God did not create Man/Man Created God

By Sudhansu S. Tunga

It is our common belief – and conviction for most people – that God created this universe and all that it possesses, including mankind. This knowledge is obtained from the religious literature of most religions which is hardly five thousand years old. But the universe was born 13.8 billion years earlier and man has appeared on earth just two hundred thousand years ago. At that time there was no God. Religious beliefs stand upon man’s ignorance and superstitions, not on any sound scientific examination, ascribing that it is man who has created God in his fancy and not the other way round. Therefore, the concept of God and
religion should be forsaken for the betterment of all.
The book deals with this subject in an objective and rational way, analyzing all the relevant literature including religious books, history, archaeology, as also physical sciences and other relevant subjects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Rose Publishers
• Release date: Nov 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890089830

Book preview

PREFACE

It is our common belief – and conviction for most people – that God has created the world and all that this world possesses, including mankind, animals and plant life. The concept of God is hardly a matter of five thousand years old. And this concept has been obtained from religious literature only such as the Bible, Koran, Vedas and so on. In all the religious scriptures, man has been described as the son of God. However, by the witness of ancient history it will be found that the truth is the other way round – God is the son, not the father of man. Man has created God with his imagination and the reality is that God does not exist anywhere outside the human mind. Under the situation, the concept of God and the religious beliefs generated from it are just the people’s superstition.

There is no doubt that with the faith in God and the binding force of religious belief, ancient people, scattered and disjointed for local scrabbles and many other forces in the beginning, came to form some larger units which ultimately brought to the modern stage of a few distinctive classes we now call religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and so on. These religions have now grown very expansive and powerful so that they have become at loggerheads with each other with a desire of earning supremacy over one another. The whole mankind is, consequently, divided into a few warring groups due to the determined but unfounded religious beliefs and customs generated from it; and since nobody is going to give up the individual religious faiths and customary rituals, it is not possible for the people of the world to become united into one universal unit of human contingent. The reason: they are compartmentalized into numerous religious groupings and this is ever growing, signaling an impending catastrophe that will lead to the ultimate destruction of the world. In this situation, it is necessary that the people of the world discard their individual conviction in God and the respective religious faiths and be united in one platform of humanism. All men have only humanism as their decisive religion. That is where they will assemble together, bringing good for all, all people, animals and all other forms of life and non-life and the whole universe itself.

In this book, this theory has been established viewing the happenings of the world in the last few thousand years. However, given the warring attitude of all religious communities having different faiths at present, the future of mankind looms dark unless the people world over understand the futility of religious faith and come in terms with the reality. As a matter of fact, the recent history of the warring religious communities is not at all encouraging; on the other hand, it may quicken the advent of much-faulted doomsday. This theory is not an individual opinion of the writer formed out of his personal imagination not confirmed by facts. This cannot also be called what we understand by atheism. This has been propagated for many years by realistic philosophers and most scientists.

The conclusion that has been reached in this regard is through the study of all the ancient civilizations of the world – Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Indo-European and the history of these established nations together with anthropology, archaeology, literature, culture, religious scriptures and other related scientific matters. This has also been known that all the religious scriptures produced so far are composition of man in comparatively recent times and, strictly, they are all notable literary works of immense value. Accordingly, the concept of God and religious faith is just a human superstition and nothing more than that. They should be looked into from that perspective.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each dealing with a separate topic relating to the core issue of superstitious belief in religion and essentiality of God. Out of this belief and conviction has grown in recent time a new phenomenon – terrorism, which threatens the survival of mankind. A whole chapter, Chapter IV, has been devoted to it. And since history, archaeology, literature and cultural elements have centered round these chapters, the book should be considered as a research work on the principal topic. But the chapter-wise essays are not mere dry research papers of little public interest but together they present a literary work in itself with possibility of generating enough scope for universal attention. I have written these essays from that perspective, with the flavor of a creative literary work whose character is made as lively as possible. Therefore, the book needs to be considered as a creative literary work based on my research on the irrelevance of religion. The book has been primarily based on my Bengali book Iswar Tumi Manabputra (God, You are the Son of Man) but is not a mere ad verbatim copy of that. A lot of changes have been made in this work. A whole new chapter, Chapter IV, has been added while three old chapters were omitted and new information with newer approaches has been inserted wherever necessary. In a word, this is a new book on an old topic of my own.

