Vimoh's Blog

One point about the world that is often brought into the debate about whether God exists or not is suffering. What sort of God would watch as his creation rips itself apart with violence? What kind of God would let his followers die of pain?

The people who ask this question are often the ones that take the metaphorical version of religion – mythology – to be all there is. They imagine God to be some kind of “guy” (a big huge, all-pervading guy, but a guy nevertheless) sitting somewhere up in heaven passing judgment on all that exists in this world. They ask what he could be thinking when he unleashes terrible trauma upon them. Some imagine him taking joy in it all. As someone recently said to me on Twitter, “God, if he exists, is a sadist bastard.”

The error in this is obvious. Human beings have a bloated idea of their own importance. And our imagination assigns human characteristics to everything. So a storm becomes cruel, an earthquake becomes murderous, a wild animal is seen as a devious monster. This is mythology — a subjective way of looking at the universe. So God, according to this view, becomes something with human proportions, human attitudes, human tendencies, and even a human appearance.

More importantly though, I think what makes people complain about suffering is the belief that they are somehow the centre of the universe. It is the same belief that people had back when they thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around them. It is the same belief that caused Socrates to drink poison and the findings of Galileo to be challenged. They chose to look at the big picture. But people simply refuse to come to terms with the fact that they are only a small piece of a puzzle that is far greater than them.

Look around and you will find that everything suffers. The breakfast you had this morning caused some life form – either vegetable or animal – to die. Millions of germs die every time you sneeze. You hurt grass every time you walk on it. Animals either kill and eat each other, or they die of starvation. It is suffering both ways. Life progresses by feeding on itself — science calls it the food chain. That is the way the world works. You are not only suffering, you are also causing an equal amount of “suffering” to the world around you.

In fact, if you pay it even a little thought, you may conclude that this is the only way the world can work. If we use a machine metaphor for the world, we find that suffering is merely our subjective view of friction. No machine can work without friction. Things need to rub against each other, corrode each other, in order for any machine to work. Without friction, there would be no machine.

People who ask, “Why can’t all the suffering just go away? Why can’t we all just live in peace?” are wishful thinkers. They don’t realise that in order for the world to even exist, someone or the other must suffer. What we call suffering is subjective. We only get sentimental about it because it happens to us, or to creatures we include in our idea of “us”.

Oddly enough, on the human level suffering serves to enhance the imagination. It makes man aware of his smallness and helplessness. It teaches him that he doesn’t matter as much as he thought he did. It makes him humble. It seems to say, “You are no different from that baby deer in the forest who was mauled to death by ravenous lions yesterday on National Geographic. It happens to everyone and everything. Get used to it!”

A child that hates school but is made to go anyway suffers. A guy who has to put up with a sour boss in office suffers. Someone on a deathbed waiting to die of a painful cancer suffers. It is all the same thing. Some suffer more, some less. The difference is of degree, not of kind.

Interestingly, man is the only animal that can work through suffering. While a crippling disease will truly “cripple” an animal, history is full of examples of human beings who made the world a better place in spite of their own personal suffering.

The scientist Stephen Hawking is paralysed from head to toe. The great Helen Keller was deaf, mute AND blind (my imagination fails when I try to put myself in her shoes). Beethoven was deaf (and he was a musician). These people not only did things, they actually did them better than others.

Reason? They didn’t allow their suffering to drag them into selfishness. They didn’t fall into the trap of thinking that someone up there is exclusively targeting them with misfortunes. They looked beyond themselves, into the world around them and decided to contribute to the betterment of the people around them.

Their suffering taught them a lesson, and they were intelligent enough to learn it.

In the comments to one of my last posts, Ankur Banerjee pointed me to a beautiful speech (even more so because it was made impromptu) by the late Douglas Adams. It was about the possibility of there being an artificial God — God imagined by man to fill in gaps in his understanding of the world. In one part of the speech, Adams suggests that early man, when he found that the world suited him so much, imagined that it must have been made for him, and that whoever made it must love him a lot therefore.

