ٍThe
God and Us
ٍThe
God and Us
Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/363-GodAndUsEng.htm
Persian Version
http://www.ghandchi.com/363-GodAndUs.htm
From the 1979 Revolution of Iran till now, many of those who prefer not to talk much about religious issues, in practice are compelled to talk more than they wish in these areas. For example, in response to many of the Islamic intellectuals of Iran, at the time of the Shah, when they mentioned Big Bang cosmological theory as a proof for their God, not that many people would challenge them as to how this God whom in their view was the Creator from Nothingness to Being at the moment of Big Bang, could be equal to the God of Koran and Islam?
If this God of Big Bang, after the creation of the universe had decided to still be active and to send Holy Books and prophets, why doesn't he initiate a new contact, the same way he contacted Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad in the past, to end all these religious wars, and in this era of information and Internet not to allow His words to be distorted. Are all these like the recent earthquake tsunami God's higher will?
In my opinion, the subject of religion is two issues. The first are discussion dealing with the origin of the universe and whether a God has created it or the ultimate reality of existence should be viewed from a different angle? The second subject is about living right.
All the Abrahamic religions see the above two issues to be related, because in their view God is in charge of reward or punishment of right and wrong actions, and the individual will go to heaven or hell depending on his actions. In religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, within the realm of the second subject of religion, the checks and balances are held by Karma, reincarnation, and metamorphosis. Of course, the Hindu religion, in the first subject of religion, believes in God and the Brahman universal soul, but Buddha basically avoided discussions of the origin of the universe and God, and his emphasis was on living honestly thru meditation.
Can all the discussions of quantum physics and Big bang theory establish the existence or lack of an intelligence, beyond the universe, time and space, as we know it, or even be a reason for creation of the world, for example by something like the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, and not to have any impact on the day-to-day operation of the created world, so that it not be its responsibility for the hundreds of millions of destitute people dead in the tsunami and earthquakes?
I think this can be possible and it would be like the God of Spinoza about which I previously wrote in Sufism and Fatalism. And today we can closely study the light that had been emitted 14 billion years ago, at the moment of the start of time and space and as Stephen Hawking said to ask what was before Big Bang is like asking what is south of the South Pole, meaning the the concept of time was meaningless before the Big Bang.
But does this God have any resemblance to the God of Islam or Christianity? in my opinion the answer is "no", because the God that assigns prophets, and sends holy books, better use His power and stop the fatalities of the tsunami and earthquakes, and to also send a new holy book to remove all these contradictory interpretations of His Word.
Nonetheless, is it possible that a God other than the Abrahamic God to exist? The way the deists like Thomas Jefferson believed? In my opinion such a possibility exists. For example, I can understand the recent position of Professor Anthony Flew.
Yet the use of these discussions, by the intellectuals who never could or can cut off from Islam, is to justify their backwardness, and in my opinion is to misuse science. In other words, a religion like Buddhism which has believed in an ultimate reality in the world, and has called on its followers to use meditation for spiritual growth, and has not claimed to have a holy book, has the right to use the results of the scientific research for better understanding of reality, but a religion like Abrahamic religions, that consider God personally involved in the affairs of the world, and considers its prophet and clergy as the representatives of that God, better not to use the deist view of Big Bang and other scientific views, to save its retrogressive religion.
For example, I see in the writings of some of the political activists of Iran who write about using the new achievements of science to "return to spirituality". I do not understand what they mean by "return"! If they mean the spirituality of the Abrahamic religion like Islam, that are based on the belief in a personal God, it is better that human society not to return to that kind of spirituality, as the weakness of belief in the God of those religion is the reason, that many of the fanatic believers of those religions, with the loss of their faith in their religion, threw away their ethics too, the same way that Bertrand Russell has best discussed this issue of the fall of ethical values of the previous religious believers.
