Dec 17, 2007

setting the premise

Having talked about reason, I am going to over the next few posts place the concept of god that I am supposed to have imbibed thus far in life at the altar of reason. I am going to use the knife of reason to dissect the flesh of god and religion and see what makes it tick. I accept that things are likely to bloody. I do not know what it is that I am going to find. I do not know what it is that I am searching. All I know is that I am looking for something and I desire to find it.

What I intend to do is think of all the various reasons that religion may have been thought up of and see which of those reasons hold true today. I plan to think of all the situations that may have led to the god, as we know it. At this point, I do not want to talk about the immortality of that god. I shall start with the assumption that god existed forever, is going to exist forever. However, religion cannot be something that existed forever. The reason being that religion is nothing but a set of beliefs about that god. The god on which the beliefs are based can be always present; however, those beliefs will be formed only when we begin to see the presence of that god. Unless the first man realized god and began thinking about the beliefs that surrounded that god, religion could not exist.
Therefore we will start with the premise that god existed and religion was thought up.

The next necessity is to decide about which religion we are going to talk. The reason this is paramount is that there are scores of religions that co-exist in this world (they at least make claims of co-existence). It would not be fair to pick a religion and then proceed to show that it is a façade. For this purpose, whenever I use the word god it means all of the following
  • Omnipresent
  • Omniscient
  • Omnipotent
In addition, please note that I shall refer to god as he in most cases. This is along the norm that is followed while referring to god in general. Even though there are female gods, for some unknown reason the word she is not associated with god. Therefore, if you are a person who does not want god to get chauvinistic, I request you to replace “he” with either it, to denote the lack of a gender or he/she to render the question of gender unimportant.

I guess that most religions make these claims of this god. They claim that the god is present across everything and across every period. It is as on a vector scale, god extends from plus infinity to minus infinity on all possible dimensions.

The omniscient god is all knowing. He has the ability to tap into all thoughts of all the people and is in a position to distinguish between good and bad. He is capable of listen to all the prayers as well as all the questions.

He is omnipotent; he has control on everything. He created the universe and therefore has the power to destroy it. He created the world we live in and has the power to make it all go away in snap. He gives reason to everything and he is the one that decides what the purpose behind everything is. Ultimately, everything is because he wanted it so.

Now we have god, we have reason. We still need religion. I will talk about religion in the next post. I hope that when that is done, we can get to business and put religion and god to the test of reason.