I have taken a little less than two years until September 2015 to complete it. Accordingly, incidents that happened anywhere in the world up to that time have been incorporated in it. But my study of the subject is not so short. In fact, a large number of books and newspaper articles have been studied for about fifty years to collect the necessary inputs. And, in fact, they are the primary material on which the foundation of my core subject rests but I do not feel it necessary to list them in a bibliography, which is not also factually possible. However, in this respect I must specially mention four books, namely 1. The Holy Bible (The Gideons International), 2. The Koran (Translated by Rev. J.M. Rodwell), 3. Rigveda Samhita (ed. R.C. Dutt) and 4. The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East vol. 1 – Babylonia and Assyria (ed. by Charles F. Horne), from which elaborate information about the ancient literature as well as extracts to justify them have been used here. The wording of the extracts from the last two books is, however, mostly mine; those within quotation marks have been directly copied, word for word.

I have received advice and technical help on my personal computer from a number of friends and well wishers to whom I express my deep gratitude. Among them, I should particularly mention the name of Professor S.C. Dey and Mr. J.N. Dutt.

1

GOD DID NOT CREATE MAN

Bernard Shaw at the end of his famous play Saint Joan1 asked a question through the mouth of Joan: O God when will this world be ready to receive your saints? This play was written in the year 1922. By that time, i.e., in 1920, Joan of Arc was bestowed with the title of St Joan – or St Juan. Every student of history knows that in the 15th century (1431 CE to be exact) the Christian world declared Joan a witch and burnt her alive as a practice prevalent in Europe at that time. What was her crime? She made possible what seemed to be the impossible. The French was getting continuously defeated in one battle after another against the invincible British and their leader Dauphin, who was king-to-be Charles, devoid of his kingdom had to take shelter here and there like a poor thief. In this situation, a country girl of only 17 years old, Joan, dressed like a boy soldier, invoked the French soldiers and gave them the lead like a general they so required for a second war with the British in which the former miraculously defeated the latter which seemed invincible till the other day. For this reason, the French got their lost kingdom back. Joan, seeing thus her job fulfilled, prepared for returning to her native village. But neither the French monarch nor the European Christian Church did allow her to do so because they realized Joan as a symbol of a new power house in the form of universal fraternity and other rationalistic ideas; so the Church as well as the monarchy quite reasonably for them but unreasonably for others understood Joan’s ability to destroy the age-old social structure and faith, in which, they apprehended, there would be no role for the Church or the royalty in society and that would signal a dangerous move. So they thought it wise to put an end to this danger in the bud. That is the reason why the Church and the royalty conspired together against Joan for which she was declared a witch in a make-shift trial. The result was the outcome of Joan of Arc being burnt when she was barely 19. For 425 years the European Church glossed over this murderous act resulting in a remorseful awakening in their mind which led at last to the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc in 1856. But not being satisfied with this as enough penance, they bestowed her on the high pedestal of Sainthood. Thus they had their atonement for the sins they had committed 500 years earlier. But has the conscience of the Church been clear by this act? Shaw asks the question here.

The question has arisen to us now in a little different way: O God, why do your sons engage in bloody fights against one another in the name of you? You have many names instead of just one; these names were given you by your sons and every one of them accepts your one name only discarding the others. Those who believe in one name show disrespect to other names as they think those others are unbelievers and so want to destroy them. The result is the war they are fighting against one another since the beginning of human civilization. We do not know how long this war will continue but apprehend there will not be any more human civilization when this war ends.

