Man's Fate and God's Choice - Bhimeswara Challa (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

history itself is a history of our own kind, always man at the epicenter. And at the end, man always sees himself as the master, mover and shaker, the valorous, victor or victim, utterly oblivious to his cosmic insignificance. Our ‘history’ is but a chronicle of barbarity that has nothing to do with beasts. The so-called anthropic principle

 

proposes that ‘the universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its evolution’, which could imply that our universe has been ‘fine tuned’ by an intelligence external to human life. In short, this view holds that the cosmos is old enough and big enough to have already evolved a carbon-based formula of life. The building blocks of life, it suggests, are not produced on earth but in the cosmos, in the stars, underlining the interconnectivity of the universe.

The other view posits that mankind is an insignificant or fortuitous accident lost in the immensity of the cosmos or, in the words of physicist Steven Weinberg, a farcical event in the chain of accidents. The earth itself is a blue dot in the Milky Way; our sun just one among millions of other suns of a small galaxy, which, again, is just one among hundreds of millions of them. We think of ourselves as natives of the earth but some scientists even say that we might actually be extraterrestrials and that life actually came from some other planet. Even if we assume that ‘intelligent’ life is confined to this planet, the sweep of the history of life on earth is far grander and greater than that of the rise of man as a pre-eminent species on Earth. The cosmic eye has seen meteorites the size of Manhattan hitting the earth, continental drifts and breakups, dramatic changes in climate, the opening and closing of corridors of intercontinental migration, and the wholesale extinction of species, some of which were far more resilient and stronger, though not brainier, than man. Our faculties of conscious awareness, thinking, information analysis and application and prioritization have been so myopic that we have repeatedly refused to heed the warnings of looming nonlinearities and the telltale rumblings. But the far greater and more imminent threat to both earth and man at this juncture may not be a menacing meteorite, or even convulsive climate change, but malice in the mind; it may not be a continental drift but technology run amok; it may not be an invasion from Mars but the corrosion stemming from within man’s consciousness.

There is a growing disconnection between our cognitive ability and social conduct, knowing and doing, precept and practice. The gap between ignorance and awareness is easier to fill than the gap that yawns between what we know and what we do. It is now widely accepted that we are governed not by a single seamless brain but by several parts of the brain

— or even several ‘brains’ — which are both interconnected as well as autonomous, and the interplay of these entities determines our behavior. Therefore, like the universe which is now being termed multiverse, our brain too is not a ‘uni-brain’ but a ‘multi-brain’. The part of the brain that deals with acquiring and storing knowledge seems to be poorly connected with those parts that relate to action. It is a congenital deficiency of the human species, and with the knowledge revolution — or more accurately the information revolution — that is sweeping the world, that ‘deficiency’ has become a serious drag on human betterment.

Modern science claims to have created a ‘global brain’ but it has no say in how that ‘brain’ functions. If its working remains as disorderly as our personal brain, it could turn into a ‘global drain.’ The booming belief in God has had little bearing on our ‘global brain’; if any, it seems to embolden our individual brains to be more callous and cruel. And secularism, which is considered to be synonymous with ‘being progressive’, has come to erode much of the traditional territory of the sacred.

 

God and good men

In both secular and sacred thought, we have a far better idea about evil and evil-doers than, ironically, of goodness and good men. Someone, probably English crime writer P.D. James, remarked that we would be better off if we learnt to behave like ‘good animals’ and less like ‘gods’. Since, according to science we are essentially ‘animals’ — the human animal — what remains to be learnt is ‘goodness’. Most people want to be ‘good’ and also be ‘good at’, but the world of ‘goodness’ is such a maze that they often lose their way. Wanting to be ‘good’ we often end up doing ‘bad’. The irony is that we claim we will do anything to be good

 

except doing good to someone else. Still, such is our longing for ‘good’ that if only someone can make a ‘goodness pill’ the sales of it will break all precedents. Its attraction lies not only in that we do not have to rack our brains wondering what is good and what is bad but, even more, it bridges the yawning chasm of our lives — knowing what is the right thing to do and not being able to do that. Since no such pill yet exists, we have to struggle with questions of theology, moral philosophy, and practical life. Is goodness synonymous with being virtuous? Should we be good for ‘goodness sake’, or for God, or for our own self-respect? Is it personal rectitude or public morality? Is it what we do or how we do? What is the litmus test? In raising such questions, we assume that in the human world there is a sharp line between ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’, and ‘good things’ and ‘bad things’. And that if we do ‘bad’ we are ‘bad’, and if we do ‘good’ we are ‘good’. In reality, we often find that we can do ‘bad’ deeds and remain ‘good’ men, and do ‘good’ deeds and not necessarily be ‘good’ men. An assumption is that to be ‘good’ or to do ‘good’ we must do something heroic and extraordinary, and sacrifice something. Too often we downplay the power of unlabored affection, a tender touch, a toothy smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around, and are the true signatures of goodness. And too often we look for grand gestures like generosity and charity. We tend to think it is okay to give a withering look if we can follow it up with an act of kindness like giving alms. And we behave as if we have a ‘right to be rude’ if the other person happens to be a subordinate or a dependent.

