Allah’ and the followers of Islam give themselves up to Allah’s will, believing that Allah is the one God and Muhammad was His messenger. Again from the same land of ancient Israel came a Jewish teacher, healer and founder of the great religion of Christianity. Stop ! Stop! Stop! Pause for a moment. Was Jesus Christ the founder of the religion of Christianity? Heck no! He was the messenger. So was Moses. So was Mohammad. Why were the ‘same’ messages being sent time after time? Was there a context to all this. Messages are not sent in a vacuum and unless there is a need for it. The ‘why’ has been staring at humanity from time immemorial but we choose to look at scriptures and engage in acts of ritual and worship that diverts out attention from the original purpose of these messages. Wonder of wonders, Jesus Christ also said that there is One God, just like the others before and after him. It was the followers of these great souls that wrote down the scriptures for ordinary men to follow the ‘good’ path.

Within these great religions, there are interconnections . Something evolutionary was going on. The Hebrew Bible also forms the first half of the Christian Bible in the ‘Old’ Testament. Like all scriptures in all religions, the Hebrew Bible is not a single book, but a collection of books written over many centuries by many different authors. It contains the books of law, history, poetry and prophesy in three main sections. The Torah, or law, the Nevi’im (prophets) and the Ketuvim (writings). The ten commandments revealed to Moses is contained in the Torah as is their story from the time to Abraham. None of the original messengers were doing the act of writing and interpretation. Human organization and hierarchy had taken over. All 27 books of the New Testament were written by followers and the interpretations and words are theirs alone. The first four books of the New Testament are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We are not surprised at the meaning of the word gospel, it means ‘good news’, news that Jesus was the long awaited messiah. And all this good news from different messengers were being spread in this one tiny land in Asia. Why, you may ask yourselves. What was the need? All the people and prophets of these great religions were related to each other. They are the same people from the same land, kept apart by their ‘religions’. Abraham finds his way in Islam as Ibrahim, Moses finds his way as Musa, Isac travels about as Ishak. Rejoice, there are many forms but only one God a.k.a Allah, Manitou, Bhagwan, Zeus, Odin, Ahura Mazda, as many as all the people of this planet of ours. And we keep on fighting in HIS name. You fight for land, it is in HIS name. You fight for material prosperity. When this has to be grabbed from others, it is done in HIS name, exemplified in the entire history of colonialism. You want cheap labour and slavery, do it in HIS name. You want to extend illegal settlements, do it in HIS name. If you want to perpetrate any crime against humanity, you do it in HIS name. In every case, you are God’s chosen people, doing it for Your God, scriptures be damned. So Jews are the special ‘chosen’ people, Muslims are a chosen people. Hitler thought his people were chosen too and superior to everyone else. Are these the ideas of Man or God?

All the prophets have been called Saviors. Saving us from what? The simple answer is that they have tried to save us from ourselves. In the Bhagawat Geeta ( Song of the Lord) it is said , “ Jada jadahi dharmasya glaanir bhavati bhargava, abhyuthanam adharmashya, tadatmanan srijamaham”(Sanskrit). Whenever and wherever righteousness is overtaken by wickedness, “I” shall appear. In some way, all religions believe this. Within the holy Trinity, Christians believe that God came to Earth in the form of man, Jesus. Hindus believe that Jesus is an incarnation of God. But why were they all here? There must have been something drastic going on for God to take all the trouble to take a human form and come down to get crucified. Now we know that the problem of the people were and are so great that it has not been solved in two thousand years. Messenger after messenger has come and gone but the fighting has continued. God was there before the scriptures and God will be there after we are all long gone. In between for a brief period there are people, not a ‘chosen’ people, but an imperfect people bumbling along.

