Is there a God or Not ??

Some heavy duty stuff .... discretion advised :)

Is there God or Not ?? is a question for which I tried to find an answer in the past few days - courtesy a trip to many of the famous religious places in south India.I personally like to believe that I am a rationalist, observe things, try to question and analyse it rationally and arrive at a conclusion. Being some one who is interested in Indian History and Mythology ;the places I visited are loaded with the same; I wanted to analyse things with a new found curiosity.

So to begin with - why are we so fascinated by these places when we have a temple a church or a masjid at every nook and corner of the street ??

My understanding is that we would like to visit these so called holy places because we are culturally led to believe that God has manifested in his form at these places and these are what the cops call "LKL" (last known location)

. Though we are told God is all prevalent and can be found in the most inanimate objects.

Places like Tirupathi,Shirdi,Bodhgaya,Mecca,Jerusalem/Bethlehem are the places where every religions associated supreme leader was know to be present in his human form, hence the sacredness associated with these places.As believers,as people who have never seen GOD we like to believe that visiting these places is the closest we can ever be to God. Therefore my understanding is that people would like to believe that whatever thanks, grievance, apology, requests,help..etc we would like to make will be heard fast and heard for sure at these places. Hence the sea of humanity who throng to these places braving all odds and discomforts.

Having tried to answer why we are fascinated, my next question is - does it really help visiting these places ??

A famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale, in his best selling book "The power of positive thinking" has mentioned the principle of 3 "Dream" "Believe" and "Expect". If you have a dream and you believe that it should come true then you have to expect it to come true. The way I see it - it is these principles which work on the human mind during our visits to these places. We 'Dream' of something, we 'Believe' that since God is the all provider and making a request to him personally in his presence will expedite matters we come out 'Expecting' it to happen and when it happens it reaffirms our faith and when it does not - we will relegate to the fact that we have tried our best and its Gods decision for our best. You see either ways we win, hence it works every time and we are never disappointed with the results for our expectations at these places. Human mind is amazing !

So coming back to the main question Is there a God or Not ?? ... Whether I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it does not get us any closer to reality. You believe there is God or you believe there is no God, you just believe something that you do not know. The problem is just this – we are unwilling to see that we actually do not know. Belief essentially means that we are assuming something that we do not know.You just believe something that you have been culturally conditioned to believe. Believing and disbelieving are fundamentally not different; it is just believing in a positive way or believing in a negative way.

The way I see it, humans love convenience - its convenient to blame God for things that go wrong and admire God and consider ourselves blessed for the graciousness in granting our deepest desires rather than take responsibility for our actions and outcomes.Having said that I have also seen some impossible looking situations working out smoothly, where even the most rational mind would be sceptical. Its said that 95% of humanity across all religions believe in GOD and that's a big number to ignore, there has to be some rational to this 95% !! who like to believe there is some BIG MAN sitting up there and DOING IT and whatever happens is for our best.

Galileo said " All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them" - for me the truth is yet to be discovered.