Let me start out by saying that I am not at all opposed to this idea. I have pondered this angle a lot and have even explored it in a post I wrote a few years ago. It is certainly possible that the idea of God came out of man’s mind and I would be lying if I said that this does not strike me as logical.

Having said that, let me also add that the idea does not negate anything in my belief system. I believe that God exists – either as an entity, or an idea, or a force, or a guy with a thousand arms and forty thousand heads – I don’t know. All I know is that he (or she or it) does exist. My personal definition of existence is very wide and allows for a whole lot of abstractions to share space with elements of the tangible universe. So when I say God exists, I may mean that he is in my head and that is quite enough for me.

But let us not make this about me. My interest in the question how God came to be is perhaps inferior to my interest in the question of why God came into being. The how-why divide may seem facile to some. So hear me out.

Regardless of whether God — a force superior to man — created him, or man imagined a superior force after he “just happened”, we are still faced with the inescapable presence of God in our lives, if not as a tangible reality, then at least as an idea.

My question is this (and try and think it over with an open mind): Why did man create God? Why did he imagine Him? What was the need for it? Why did he feel compelled to find a meaning in the world around him that there was no physical need for?

Animals don’t do this. They get along just fine without bothering with the meaning of things. Why is it only man that has this need to imagine things, to tell stories, to wonder about things higher than himself? Why does man have these fancy philosophical questions? Why does man feel humbled? Why is he always looking up? Why do we personify nature? Why do we imagine the wind to be a god? Why do we imagine the sea to be the thousand-eyed Varuna? Why to we consider the earth our mother?

Some will label it delusion of the mind. But I think that is simplifying it far too much. Imagining things is not an option that we exercise. It is a very deep-rooted human tendency. We indulge in little acts of imagination (acts of faith?) uncountable times everyday, mostly without even knowing it.

Many people cherish objects handed down to them by their parents. These can be a pen, or an item of clothing, or something like that. But to them, these are more than just simple objects. To them, these are something more. They imagine a higher meaning in them. Many people yell at their computer when it hangs. Many people find themselves considering certain places more significant than others – the house they grew up in, their first school, the bridge on which they kissed someone for the first time, etc.

These things, while they may not look related, demonstrate the same function of the human mind. Namely, the tendency to believe that the world is more than it appears to be. Belief in the existence of God is just a larger concept than imagining that the bridge on which you kissed your first girlfriend is somehow special and unique. It is all imagination.

My question (as if I have not asked it enough times already), is WHY. Why do we do all this? I have blogged before about our need for rituals and superstitions. Plus, there is scientific evidence of our brains being hard-wired to be superstitious. But that doesn’t answer the question, it only adds to it. Why is man built this way?

For the purposes of this post, I will ignore the idea of God as creator, because we started off with Adams’ suggestion of God being an artificial construct. Thus, we end up with the theory that man naturally evolved from lower animals and got to be this way. But even so, the god-damned why remains unanswered.

If man evolved from lower animals, and lower animals lack the sort of rich imaginative tendencies that man has, does it not naturally follow that what we have is something superior to what they have? Does it not say that the ability to believe and the ability to imagine meanings and the tendency to see things for more than what they seem to be, is something that we gained through the marvelously complex system of evolution by natural selection? May it not be that we evolved to believe in God? And if we did, the question that follows inevitably is – why. Why did we evolve to believe in forces higher than ourselves? Why can’t we just live our lives like animals without wondering about our place in the universe?

I don’t have an answer. But I will not pretend that the question doesn’t exist. So in order to show respect to the question, I will proceed to make some logical deductions.

Let us consider the human body to be a computer. It is a fascinating machine, capable of amazing feats. It boggles our minds. We grow curious and start exploring it. As time passes, our understanding of the computer grows better and better. We get to its very basics. We discover that it is made of metal and plastic. We go even deeper, down to the circuits. We find what makes the software work. We then sit content in the knowledge that our understanding of the computer is complete.