We cannot think about goodness for two minutes without the thought of God cropping up. The question is not about goodness of God — that we just assume — but about God’s role in ensuring our goodness. Does God really like good men or is it that because they are good, He wants to test how good they really are? And how does He judge goodness? It is a part of anthropocentrism to believe that God’s job is to keep us good, and that if we fall prey to evil, He has implicitly failed or forsaken us? And when we are at a dead end, we turn to the question of all questions — what is the matter with God? The pervasive indignity, injustice, and cruelty in the world have led many observers to ask why God allows the ‘innocent’ to suffer and the ‘evil’ to triumph. In the Karma theory, it may be noted, the ‘innocent’ may be the ‘evil’ ones in another life and their suffering a way to pay for their papa or sins. When one unspeakable horror is brazenly followed by another, more unspeakable or unthinkable horror, without let up or hindrance — Holocaust, Gulag, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur — the troubling thought does cross our minds if such things on such scale, particularly those triggered by religious rivalry, could happen without some sort of divine imprimatur.

Or is man a creature whose evolution has gone so awfully awry that even God cannot set it right? Some say Hitler’s Holocaust or Stalin’s Gulags happened on earth, not because of human viciousness but because of what has been dubbed, in the words of Martin Buber (1952), as “eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God.”39 It is not just that modern men, due to their absorption in technology and material progress, have become incapable of hearing God’s voice. The timeless question is why does God allow ‘good men’ to fail in life and fall in sin? Human history, mythology, and sacred texts are full of gods, ‘good men’, spiritual leaders and many others who succumbed to temptation. In the Bible, David, dear to God, committed adultery with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, then had her husband murdered to cover up the affair.

 

 

 

 

39 Cited in: Maurice S. Friedman. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue. Accessed at: http://www.religion- online.org/showchapter.asp?title=459&C=386

 

Man is frail in flesh, mind, and spirit. Why does not God make us stronger and impervious to temptation? God Himself might have chosen, looking at what man has wrought on earth, to stay still and silent in our age and time. The Hindus however explain this as the inevitable symptoms of the Kali Yuga. According to the Hindu concept of cyclical time, we are living in the evil age of Kali Yuga, which is said to have started more than 3,000 years ago, and expected to last another 432,000 earth years. It was at the beginning of the Kali Yuga that King Yudhistira, in the great epic Mahabharata, who asked the immortal sage Markandeya, “When morality and virtue come to an end, what will remain?”40 We know what ‘remains’, now and here, but why must it be that way? Are we required to be ‘bad’ simply because we are born in this yuga? Who benefits from human misery? Is everyone born in this age of hardened sinners doing their final ‘time’ on this hell of a planet? What cosmic cause is served if we are forced to do things we do not want to do, but are unable not to do? Bereft of any answers suitable to our intellectual intelligence, we again turn to God, but He remains an inscrutable Sphinx. It raises the question, in the words of one of the characters in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian (1985) “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?”41 In other words, does our decadence have a divine sanction? Some theologians skirt around the torment and argue that God’s designs are not for us to discern, that He is not answerable to anyone, nor is He in any kind of moral bondage to man. Some say that events like the Holocaust and the Gulag are God’s punishments, but does it mean that people like Hitler and Stalin were God’s chosen people? and that they and their henchmen were, so to speak, ‘doing God’s work’?

If God is faultless and horrific things keep happening, and the ‘evil’-doers seem to go scot free, then how does one make sense of it all? The answer is startlingly simple — just extend the time frame beyond birth and death. One must look at life as a continuum that stretches over multiple lives in myriad motifs, in each of which we carry forward both the good and the bad we do, and what we call ‘quality of life’ and suffering are but a reflection of these actions; a sort of perpetual collection of dues and payback of debts; and in so doing, we again continue to do both good and bad things, and the cycle continues. Our spouses, children, kinsmen — indeed every