Vimoh's Blog

“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.

I have just returned from my second watching of the awesome 3 Idiots and have perhaps come across something very interesting. To be on the safe side, I issue a spoiler alert here.

The movie tells the story of Rancho, a free individual who teaches his friends the meaning of life. He tells them that the only way they are going to be able to do anything worthwhile in life is by, to quote Joseph Campbell, following their bliss. Throughout the movie, Rancho encourages people to do what gives them joy and promises them that happiness (succes in this case) will follow.

But Rancho’s real name is not Rancho, it is Funsukh Wangdoo. The name is thrown about carelessly at first and then comes to establish itself as something of key value. Towards the end, when it the name flashes on Chatur’s mobile phone screen, it hit me.

Funsukh is made of FUN and SUKH – demonstrating the message that sukh (happiness) follows fun. I don’t know if this was intentional but I have a strong hunch that it was. As for Wangdoo, I think that serves to indicate the whole “idiot” angle. People will call you a bangdoo (Hindi colloquialism generally implying idiocy) if you tell them they should break out of the beaten track and follow their hearts.

Have I mentioned how big a fan I am of meaningful character names in stories? I haven’t? Oh well. Now you know.

Here’s something interesting. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean though. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a lot.

Consider this sentence: "Smoking is bad." The exact opposite of it, expressed by reversing everything except the subject (because the subject is what we are passing judgment on), actually means the same: "Smoking isn’t good."

Try it with any absolute statement and you will get the same result.

"There is no God," becomes, "There isn’t yes God," (ungrammatical, but you get the idea). “I will go home,” becomes, “I won’t not-go home.”

I keep wondering why it is so difficult to express delicate and nuanced ideas in simple language. No matter how I go about expressing the details of something largely intangible, I end up trapped in block-headed sentences. It’s always ‘either this or that’ or ‘either here or there’. Language simply fails at expressing middle ground logic and ideas.

Maybe language is flawed. Maybe it can’t be used for expressing anything less than absolutes. Maybe we can’t talk in nuanced ways. Or maybe this post is pointless and I am a nut.

I am merely ranting in frustration after something of a failure at expressing myself. If you don’t get it, feel free to ignore it.

Keval drew his breath in and aimed the arrow at the target. He switched to a version of reality where nothing except his target existed. Even his self melted away until he was nothing but a viewpoint.

When he felt sure that he couldn’t hit anything other than his target, Keval let the arrow go. He missed.

Disappointed, but incapable of not analysing his way of doing things, Keval had finished running all the calculations inside his head before his master’s cane hit the back of his head.

“Do your math boy,” came his master’s favourite phrase. “You are not doing your bloody math!”

“My math was correct, I checked,” Keval defended himself. “There was nothing wrong with my calculations.”

“Well it didn’t work,” said master. “And if it didn’t work, it can’t have been correct, can it?”

“It was the wind,” Keval said, pointing at the invisibility around them. “The wind blew my arrow off-course.”

The master kept looking at Keval in silence.

“My math was correct,” Keval repeated.

The master walked to the target and pulled the arrow out of the stump of wood it had lodged itself into. He examined the arrowhead carefully and looked back at Keval. Then he walked back towards his young student and handed him the arrow.

“The wind is doing its job young archer,” he said. “It is blowing as it always blows. That is its nature. Perhaps you would like it to hold still while you shoot your arrows, but that is not going to happen.”

Keval bowed his head in acknowledgment of his master’s words.

“It is you who must make allowance for the wind’s blowing when you take aim,” the master continued. “If you can’t do that, go and practice somewhere the wind does not blow.”

“There is no such place,” said Keval.

“Wise words,” said his master with a smile. “Everything has its place in the universe — the wind, your arrow, me, this ashram, the trees, birds — everything. None of it can be wished away, just like I can’t wish you away even though you interrupt my afternoons with your foolish dreams of being a great archer.”

Keval smiled a little. His master smiled wider.

“Do not blame the wind,” said the master. “Instead, learn from it. Keep moving, no matter what. Don’t stop to complain about your circumstances. Find a way around them.”

Keval took the lesson in and smiled until his master’s cane stang his elbow like a bolt of lightning.

“Don’t stand around. Take aim,” barked the master. Keval breathed in and raised his bow.

Being open-minded is considered a trait of the educated. Ironically though, the best lesson on it is to be had from the most uneducated of humans – babies.

I once picked up my little (1-year-old) nephew Golu and looked straight into his eyes. I asked him what his name was. “Golu,” he said. I then asked him why his name was not Bholu. Golu didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. Instead, he frowned a little and thought about the question. He was genuinely wondering why his name was not Bholu! That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is what is called being open-minded.

Being open-minded means showing respect to questions, and to ideas, regardless of where they came from, who expressed them, or even how stupid they sound.

When faced with an idea they think is laughable, many people refuse to even acknowledge it as an idea. They laugh it off, or label it ridiculous, or bat it away with sarcasm.

Golu would have thought hard about why his name was not Bholu, he would have asked his mom why his name was not Bholu, he would have definitely made some answer and you can be assured the answer would have been the best he was in a position to give. The ideal open-minded person would treat all manner of questions as equals. He would treat physics, politics, philosophy, carpentry, knitting, and writing with equal respect. Though he might prefer one topic over others, he would never push a question away as unimportant.

It is the open-minded who learn the most in life.

Questions are of various kinds. But there are no questions higher and more important than others. To laugh a question off and call it unworthy of respect, is to indulge in racial discrimination of the mental kind.

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.