But what we conveniently ignore is (brace for impact) the why. Why is the computer there in the first place? Why is such amazing software installed on it? For what purpose? Ignore the question about who made the computer if you want to. What we should at least wonder about is why it exists at all.

This is, in fact, the single greatest philosophical question that has obsessed man since the beginning of time. Why does anything exist at all? What is the point of it? The name religion gives that reason, is God. Plain and simple.

And the question is not as hopelessly unanswerable as it may seem. We have the computer and we know what it can do. We know that there is an operating system (the soul?) and a web browser on it (imagination?). Does it not naturally follow that there may be a web out there, waiting to be browsed? I mean, why would we be given an Internet Explorer if there were no Internet to explore?

I think the problem here lies with our temporal way of seeing things. Humans have very definitive ways of defining concepts like “beginning”, “end”, “creation” etc. And as we have learnt more, these definitions have been challenged and, in many cases, demolished. For example, our ideas about “up” and “down” disappeared the moment we ventured into the weightlessness of outer space. Could it not be that the limitations of time (as we understand it) do not apply to the force that created us? Why does God have to be something that came “before” us? After all, there are objects in the known universe that mock “time” all the time (black holes for example).

The other idea is to look at the God concept as something resembling music. Music, as we know it today, didn’t exist till humans came around. But we definitely didn’t create music. It has always been around. What we really did was perceive it in a way that none had done before.

Why can’t this be the way man “created” God? The force that made all things may have always been around. All man did (when he got around to being able to do so) was perceive him with a faculty only he possessed — imagination.

Some time ago, during a debate about God as creator, I found myself running into a wall with my atheist opponent who kept refusing to acknowledge anything “magical”. Funny thing was, I wasn’t even talking about anything magical. I was only suggesting the possibility that something intelligent may have created the universe. My friend kept insisting that the idea of something magical having created the universe was preposterous.

He was making the common mistake of equating higher intelligence with magic. He probably wouldn’t have resisted my suggestion as vehemently if I had said that an intelligent alien race created the universe. It was the word God that he wasn’t comfortable with.

But this disagreement pointed me in another direction. I realised that we tend to label a lot of concepts as ‘supernatural’ without a second thought. Things that science can’t explain are labeled supernatural. Ideas that are not reflected in scientific literature of the time are labeled supernatural. The God concept, of course, gets thrown into that pile as well.

Basically anything that isn’t part of the tangible, knowable, visible universe; is classified as supernatural. But it is not a valid classification, is it? The mistake we make in making such a classification is assuming that nature is only made up of things that we know. We mistake our view of the world to be the absolute world. We confuse the subjective with the objective.

A few centuries ago, the idea of man flying across continents in minutes may have been labeled supernatural. People recovering from utterly destroying injuries was supernatural some time ago. Now, thanks to advancements in medical science, such events are seen as perfectly natural. History has repeatedly rewritten our definitions of what is natural and what is supernatural. Our view of nature keeps expanding as time passes.

Religion, sadly, has often encouraged the facile divide between natural and supernatural. God has been put on a pedestal and his images have been lined with armies of priests specialising in incredibly complex rituals. What should have been man’s direct line with God has been turned into a veritable industry with all manner of middlemen telling you how to go about finding God. God has been taken from his rightful place – that is inside man – and imprisoned in an imposing “out there” and “up there” structure.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell describes the nature of the killing idea that the modern world has come to refer to as the supernatural:

The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned the world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing that they truly wanted because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.

I myself used to think of God as something beyond nature. But when you actually think about it, there is nothing magical or supernatural about God or the so-called miracles. They are only aspects of reality we haven’t been exposed to yet. Once you understand them, they simply melt into the natural, becoming parts of it.

