Thursday, July 26, 2007

Who Created Who? The Evolution of God


A lot of people ask me why I don’t believe in god. You tell me why you don’t believe in the big foot and I will tell you why I don’t believe in god. How stupid will it seem to pray to the big foot, die for the big foot or kill for the big foot? That is how stupid believing in a tyrant in heaven seems to me.
Of course the die hard theist will naively point to the theory that evidence all around us is testament to gods existence. The evidence all around us, being this world which would need a creator and the notion that science hasn’t been able explain creation. Here I fail to understand something. Just because science cannot provide reason for something doesn’t automatically make grounds for a creator. Just because evolution isn’t able to explain everything doesn’t mean that there is a god. Just because theory A might have some short comings, it doesn’t automatically legitimize theory B.
Man has always feared what it cannot understand. Man has always sought to provide reason to what he cannot explain. This amalgamation of fear and never ending desire to explain everything gives rise to concept of an all powerful deity. If something is there and you don’t know where it came from you have to pin a reason. This lack of knowledge gave rise to the myth of God.
Men worshiped fire, earth, water, sun, moon and stars. But when mankind understood the science behind them all we moved to another form of God. The God that cannot be seen cannot be heard. The concept of God started evolving. We worshipped these invisible gods. We started attributing anything we cannot explicate to this all knowing all powerful dictator.
God didn’t create Man. It was mans insecurity, fear and longing to explain the “explainable” that lead to myth of God. We created god to explain things couldn’t at the time.
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"Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world."
-- John Burroughs
“It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.”
-- Ludwig Feuerbach
In due course of time when science starts explaining more and more of the “unexplainable” the dominion of “GOD” will start diminishing. This will give rise to a new form of “God”. One that will again exit in the realms of the unknown till science starts infringing upon this new gods territory. God will continue to exist through us in the unknown.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Introduction

I am an ex-Muslim atheist. I was born and brought up in a Muslim family. During my childhood and throughout the major part of my teens I was made to recite the Quran every day (in Arabic and its Urdu translation). I used to pray 5 times a day. I started deviating from Islam at the age of 17. When I was 20 I declared myself an atheist in my closest circle of friends.
Why this transition. Well my college had a big part in it. It was there I learnt to think beyond what I was fed my whole life. I learnt to question the most basic of things and seek answers from an unbiased perspective. Eventually when you start questioning you will eventually stumble on one particular question. Is there a God?
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