In the vast landscape of the Serengety in Africa, lies myriad species of animals, who are part of a complex food chain and a hierarchy. Yes it’s an animal thing, but can you recognize it in your own species. Kill or be killed. The instinct of survival. Instinct and hierarchies, its an animal thing. But man is supposed to be different, isn’t it? Because man has a mind which other animals don’t have. Within us too, there are gradations. The physical brain has layers of evolution . In the 50’s Paul MacLean at the National Institute of Mental Health USA, developed the concept of the Triune brain. His research indicated that the human brain consisted of three layers, each layer physiologically and chemically different, each layer corresponding to a different stage of evolution and each layer responsible for different kinds of mental processing. The innermost layer he identified as the reptillian brain. This part of the brain is the earliest to develop, the most primitive and is driven by instinct. This part of the brain creates patterns, habbits, routines, and controls instinctice behaviour as well as the sense of territory and safety. The middle layer of the brain is known as the paleo-mammalian brain or more commonly, the limbic system. This deals with emotion, form and sequence and plays a major role in learning and memory transformation. The neocortex or cerebral system, is the most recent to develop and makes us different from the animal kingdom. The processes that take place in the cerebral portion of the brain are cognitive. It is the neocortex that enables us to think, perceive, speak, and act as ‘advanced’ beings. Since then the split brain studies of Nobel winning Roger Sperry and his team at Cal Tech has come and Ned Herrmann has researched with creativity. There is no doubt that our physical evolution is happening in our brains and our minds. It is now certain that this is linked with spiritual development and evolution. Some of us are at the same evolutionary level as animal consciousness, instinctive with strong territorial and hierarchical needs. Some of us have evolved to higher levels of consciousness and intelligence, but are guided by the self individualism and good or bad are decided by “what’s in it for me”. At the next evolutionary level are those that get their joy and goals in life and work by serving other souls at a higher level of consciousness. Their way is the way of the Samurai. Finally there are those that are far removed from instinctive actions and are ready at the evolutionery level of Consciousness where they are ready to merge with the supreme or super-conciousness. There are no watertight compartments and one may have elements of each. If there is any ‘duty’ or purpose to our mortal lives that I can see, it is for those at higher levels of consciousness to raise and guide those at lower animal levels towards the higher path. It may take time, but the action has to be there, all the time. When we take such action, we get affected ourselves, we grieve, we weep and sometimes do not know what to do. But we must. In the early days, there were messengers. Now there’s only us and evolution thrusts this role onto us. Don’t wait for prophets, do what you must, selflessly, without waiting for rewards.

Let me tell you a story from elsewhere and the dustbowl of history. You are permitted to smile because you will know. I belong to a country which has never invaded another for a thousand years. It is a place where non-violence has been a way of life. Until violence is thrust on our face by history and the base reptilian nature of man. There is a place called Ayodha in the northern Indian State of Uttar Pradesh, which by ‘belief’ is considered the birthplace of the Hindu lord Rama and has been an ancient place of worship. Muslim invaders constructed a mosque called Babri masjid on the site in AD 1528 and by 1553 the first acts of inter-religious violence was recorded. In 1859, a fence was erected to separate the Hindu and Muslim places of worship, after which the inner court was used by Muslims and the outer by Hindus. By 1949 the government declared the premises a "disputed area" and locked the gates after idols of Lord Rama appeared inside mosque, allegedly placed there by Hindus. Both parties filed civil suits. In 1984, a committee was set up by Hindus to "liberate" the birthplace of Lord Rama and build a temple in his honor, led by the VHP , a right wing Hindu political group. In 1986, the gates of the disputed mosque were opened, according to orders of the district judge, to enable Hindus to worship there. In protest Muslims set up Babri Mosque Action Committee. In 1989, the VHP laid the foundations of a Rama temple on the land adjoining the disputed mosque. In 1990, VHP volunteers damaged the mosque partially. Negotiations aimed at solving the problem failed. In 1992, VHP volunteers demolished the Babri mosque, with the entire country watching on TV. About 2,000 people were killed in the violence that rocked India. In turn it sparked terrorist violence in the city of Bombay in 1993 when seven landmark buildings of the city including the Air India building were blown up by Muslims. Those of us who saw that happen, saw the shocking violence at the WTC as a kind of déjà vu. An endless cycle of violence.