The divide between what we call natural and what we consider supernatural roots from the tendency to see certain things as being “beyond this realm”. In truth, there is no realm other than this one realm. It is only our faulty and limited understanding of reality that causes such bogus divisions. At the end of the day, there is only one universe that contains it all.

Many religions say that what fuels us is something indestructible and, for all practical purposes, invisible – the soul. Hinduism believes that all living creatures — from the tiniest of germs to largest of the redwood trees — have a spirit energy fuelling them. This invisible field of energy does not end when the body is destroyed. It merely leaves the body, to return later on in another one.

Without going into the dynamics of reincarnation, karma, and the whole train of concepts that lie in that general direction (perhaps I will go there some other time), I would like to propose an argument in defense of the spirit/soul idea.

The scientific view of an organism is that it is a machine. A very complicated and highly developed machine, but a machine nevertheless. Science believes that all that is to be understood about an animal is in plain sight. All that we need are powerful enough instruments. Oddly enough, it is this very machine view that trumps science’s dismissal of the soul.

To me, proof of the soul’s existence lies in the difference between a living creature and a dead body. If organisms were simply a superior variety of machines, they would end in as straightforward a manner as machines do. But they don’t — there is a crucial difference.

Think about it. What differentiates a living being from a corpse? What really happens when we die? Machines stop working when a crucial function ends or when they run out of fuel. In case of humans, crucial functions end all the time. Accidents destroy vital organs, disease eats up parts of the body, various illnesses happen. But these are not the causes of death. If they were, we could (in theory at least) find cures to them and prevent death. What about the inevitable kind of death? What is it that causes a man to die of old age? What leaves him that does not come back?

We are told the body’s chemical composition changes, turning it from a life-supporting structure to something that is no longer suitable for the purpose. But truth be told, it is all guesswork. We don’t really know how chemical composition changes, or even if it does change. If we did, we would be able to change it back. If nutrition is what the body lacks, we would be able to give it nutrients and bring it back to life. If specific conditions are what caused someone to die, then we would be able to change those conditions and bring them back to life.

But we can’t do any of those things. What differentiates an organism from a machine is that beyond a point, it cannot be repaired.

None of the above “scientific” reasons are that crucial deciding factor between life and death. Science simply does not know what causes people to die. Conditions, failures, old age, accidents and diseases are mere circumstances. They do not cause death. Death happens when life leaves, whatever the reason. We can go ahead and make a list of things people die of and then proceed to find a cure for every single of those conditions, but people will still die. Science can’t “cure” death for the simple reason that science does not know what causes it.

What stands to logic however, is that something vital does leave the body at the time of death. Call it the immortal spirit, the pristine soul, life force, the aatma. Heck! Call it life if the other names sound fancy and magical – it doesn’t matter.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that one day there will be a scientific way to “see” this vital differentiator between life and death. But in order for that to happen, science has to start looking for it. Blunt denial of the soul’s existence will not get the job done.

“Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. BUT Faith will move mountains.”

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once proposed something that has come to be known as Pascal’s wager. The theory goes to suggest that regardless of whether God exists or not, it makes more sense to accept him (or her, or it) as real. Pascal did it by calculating likelihoods and possibilities.

Since then, the wager has faced criticism and challenges from many quarters and has been accused of being impractical, illogical, pointless and other things. One particular criticism among these attracts me more than any other, mostly because I am living proof of it being untrue.

The criticism in question is that the Wager is rendered pointless by the fact that even if one accepts Pascal’s logic as valid and accepts God as real, he wouldn’t really be believing. He would be accepting God merely because his existence is more of a statistical possibility than his non-existence. It wouldn’t be real faith, it would be make-believe devotion.

What exactly is belief? Is belief in God any different from the momentary belief we exercise in the reality of a movie or a book when we are in the middle of it (and are probably in tears)? Does momentary suspension of disbelief count as “true” belief? Can we decide to believe? Is faith in God an option within anyone’s reach at any point of time?

