At Metafilter. The irrepressible atheist, MadMan adds his bit there as well as on his own blog. Part of the problem with this whole God Affair is that God mostly is conceived as a Him (or Her if that pleases feminist lurkers on this blog). That is, human qualities/aspects/behaviours are attributed to God. When this is done, God becomes easy meat for systemmatic deconstruction. Perhaps, the best argument for atheism comes from one of the biggest atheists of all: Bertrand Russell. In one of his “unpopular essays,” he quotes this story about a devout Nun who supposedly took her bath fully clothed. When asked why she did so because she anyway had the privacy of her bathroom where nobody could see her, she replied, “Oh, but the Good Lord sees all!”

It is hard to counter the reasoning given by the Raving Atheist or other atheists. My position on the existence of God is somewhat fuzzy. I’m neither a full blown theist nor a committed atheist. Yet I believe that God is primarily a product of fear or incomprehension of natural phenomena or both. To put it in one word: ignorance. I’ve often thought about this: we learn that there is a certain something called God after we come into this world. Similarly, we’re unsure whether we “return to God” after we die; yet we kind of hope that that’s where we return to. To that end, God is a creation of man.

The conception of God by different religions varies vastly. Monotheistic religions have more or less a direct and an only conception of God–nay an only conception of an only God. He is attributed the aforesaid human qualities. He has the same passions that humans have: he can be angry, frustrated, happy, jealous…. The conception of an only God is the most mischievous element in these religions. Consider this: this God is jealous if you worship other Gods (meaning Gods of other religions), he brands such worshippers as heathens or kafirs and orders their conversion or destruction.

However, there is yet another conception of what is called “God.” It isn’t God in the sense atheists use the term. The closest term I can find for it is….well, Reality. This concept as enunciated in Hinduism–which is not a religion in the sense Islam & Christianity are–states that an individual is a manifestation of the entire universe. When you reach that realization–that the whole universe is within you–you are said to have seen Reality. The Indian concept of God has its roots here. You therefore find God in everything in India–I don’t have to repeat the bit about seeing God in stones, pictures, paintings, etc, ad nauseam. What is meant by this is that it helps in your quest to find Reality if you see unity in everything including stones. It is for this reason perhaps that atheism was unnecessary in India. And contrary to popular belief, atheism was not shunned in India.

This sense of underlying unity makes it possible to accommodate any number of Gods. Even a cursory study of the basics of Indian philosophy is revealing: it doesn’t attribute natural destruction to God. Rather, it inquires into the nature of creation and destruction. To that end, it gives us the concept of the cycle of creation, order, deterioration and destruction much in the same way as a human is born, ages, and dies.