Oh My God: Part Four

Oh My God Part Four

BT Song 1226

I am not sure how many devotees of the Lord are going to read books by secular scholars like Sri Arun Shourie. However, the way he analyzes scriptures, particularly the Quran and the Bible, and raises several serious questions, will overwhelm the followers of these scriptures. When I read the following question he raised, I was deeply moved:

…Like the God of the Old Testament, Allah deliberately creates a distinction between virtuous deeds and sin; next, He deliberately creates man in such a way that he will transgress, that he will sin; while He exhorts everyone to forgive trespasses, He insists that He will not forgive one trespass—and that is the failure to acknowledge that He is great, that He alone is great. We can only conclude with Schopenhauer {Cf. ‘On Religion’, in Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Classics, 1981, pp. 183-5} that He deliberately creates the world to watch it suffer forever. (p.316)—Arun Shourie, Religion in Politics, New Delhi, Roli Books Pvt. Ltd.,  1987, 3^rd impression (enlarged), 1989. [Italics original]

But his response such accounts of God is more challenging:

Clearly, then, such accounts of God cannot be taken as reportage. It is hard to convince oneself that the authors have ‘seen’ God and found Him to be so singularly obsessed with our opinion of Him. The accounts make sense in only one way; they portray not God but what it is in our conduct that we went to rationalize, they portray what we want our conduct to be, that is, they show the role-model that we are putting before ourselves. In brief, whatever the nature of the real God, God as we know him from these Books is a product of our needs, of the environment and circumstances in which the books were written

“The influence of time, circumstance, and need can be seen not just in peripheral notions like Paradise, or in sundry provisions of law, but in the central concepts too. Consider as an example the be-all and end-all of the Old Testament and the Quran, that is, God or Allah Himself. What is His central, His exclusive concern, indeed His preoccupation? It is that we acknowledge two things—namely, that He is great, and that He alone is great.” (p.315)

“The books thus deal with relatives, with things born of time and place, not with eternal verities. Once we have documented this for concept after concept, and once this fact percolates into the common mind, we will see that the book, the religion that flows from it, and the priest and politician who strut about in its name, are not things over which we should be breaking one another’s heads.” (p.319)

A true devotee of the Lord has to agree with Shourie that “the religion that flows from it, and the priest and politician who strut about in its name, are not things over which we should be breaking one another’s heads.” After reading this, I sat quietly for a few seconds. Then a burden came into my heart and tears began to flow as I said to the Lord, “I am a fool, what can I do? I came only to You to know, what else can I do?” As inspiration came, I wrote this song, as the burden continued to push my reason further down. But when I completed this song, I found some release in my spirit as I begged the Lord to give me such a status in Him that goes beyond reason, religion, and even scriptures.

Revised 11-7-2024

Gurukulam