There are those that would say yes and there are those that would say no – that faith can only be had through reason and evidence. I wouldn’t do either of those. Instead, I want to tell you how I came to believe in God.

I grew out of the norms of a traditional Hindu family quite early in life. I couldn’t see the point of spending large amounts of time in pursuit of beings whose existence was largely questionable. Sure, Shiva was meditating on Kailash and Vishnu was lying in the comfortable coils of a large snake floating in a sea of milk somewhere and Brahma was sitting on a lotus whose stem grew straight out of Vishnu’s belly button. It was all a lot of fun when I didn’t know any better. But then education happened and I realised that there was no Kailash and no sea of milk and no city of gods and no army of demons and no nothing. Anywhere. At all. They were all just stories.

Thankfully, I was never the sentimental type and the realisation didn’t hit me hard. I did however, grow openly dismissive of the God concept. The family didn’t care much for my disagreement as long as I toed the line (attending religious festivals, praying, chanting during ceremonies etc). But eventually, I couldn’t continue with the appearance of it either. I was not a hypocrite, I had self respect. I couldn’t lie and pretend to believe something I knew to be untrue.

I broke rank with the family on religious matters. I stopped paying even the rudimentary lip service to God and religion. The family, being the family, put up with it.

In the meantime, education continued to happen. My mind opened up to entire new worlds of knowledge and imagination. I devoured all manner of books from wherever I could. I read more of science, not because I disrespected the arts, but because I liked to have answers to my questions (and I had tons of questions). Science had all the answers. In due course of time, I did turn to fiction. But what I found was that all the arts gave me were questions.

These were not questions that could be answered with calculations or by putting two and two together. These were amazing questions. These were questions about me, about my identity, about this universe, and my place in it. These were the questions that drove me mad at first, and then taught me to accept them and to live in their shadow.

I remembered that long ago, religion had seemed to address these same questions. Questions about who we are, and where we came from, and why we are here, and where we go after we are done with whatever we are doing here.

I remained an atheist for quite some time after that, trying to balance the equation out in my head, and failing. I had refused religion on the basis that I could not live a lie. Now, for that very same reason, I couldn’t carry on believing that there was nothing more to the world than what I could see, feel, or judge based on existing evidence or extrapolation.

Atheism became a very unattractive place to be in – a place with walls all around. Not only did it not provide me with satisfactory answers, it even refused to acknowledge the questions as valid. As far as science is concerned, “Who am I?” isn’t even a valid question.

But my fancy philosophical quest didn’t even come close to pointing in the general direction of God. I was, for all practical purposes, an agnostic. I listened to people on both sides of the fence and tried to make up my mind. What if there is really nothing more to the universe than what science can show us? Were my prized questions pointless? Even if something resembling God did exist, what is the point of worshipping him? Why not go look for the creator from a scientific standpoint? Why is man obsessed with the question about who he is?

Being agnostic made me feel honest to myself. I didn’t know the answers, but at least I was admitting it – I was being open-minded. But realising God’s existence was going to take more than an open mind, at least in my case. It was going to take effort. It happened on a day when I was in my first job, in Mumbai.

I worked for a web portal (one of India’s biggest), as a sub-editor. My job involved updating the news headlines on the portal’s main page as and when things happened and reports came in (breaking news!). Most of the time, there were three people at work, given the sheer number of things one had to pay attention to all the time (maintaining web pages, updating headlines, editing news reports, updating SMS headlines). But on weekends, when the news cycle was slower, fewer people were on duty.

It was my first Sunday at work. I was going to be on the news desk all alone all day. I came in hoping against hope that I would be up to the task of keeping the whole system running all by myself. I also prayed (out of sheer habit) that no big news should break that day.

At around 10 am, news came in of a massive earthquake that rocked large parts of Pakistan and north India. Reports full of casualty numbers started coming in from various sources. Our correspondent in Srinagar called and breathlessly dictated a preliminary report – he was running towards his little daughter’s school building, which had probably collapsed.

