Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Humanity and Religion (part 4)

-But ask yourself again whether human really needs God to live. How about the Penans and the Papuans who live as hunter-gatherers in the jungle? Do they know God? Notice that not every single language has a word that refers to what can be understood as being equal to Allah, being equal to YHWH, being equal to the Turkish Tanri, to Aryan Brahma...there are many languages in which the concept of the unseen things are confined to worldly and little beings, beings that can actually be perceived by the speakers of the language, but would remain invisible to non-speakers...Speech is belief; Islam's definition of Iman involves three aspects of 'heart', 'mouth' and 'action', all of which are language-based. Language is the only possible way to Iman. So how can one say that the whole world believes in God? Many people would argue that even the seas do praise the Creator; even Quran said so...it is just that the praises are not coherent to human. But something that is incoherent to human, can we call it 'praise'? Calling it a 'praise' is an anthropocentric act; we, by the act of saying that 'even the seas praise the God' makes the whole phenomenon an anthropomorphized one, which is ridiculous; Seas are seas, not humans. They don't speak; they don't possess language, at least not a humanly language; so how can one say they praise the Lord? I suspect that the statement is made in order to make a religion superior from other religions, but does not take into account about the nature of language enough. Will God in his omniscience make such a statement? Language is a barrier.
-God as we often understand would then be reconstructed as being products of language; Muslims, Christians, Jews...whenever they invoke the name of the God, really only invokes the concept created through their utterance of the name God. Their efforts, their prayers, their beliefs; none of these reaches God, none of these have anything to do with the REAL GOD. The REAL GOD is something that I can't say anything about; I can at least say that it is not a coherent being, but think; literally there are millions who pray to God, who reports that they do feel God. It is not coherent through language, but people make do anyway. With what? With feelings.
-Thus talking about God would bring us to the realm of the emotional. The turmoil of the human emotion that seeks both the fulfillment and the emptying of their existence; "I want to erase all my sins." Erasing my sins; what exactly is that? We hurt people as soon as we were conceived; think about how our mothers deliver us from the state of being nothing to the state of being something. Pregnancy is a terrible predicament. But why mothers endure the pain of pregnancy? What is the thing that drives us humans to keep on procreating; keep on surviving? Aren't we all going to die? Thus some might say that life in itself is a sin, which is inferred from the fact that living and dying is actually the same thing. You lie when you say you are living; you lie when you say you are dying. You are both living and dying; you cannot claim to be one without claiming to be the other. Living is dying and dying is living. Why these two antithetical states coexist arbitrarily with the other?
-That would pose no problem to the earlier humans who hunt on a daily basis for food. They observe that both are no different; they are not antithetical; they are not separate. Lions consume other animals so they themselves can live. Female spiders devour their mate after procreating. Salmons die soon after laying eggs. The early people see these and do not see any conflict. But why do we perceive the conflict between living and dying?
-The answer; we begin to farm. Why did we begin to farm? The whole idea of farming is not exactly what I would call a brilliant idea. It is easier to hunt, easier to gather food, than actually taking care of them, nurturing them until they got mature enough to be eaten. Taking care of things; that action involves emotion. Emotion spoils everything up. All because we wanted to take care of something. If one were to believe in Torah, one of the very first things that God ordered (or rather, condemned) Adam to do was to farm. All of a sudden, Adam knows how to farm. There is no mentioning of the learning process. Adam just began farming.
-Perhaps that is the reason why the more sedentary population hated the nomads. Those who don't farm and those who do farm; there seems to be a totally fundamental difference in the ethics. Farming begins the history. Religion sprang up together with farming. People didn't believe in God before they began farming. They don't even know God to begin with; the whole idea is not even started yet.

No comments:

Post a Comment