And God, why man believes in you? Who are you? Everybody says you are the father of man. But why and how? Nobody gives a scientific or historical proof to this question to satisfy us. Conversely, there are hundreds of evidences against the existence of you. Birds and animals do not consider you their father – what is more – they have no ability to form a concept or an idea about that as they are simply animals without any thinking or rationalistic ability. Because of their inability to worship you, their life is not destroyed. Or do they go to hell after death like the sinful men and women where they live rest of their life in pain and misery? Birds and animals have life but no mind or rational thinking. Again there are many objects which are lifeless and devoid of any mind like dust, water, vapor, atom and molecule. These objects do not worship you, what kind of the hell you have created for them? The sky, air, ether et al are all-pervasive and since they are all-pervasive, they do not have any specific figure. O God, if you create hells, how will you keep these figureless substances in your hell which have a certain boundary? Is your hell figureless too or bound by the norm of a figure? Those who are faithful and devoted to you will surely curse me because they realize that I do not have any faith in or devotion to you the way the faithful and the believers behave by keeping their faith on and having devotion to you. Or they may simply ignore me like the one who has no faith and consider me useless like ants and insects or the dusts. When there was no life on earth – man or animal, or going further back to the birth of the earth, when it was not ripe for the appearance of life or when it was just a lifeless ball of fire revolving around a bigger ball which is sun, there was no dust, no life. Three billion years later, when the earth became cooler the age of dust, air, water and vapor began; they were the sole objects found for one or two billion years more ruling over the lifeless earth. Then the life came to it in the form of plants followed by small one-cell ameba whence after a few hundred million years the multi-cell life – insects, birds, animals, beasts, etc – came to existence one by one. At last humans appear here and they are the latest species in the creation process. So, none of the dust, air, water, and so on can be ignored: they have a respective role to play in this process of creation, which is continuous for billions of years.

EVOLUTION

In the Old Testament it is written that God created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27). If this is to be believed, then it must be accepted that God looks like a human. In some religious scriptures, they describe God like an animal or a zoomorphic form; in some others, God is painted like a figureless, colorless entity that exists everywhere but is never seen by anybody. This is also a false conception and totally unfounded by any practical means. On the other hand, modern science gives a concrete explanation to creation through the theory of evolution. This theory of the creation is a discovery of recent times, just about a hundred and a half century old. Before that nobody had any correct knowledge of this universe or the world and how it was created or how matter, life, soul etc came into being. For this reason people thought all these were created by God. The Greek philosopher Plato who lived 500 years before Christ also thought in the similar way; in his opinion whatever is visible in this world is created by God. Plato nourished himself in the atmosphere of civilized world’s most cherished culture and belief. He was a great thinker and a very learned man. Nevertheless, Plato did not have any idea of the greatness of the universe which holds billions and trillions of galaxies having each trillions or quadrillions of earth-like heavenly bodies and more.

We know, apart from the Greek civilization, there were several civilizations and cultures that gave birth to a number of great thinkers and scholars. But it is doubtful if such a great scholar was there anywhere in these civilizations (except, of course, two other Greeks – Socrates and Aristotle). Probably, there was none. King Solomon was a learned man, a wise judge and a great scholar but he was neither a philosopher nor a scientist; King Hammurabi was also a knowledgeable person and a wise man but not a great scholar. They are believed to have lived in the hoary past – 1800 years to 1000 years BCE – an age about which we have limited knowledge only. There were scholars and learned men also before them but their knowledge and scholarship was much more limited. They did not develop any sense of realizing the visible and invisible objects before us: they did allow much room for imagination for explaining these objects as they failed to give scientific analysis and explanation to the great power of energy that existed beyond their known world which was visible only through their ears, eyes and touch. It is, however, unfair to say that the architects who built the pyramids in ancient Egypt or who constructed the old palaces and gardens in Babylon or those in the Indus Valley who founded the great cities with all kinds of scientific infrastructure and led a modern city-based civilization 3500 years or more before Christ did not know much about science and rational reasoning or took everything by blind faith and had only wrong perception of the world. In fact, we find profuse illustration of scientific knowledge and very practical substance of the material utilization for all those great works they made and constructed in all the great civilizations that sprouted in ancient times. In fact, they knew much about the real world. It is indeed an established fact by all means that there was much practical knowledge and use of scientific concepts in the activities of the ancient civilizations known to us as Sumerian, Egyptian, Cretan, Babylonian, Chinese, Indus and Hittite. Therefore, it is a travesty of historical truth that ancient people did not know the world realistically. The ancient man – by which we mean those who lived four to five thousand years ago – had sufficient practical sense of this world much the same way as we do today. Yet, it is true that those men did not have the knowledge and concept of the real world like the people in the 21st century.