In contrast, those who have not made God the guardian of ethics, and ethics for them has been based on meditations of the individual and personal spiritual evolution, whether believing in religion like Buddhism or not, have offered a stronger ethics for societies. The experience of Buddhism proves that ethics can go forward separate from the discussion of God and Creation, and as noted by believed by some like Jack Li, spiritual evolutionary process is a personal process.
But to equate such evolution to a new interpretation of Islam, is the effort of those who are trying to save Islam, from the bitter experience of the last 26 years, and the reality that the moral decay of the yesterday's Islamic believers, is the result of a system that makes a ethical guardian king out of the God of Abrahamic religions, and not that the meditation of the individual to be the way to achieve personal evolution and higher ethics, and to recognize honesty and right action as the guiding light of human action, and not the fear of Abrahamic God who asks the murder of the son as a test to prove the faithfulness of the father to this God.
Basically the problem of the monotheism of the Abrahamic religion can best be seen in the Ten Commandments of Moses, although those ethical laws were necessary for the society, but the God which is like a tyrant monarchy is its guardian, which is the reason for all the decadence that follows after the belief in such God is lost in this world, and the call for "return" to such spirituality is nothing but retrogression. These are the words of the God of Moses in his second commandment, from the Ten Commandments, which clearly shows the result of such "return to spirituality" is returning to what kind the kind of thinking of the monotheistic religions which were like an absolutist monarchy in the realm of human thought:
"2. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or the water below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments."
Hoping for a Futurist, Federal, Democratic, and Secular Republic in Iran,
Sam Ghandchi, Editor/Publisher
IRANSCOPE
January 4, 2005
P.S. The following notes that I previously wrote in my articles entitled "Slaves of the Islamist God" and "Islamic Democracy is *not* Pluralism" are of relevant to the discussion here:
"A simple look at the Islamic texts shows that everywhere the human being is referred to as the *slave* of God. True that one can see this view in all Abrahamic religions, as I have discussed elsewhere, but its literal meaning is lost even by Evangelists who see a herd and shepherd relation in the predominantly Christian countries. Whereas the extreme slave and Master, or created and Creator relation, builds the legitimacy of clerics under Islamism, speaking in the name of God Master, to incontestably order fatwa killings, rape of prisoners, and other atrocities.
Years ago I wrote a paper entitled "Intelligent Tools: The Cornerstone of a New Civilization", which was an in-depth look at slavery and artificial intelligence, In that paper I noted how tool making nearly made humans as we know them, and how slave society was the best example of a society where the humans were clearly used as *tools*. On one hand tool-making made human civilization possible, on the other hand it made the attitude of controlling nature, and even controlling of humans by humans, possible, as I noted in another work entitled "Dancing in the Air".
The fact is that tool-making made it possible for humans to create new things and thus be *creator* of their *created* objects, and humans extended this view to the universe and human society at large.
Thus they developed a view of the world as being the work of a "Creator" and regarded themselves as well as everything else in the universe, as the "created". The Gods were Creators and the humans were just the created objects, sometimes just to entertain the Gods, and the priesthood speaking for those Gods, needed little explanation to justify the demands of those Supreme Masters from their subjects. This view of God is present, in various degrees, in all Abrahamic religions. In contrast, one seldom sees such a view in religions like Zoroastrianism of Iran, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, where they do not look at the universe in such anthropocentric ways, and even some traditions within the Abrahamic religions have discarded such ontological views.
The anthropocentric Creator-vs-created view of the universe has been dominant in all societies the same way the material basis of using humans as tools had remained until intelligent tools could be artificially made. As I have noted elsewhere, the ending of many slave societies was not because of ending the material basis of slavery, and rather it was because the shameful treatment of our kind as a mere tool was no longer acceptable in the societies that discarded it, and it is noteworthy that even in the modern U.S., slavery revived centuries after it had been discarded, because the material basis of slavery had not been eradicated. So until the material basis of slavery which is using the humans as tools is ended, one could not say the slavery was totally over and done with. Also the basis of the view where everything in the universe and society is viewed in a Creator and created or in a slave and master relation."
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