Stuck with insufficient data and a correspondent who couldn’t have added much even if he had wanted to, I turned to the TV channels for help. Nobody on the screen had any idea what was happening. What little they had, our good correspondent had already told me. I began switching channels, hoping to find something new on the earthquake.

I found a news channel patching through the signal from PTV (Pakistan’s official state channel). What I saw was two gentlemen sitting in a TV studio — one was the anchor while the other was an elderly Mullah. Around them, the studio seemed to shake like mad and the cameraman was perhaps doing all he could to keep the camera upright. I saw dust falling from above them. The set elements behind them started to collapse as the show proceeded.

The two men, surrounded by this mayhem, looked ordinary – no different from each other. What set one apart from the other was the way they reacted to the chaos. The anchor fidgeted in his seat, wondering if he should get up and run out. But he was not sure if the danger was serious enough for him to risk looking like a fool on national television. So he stayed where he was, undecided, doing nothing. He was getting up, sitting down again, looking around, asking if they should go, then looking at the Mullah, then deciding to get up again, and so on.

To me, he looked weak, unsure, and even pitiable. He also, for some reason, reminded me of myself. In contrast, the Mullah was the very image of peace and courage. He sat steady, chanting whatever he was chanting, paying no attention to the chaos around him. Till date, I have no idea what he was saying or thinking, but I do remember being struck by his calm. It was in complete contrast to what my mind contained. All I had were doubts.

I decided then, that I wanted to be him. I decided to believe in God. It sounded stupid to me even as I made the decision, but I figured that if deluding myself is what it takes to gain that kind of courage, then so be it. I will be delusional and I will believe in whatever religion wants me to believe in. I wanted the courage and calm of that Mullah and I wanted it at any cost. I couldn’t carry on being indecisive any longer.

How could I do this? It wasn’t that hard. I merely dismissed my disbelief like people do when inside a movie hall (and end up in tears, or angry, or moved). I figured the end result will be the same, that is, evoking of a feeling – courage and calm in this case. Never mind the fact that I was, in effect, pretending.

The decision took some serious effort on my part. I was actually committing to taking things at face value. That is the exact opposite of what years of scientific education had programmed me for, or so I thought.

As I proceeded with my self-imposed courses of studies, I found that what religion told me was not altogether as delusional as I had imagined it to be. Here was acknowledgment that the questions I had been grappling with were not aberrations. That many before me had asked these same questions and had walked the same path. Here was assurance that there was a world out there, just as I had suspected. Here was language I thought I had invented in my restlessness. I discovered the universe all over again, and it was far bigger than I had thought it to be.

In addition, I found God. I think what religion did to me was that it taught me the language God speaks. I found his presence in everything around me and actually felt him working through the world around me and speaking to me through it. I have witnessed events that I would have passed off as coincidence had they not happened in perfect synchronicity with each other, leading up to a goal I explicitly asked for.

Did I find my answers? A few yes, here and there, partially. Some more, I like to think, I am on my way to finding. But the larger understanding I have come to is that the world is perhaps far too big to span with numbers and equations. That some things do not translate to language at all and can perhaps only be understood with imagination. That the amazing storehouse of stories in our mythology serve to act as metaphors for a reality that defies words.

I am aware that this post does not do much by way of proving God’s existence. That was never my purpose. I don’t think that is even possible (although who knows, it might be). I only wanted to put down in writing my own personal quest for truth. I started off as a half-hearted believer, went on to being a radical atheist, moved on to be an agnostic, and then came to absolutely believe in the existence of God.

If you remember the last scene of The Da Vinci Code movie, you will remember that the hero Dr Robert Langdon finds himself running with barely-concealed hurry towards the place where Mary of Magdalene, he deduces, must be buried. He is a non-believer, but he is also a historian. He is someone who pursues secrets of the past with great passion.

