Badri Raina: My God Problem

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Why people believe in a God

Nasir Khan, April 10, 2015

In a ZNet article Badri Raina reflects upon an old humanist tradition that shaped the social and religious outlook of different religious communities – Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists – in his native land, Kashmir, and the contributions of Kashmiri saints and rishis that enriched the Indian thought. He compares those bygone days with the present times when we see a strict observance of religious dogmas in place of a free exchange of ideas on these matters between Muslims and Hindus.

The ideas that Raina advances and the questions he raises about God, divinity and religion are understandable when we see the contemporary scene, not only in Kashmir but also in many other places and amongst the followers of Islam and other religions. His views are primarily of a tolerant, secularist person who is willing to enter into a free exchange of views with some intelligent religious people, including Muslims from his native land. I admire the humanist impulse that underlies his spiritual stirrings and see how the present situation anguishes him. Somehow, he also seems interested in that his intelligent compatriots may explore the rational ways of looking at God, divinity instead of remaining prisoners of their exclusivist dogmas. If that is to happen then the preconditions for such an enlightened approach do not exist in the social and political arenas at present.

In fact, it is quite unrealistic to track God and his divinity to a manageable level. People have looked at him in various ways and have given him all the attributes human beings have. He sees, watches, listens, speaks to some, knows-all, controls everything, becomes happy, gets angry and revengeful; he rewards or punishes us for our actions; he loves to be praised a lot and venerated by all. He is kind, generous and very rich because he owns everything in the universe. Many sacred books count all such qualities of him. We have learnt about his qualities.

But we can inform a theist that if anyone speaks, listens or sees then he must have a tongue, ears and eyes in his physical body because we cannot say that a non-objective being can speak, listen, see or has other attributes of a biological organism. It is common knowledge that we have the capacity to imagine such a being but that does not mean it can have an independent existence. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx pithily wrote, "A non-objective being is a non-being." Certainly, a theist cannot refute this; he will have no answer. The only availabel answer he will have is to point to some sacred book or some holy men who said this or that and by doing so he will feel that he has proven the existence of his inscrutable ‘objective being’!

So the final solution is not to question or explore but to accept what the authorities say about the Ultimate Authority and that is the end of the matter! But why so many intelligent and knowledgeable people continue to believe in a deity/deities may be due to the force of social tradition and early indoctrination from which they cannot easily break away. 

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 My God Problem

By Badri Raina , ZNet, April 4, 2015

These thoughts are occasioned by my most recent week-long embrace of the valley of Kashmir (March 22-28), among whose people I am, despite some five decades or more of living in metropolitan India. My visits and my engagement with Kashmir remain relentless, and my language, despite a half century of marriage outside the Kahmiri fold, still rolls from my tongue with accents of love and belonging, and I am owned there without the least subterfuge or qualification. My people are presciently brilliant of intellect and will question and research everything that may be questioned or researched barring one  thing—god  and religion therefrom.  There are of course those who do so, but away from public notice, it must be said. And presumably many others who keep their cogitations to themselves altogether as they conform to everyday  religious observance. 

 Let me quickly add that such questioning has now becoming a hazardous enterprise across the world’s religions, differing only in degrees of accommodation and consequence. This was not so until some three decades  ago. During my years in the valley, and long after as well, it was common to hear Kashmiris of all hues spar about divinity, argue many dark corners, lovingly mock at God’s frailties, propagate godliness as human selflessness and a habit of non-doctrinal embrace of the other, to laud the rich treasures of sufi-rishi wisdom that transcended denominations, indeed that challenged denominations, to celebrate the lives of saints as emblems of  all-encompassing love, and not to hold the definition of  faith  down to personal habits that may have been proscribed in a sacred text.

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