final comments on geetha

When one studies different religions, or the same religion at different times, one cannot help wondering what exactly is meant by the word God in them. There is I think a gradual evolution from the simple to complex or sophisticated.As the human intelligence opens its eyes in the primitive times, and experiences various phenomena, many of them out of his control, he may wonder about these forces, apparently not visible, but certain to be there because of the evident effects. Certain things he could will and execute, many things happen in his own body and outside, which he cannot control. Used as he is to the feeling that the outside events must have a cause, he projects his anthropomorphic concepts to that force, imagining it to be something similar to him, but vastly more powerful. He might have called it by the word, "God".First, he may feel that there are very many individual gods directing each of these natural phenomena. As his reasoning powers grew and as he observed more and more the happenings around, with the resources and facilities available, he might have felt the need for a central figure. Thus must have come the idea of one most powerful god.This god however remained only that of one related group for a long time. Gradually, as the groups became bigger, from family to society,the idea of the god also must have grown larger and larger. Power was the attribute of god, most visible, but soon the necessityof keeping the society unified and stable, must have projected into the concept all the noble qualities desired in man into it, love,justice and so on.The early religions remained those of various communities, and their feeling of insecurity vis-a vis other communities made each to cling to his God as the only true one, and to deny the same status to the gods of other communities, indeed to consider god as partial to them. Unfortunately,God became some one like a chief of armed forces for each, getting involved in their petty quarrels.Wherever there was not this insecurity probably, each group was more tolerant and more willing to accept the different Gods as proper to those groups.The qualities projected in God also gradually changed; what was narrow, crude and considered unsuitable, were eliminated; and a concept of all-goodness emerged in most of the civilized communities. As man grew in his reasoning and grew out of his insecurity, and became more daring, he started shedding one by one the human qualities from the concept of God, so that ultimately it ended in accepting a sort of atheism, which meant, no God in the sense of a personal human-like figure.In any case, the ultimate reality above our own consciousness seems beyond our reason. All theories of the first cause in the end are a matter of faith. We are what faith is, as Geetha says in the 18th chapter, and that faith which is conducive to social harmony and progress is probably that which humanity will veer to.