Throughout the days after the earthquake in Turkey and Northern Syria when young children and others were pulled from underneath the rubble by brave rescue workers including those from the White Helmets, there was the constant cry of Allah Hu Akbar, Allah Hu Akbar, which translates as God is Great. To be fair it is great, but the obvious question is why God was not so great in respect of the tens of thousands who died under the rubble. I have been thinking about this and have decided that God is great,” doesn’t cut the mustard” a metaphor that as one of our great intellectuals and thinkers recently pronounced on a less important issue. Let me lay my cards on the table, I am not a person of faith, however, that does not exclude me from a serious and “rational” discussion on this issue. Though, I may have started on the wrong foot by invoking rationality.
The Abrahamic faiths which include Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have their male God on a pedestal, in that he is not just omnipotent, but omnipresent, all-loving, a God of fortitude, patience, forgiving and just. However, the God in the Old Testament is quite frankly scary. This is a God that must be loved, reassured of the love, praised and obeyed, quite frankly verging on being a megalomaniac. This a God who commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of his fealty and just before he was about to do it, God said,” I’m only joking” and gave him a lamb to sacrifice instead. In addition to all the other attributes associated with God, he is also a bit of a prankster. Not to labour the point of God being a man but to be clear, it was men who decided that God was a man. In the Hindu tradition, God is non-binary, as expressed in the Hindu version of the Lord’s prayer which starts with,” you are my mother you are my father”, there you go.
People of faith often talk about God’s wisdom, a wisdom that allows children to be crushed under a collapsed building, followed by the comment that God transcends meaning. My answer, you have had a couple of thousand years to have worked this out and it seems no progress has been made. Then others would say, particularly in the Christian tradition, that suffering is a part of the “salvation deal” which is consistent with the suffering of Jesus on the cross. So, what is being expressed by people of faith, is that a child’s suffering or for that matter anyone’s suffering is part of the” salvation deal”, really. In Islam, redemptive suffering purifies bad or negative behaviour, try to explain that to the parents of children who died in the earthquake.
A comment by contributor on BBC radio said, suffering disturbs me but not my faith. This implies a Jekyll and Hyde attribute to his faith, with faith being a sort of out-of-body experience. This is the sort of gobbledygook that implies that to be a believer you have to suspend disbelief.
The other question is, is God a useful myth created by man to subjugate others? The answer to this is yes, do you remember the Holy Roman Empire or the Spanish Inquisition of yester years? Today we have the zealots of the Taliban and Iran who proudly exhibit their misogyny by killing young women who want the freedom to express their femininity and parity with men. These male zealots chant Allah Hu Akbar as they beat and brutalise young women, all with the full authority and blessings of God’s enforcers, the pious Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada. A survey recently showed that religious states are the most miserable, well that doesn’t come as a surprise, just watch the Handmaid’s Tale.
Institutionalised religions not only exorcise rationality but completely remove agency through doggy rites of passage ceremonies such as Christening, Baptism, first communion, confessions etc. In Islam, it also starts early with Adhan where prayer to serve Allah is whispered into the right ear of a new-born. Judaism also includes a variety of confirmation-type ceremonies such as Bat or Bat mitzvahs.
My father said to me his job as a father was to “liberate and not indoctrinate”, it seems those who bang on about God, their job is to indoctrinate not liberate. Bless the father, my father. The outshot of this is that the religious communities are held together by the fear of being an outsider.
I have no issue with those good people who derive comfort in difficult circumstances from a direct and spiritual connection with God, distant from religious dogma, religious mythology or the iron grip of a religious institution. What is clear from the many natural disasters that have occurred, is that God doesn’t intervene on anyone’s behalf either directly or through the process of prayer.
Here the Hindus seem to have got it right with a degree of rationality. They believe that when God created the universe, it was job was done. From then on, he or she decided to sit back and see what pans out. In other words, a non-interventionalist God that has neither the attributes of humans nor the tendencies of a megalomaniac. So, just to be clear, God is not made in the image of man.
Even though I don’t believe in a God, that makes a lot more sense than the omnipotent etc, etc, etc, stuff that the Abrahamic traditions believe in. The non-interventionalists God may be the answer to the question of why a 5-year-old child survives an earthquake and the rest of her family perish, cause and effect and not the fable that God works in mysterious ways. There is no mystery in the generosity of people in terms of financial support provided, there is no mystery in the doctors and rescuers who flocked to support the victims of the earthquake whether with faith or none: to me if there is a mystery, it’s the depth of people’s humanity. The very essence of humanism is put beautifully by Robert Ingersoll in two quotes “Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.” and “Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.” What’s God got to do with it?
Let me know what you think in the comments below 👇
Suneil Sharma
22nd March 2023
The Gob 
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