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I am no
intellectual and I am no writer, but I do want to express my opinions
without being opinionated. And I do find this question interesting
enough to muse over, though as I said, I do not claim to be qualified
enough to really answer it with justice, rather I am just exploring it
further. Secondly, I waited enough to see if anyone among many
well-informed and scholarly participants in this forum will respond to
this question.
Very strangely,
some question seemingly simple may be expounded in quite a detail and
this question suspiciously appears to be of that category.
Which term is used for a group
of people who believes on God but does not believe on any religion past
or present?
I wrestled with it
a little bit because this provided me chance to explore some interesting
things. In fact, the whole discussion of evolutionists vs. creationists
rests on some of the assumptions built into this question. In my own
account of the seminar I tried to bring up to the surface some of the
‘priory’ assumptions, some of the fundamental thought patterns, which
creates the dilemma inherent in the discussion.
In fact, there may
not be any dilemma if we check our ‘priories’ first. As far as this
question is concerned there is a relatively simple answer at the end of
this discourse, which I found in a book, but before that I would like to
put forward following questions so that some of the conceptual
categories inherent in this topic may be dissected in order to be better
able to see it in a broader perspective.
What we really mean
by God?
God has many names
and each name may signify different variations of divinity to different
people. But beyond the name how ‘God’ is seen, felt or thought over by
people?
What we mean by
religion?
Can there be any
group of people whose members can have identical belief?
What is belief?
Even within every
religion there are so many sets of beliefs and creeds. What is the value
of labeling people in one way or other?
What we mean by
believing in religion?
Individuals may
internalize, to varying degrees, the words we hear, which we think are
expressing our beliefs.
Can God only be
seen in relation to humans?
Like the famous
question ‘ Will there be light if there are no eyes?’ this may also be
asked,
“Will there be God
if there were no humans?”
To explain little
further: light is small band of electromagnetic waves spectrum but is
not ‘seen’ by eyes or even by nervous system as such. It is
reinterpreted. It becomes a word. Can there be the word ‘light’ if there
are no eyes? This does not prove anything either way. It only points
towards the body of knowledge called ‘epistemology’ which needs to be
incorporated in any study of religion or science.
Now for a simple answer to this question I quote
from the book, “The World’s Religions” by Huston Smith,
“In The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky has Ivan blurt out: "I don't accept this world of God's, and
although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It's not that I
don't accept God, you must understand, it's the world created by Him I
don't and cannot accept."
Ivan is not alone in
finding God, perhaps, good, but the world not. Entire philosophies have
done the same - Cynicism in Greece, Jainism in India…..”
And probably Taoism in
China. All these philosophies believe in a universal force = God which
is not necessarily involved in human affairs, or some version of this
concept. I think, these
philosophies do point out towards similar idea as put forward by Iffat
Zehra.
At the end I would
like to mention a saying of Plato, in which he likens the human
condition to some cavemen who are tied at the entrance of a cave with
their backs towards the opening, and all they can see are the shadows of
their bodies playing on the wall of the cave, cast by the light from the
open, and they take those shadows as reality of their being.
The
ultimate question is that can humans transcend their thinking and their
very being and come to know of a reality which is not comprehendible
just with logic and reasoning but is just comprehendible by the so
called ‘leap of faith’.
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