Langdon finds the spot finally, looks around to confirm his calculations, lines up the stars in the sky, and is finally satisfied that he is standing right over what countless others have died looking for — something that has moved the minds of men since the days of Jesus Christ. He is standing over real, tangible history.

He however, doesn’t know how to react to the moment. What he does know is that he can’t not react. The presence of history is too great for him to ignore. His passion for history and the invisible past is as great (if not more) as someone else’s might be for God and religion.

Perhaps because Langdon feels nothing else would aptly express what he feels, he kneels.

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik said at TED India this year, “Culture is a reaction to nature. And this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation to generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals.”

Kneeling or bowing down to a higher power is a ritual meant to express the feeling of humbleness. It happens more often than many of us would admit to, but we are humbled numberless times in our lives. What one man feels in front of a deity, another may feel standing in front of grand canyon, while yet another might feel the same when his life has taken a bad turn and nothing seems to be going right.

Rituals are man’s different symbolic reactions to the different aspects of the world around him. They are man-made constructs designed to express that which cannot (should not?) remain unexpressed.

The idea is not something exclusive to religion either. If you were moved by the movie 3 Idiots, you may find yourself saying, “Aal Iz well” in remembrance of the feeling that the movie evoked in you. That’s a ritual too. Same goes for gestures like “Live long and prosper” and “May the Force be with you”.

Rituals are a part of life and therefore, inevitable, just like superstition or facial hair. It does not do to declare them evil or old-fashioned. Try and see if you can understand where they came from.

In my last blog post on why religious myth relies on fantasy, I implied that superstition works better than a starkly objective view of the world. I can believe that superstition exists because it works; that it has fought for survival against a physical-only interpretation of reality and has stood its ground. It has passed the Darwinian evolution test.

But because that may not satisfy many, let me try and answer the question: Why are we superstitious?

It is easy to trace individual superstitious practices to their roots and say how they started. But that won’t really answer the question. The real question is why. Why do human beings have this need to believe in strange things? Why have people imagined incredible fantasies since the beginning of time? Why has the tangible side of existence consistently failed to satisfy mankind?

Stark atheists would say superstitions are signs of a weak mind that can’t handle reality and therefore must come up with fantastic explanations for things. I find that strange, seeing as how everyone is superstitious at one level or another.

When you yell, “Come on! Don’t do this to me!”  at a hung computer, you are being superstitious. It’s a machine, it can’t hear you, and you know it. If you feel the loss of your favourite pen, that’s superstition too. At a physical level, pens are just pens. The importance you assign to one pen over others is imaginary. The same goes for people being sentimental about their cars and motorcycles, people saying, “The damn door broke my nose,” and people cursing the weather. Nobody is utterly free from irrational behaviour (even though some might want to pretend that they are Vulcan). Human beings have this instinctive tendency of thinking up imaginary truths.

A recent scientific study by Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, points in the same direction:

The findings of Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, suggest that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force. His work is supported by other researchers who have found evidence linking religious feelings and experience to particular regions of the brain. They suggest people are programmed to receive a feeling of spirituality from electrical activity in these areas.

I believe that the act of storytelling roots from this tendency. As far as we know, man is the only animal that tells stories. We read books, watch plays, we pay to go sit inside movie theatres and allow ourselves to be moved to emotion with a narrative we know to be false, even if it is for a short while. This behaviour falls under the same category as the little personal superstitions I referred to in the previous paragraph.

There is something inside us that craves the imaginary. It is something inherent to human nature, something that makes us human, something that is essential to the human condition. There are those who believe that with the advent of modern science and the spread of education, the world will soon be rid of all superstition. I don’t think that will happen. Superstition is not rooted in ignorance. It stems from the same part of us that creates stories and myth.

What we call superstition is thriving in the modern world. Storytellers are some of the most prosperous and well-known people on the planet (writers, filmmakers, actors). Every year, more and more people spend their money to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds and situations. In fact, this is practically the age of imagination.