To continue the story of Ayodhya, recently, violence started again in the State of Gujarat on Feb 27, 2002 and has continued since. The violence broke out when a train carrying Hindu activists was attacked and burned by Muslims, and nearly 58 people killed in the mayhem. The 3,000 VHP activists were coming back to Gujarat from Ayodhya, after attending a ceremony at the site where the VHP is determined to re-construct the controversial Ram temple, destroyed hundreds of years back. The proposed temple is to be erected on the ruins of the Babri Mosque. Violence spreads fast. It needs the action of an army in peacetime to bring some amount of control , but the damage is done. Public opinion and the press and all political parties called the attacks on the train shameful, but at the same time appealed to the VHP to desist from carrying out their plan to build a temple in Ayodhya. The VHP has rejected the plea, making the return of peace in the region uncertain. We know and we grieve. We grieve for the dead and we grieve for the living. There is no God in this, but there is religion, the base consciousness of man, killing and conflict. And we feel it in our hearts and conscience, from a duty to serve others. We are doing this in the name of God, they say. One wonders - who is God and who is the Devil.

And the anguish. I present to you one such tormented soul, Harsh Mander, a Hindu and Country Director of Action Aid India and a serving officer of the Indian Administrative Service writing on his horrifying visit to Gujarat after the violence.

“Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame. As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmadabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch small bundles of relief material, all that they now own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others bus themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending the wounds of the injured. But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organized bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century. I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I heard and saw, because it is important that we all know. Or maybe, because I need to share my own burden. What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her fetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity.

What can you say? A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A family escaping from Naroda- Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable directed her to`safety' and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire. I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver. Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a group of terrified women to cower them down further. In Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors - agree that what Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder, being organized like a military operation against an external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes. They were armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons, daggers and trishuls( tridents).They also carried water bottles, to sustain them in their exertions. The leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and reporting back to a co-ordination center. Some were seen with documents and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They had detailed and precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by members of the minority community, such as who were partners say in a restaurant business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were married who should be spared in the violence. This was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned pogrom. The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and business establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down of all their valuables, then cooking gas was released from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes. A trained member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building. In some cases, acetylene gas which is used for welding steel, was employed to explode large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs (place of prayer)were razed, and were replaced by statues of Hanuman and saffron flags. Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their sites covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic now plies over these former dargahs, as though they never existed.

The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The police is known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children. There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom.
As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. The law did not require any of them to await orders from their political supervisors before they organized the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable women and children from the organized, murderous mobs. The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country. I have heard senior officials blame also the communalism of the police constabulary for their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces have been known to act with impartiality and courage when led by officers of professionalism and integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their orders.
Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human suffering is the `civil society', the Gandhians, the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch and Ahmedabad? The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Ashram were closed to protect its properties, it should instead have been the city's major sanctuary. Which Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the death-dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of this country must carry on our already burdened backs, that the camps for the Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by Muslim organizations. It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim people is the concern only of other Muslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears the primary responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in any of the camps, to manage, organize the security, or even to provide the resources that are required to feed the tens of thousands of defenseless women, men and children huddled in these camps for safety.

The only passing moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat, were when I saw men like Mujid Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in these camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from four in the morning until after midnight to ensure that none of their children went without food or milk, or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader Mujid Ahmed is a graduate, his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to worry about his own loss. Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of food grain to feed some 5000 people who have taken shelter in the camp. The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time she hears the stories of horror by the residents in Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in the grounds of a primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs. As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhi would have done in these dark hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy, just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution. There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today. Only discourses on Newtonian physics, to justify the vengeance on innocents. We need to find these voices within our own hearts, we need to believe enough in justice, love, tolerance. There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are: Sare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara. Where everything good is present, in this land of ours. It is a song I will never be able to sing again.”


We study history and we study the scriptures and holy books but never seem to learn from them. We know that the atrocities perpetrated in the name of God will be repeated. There seems to be no shame with what we do with religion. There will always be some of us engulfed and living in the purely animal world. The holocaust lives on. Religion, scriptures or no scriptures, we have to live with our conscience and our duty and purpose to raise ourselves and others from where they have fallen. Not to 'convert' people to our chosen faith, but to empathize, understand and accept everyone on the common journey to the higher path and consciousness.The more powerful we are, the more is our duty. If there is one purpose to life, it is this. It is this. It is this.