We have certainly grasped the knowledge of this world and its various ramifications, yet how many of us have the correct idea of the origin of life on earth and its aftermath? Matter and energy are the two most important factors behind the birth of universe and everything that we have before our eyes. In every moment, billions and trillions of events are taking place in the universe – which is better expressed by a Sanskrit word as Brahmanda – with so many rises and falls, births and deaths, explosions and formations; there are even births and deaths of galaxies, nebulas, stars, suns, planets, and so on. All this is due to the result of permutation and combination or the cause and effect relation of this matter and energy. All living beings – man, animal, insect, plant – are grown out of combination and permutation of this matter and energy. We all are destined to be destroyed in the same way. But how many of us have this knowledge of modern science? Those who among us are uneducated are guided by faith and occasionally by religious scripture; those who are educated are also driven by the knowledge of scripture and behave like the uneducated who accept the popular faith. What is faith? In a word, it is a kind of blind belief. Uneducated man followed the advice of his forefathers – father, mother, village headman and so on – and formed his concept; educated persons got his lesson through reading of scripture, sometimes rightly sometimes wrongly; they also receive their lesson from their teachers, who may be sometimes good, sometimes bad. When man forms his lesson in the wrong way, his education is bound to be wrong, which means he has no real knowledge at all. Now the total population of earth is seven billion; half of this is completely uneducated, three fourths of the other half despite being educated in modern institutions has no knowledge of the world in real sense. Therefore, more than six billion people may be guided by wrong belief and concept and therefore see this world in wrong way. So their knowledge and conception made through it is wrong. It can therefore be said that only a little more than a billion people who have correct knowledge may be ascribed to see the world in a right perspective. This is because we are learning new things every day and our boundary of knowledge is enlarging every moment by this eternal learning process. Yet, it is, indeed, in strict sense doubtful if any one person of this nearly more than one billion people, however educated and intelligent, has been able to reach the doorstep of ultimate knowledge. We have so far learnt only a fragment of this universe which is so vast and limitless.

In face of the vastness of human knowledge obtained through scientific study, when the situation is so grim and colorless in the beginning of the 21st century, it can be well conjectured the state of human knowledge four or five millenniums ago. It must be maintained that at that time man did not have proper geographical knowledge. Doubtless, they traveled far and wide through their horse carts or by sea voyage with wooden or grass-built boats and in this way they established business relations with unknown lands and islands. Yet they thought the earth was flat and not round and they believed for every natural event there was one god or another who controlled these events. This is how the role of one or more gods was there acting behind the crops of their field. The crops were very important for every body’s life, whether illiterate villagers or educated city dweller. For the raising of this crop, cultivating the land and irrigation of water was no doubt necessary but what is more important was the blessings of the god; they thought it prudent and so worshipped him, and sacrificed somebody – man, woman or animal – in order to obtain his blessings and kindness. As recently as a few hundred years back, man was in the habit of sacrificing the most beautiful and innocent unmarried girl of the village every year to the god or goddess of crops for getting higher yield of crops from their fields; they believed the god’s or goddess’ hunger would be satiated at the blood of the virgin and thus satisfied he would bless the farmer. The mindset of the ancient world was beset with this and hundreds other such blind beliefs.

The human civilization rich in many valuable assets is at most ten thousand years old. Yet they had a completely incorrect perception about the heavenly bodies like planets, stars including the sun which according to them revolved around the earth until about 400 years ago. We see the sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west. People in the ancient world saw the same thing in the same way and believed all the objects in the sky revolved around our earth, which they thought was the center of the universe. Only the other day this wrong perception was eradicated. However, that did not happen very smoothly: after much quarrels, feuds, enmities and even bloodsheds, man at last had to acknowledge this truth. The sun was stationary and the earth was moving around it in a certain fixed orbit for eternity. This was postulated by Galileo a mere four centuries ago. For this he had to leave his country because his countrymen got the scent of blasphemy in this. A second Italian of the the same date line, Bruno, was burnt to death in Rome for saying the same thing of heliocentric universe and disobeying the Bible's rule regarding the earth’s orbit. Almost at the same time, another European astrophysicist, Kepler, propagated the same scientific law of earth moving around the sun had to flee from one country to another for the rest of his life as the church could not digest his ‘theory of an unholy Satanism’. A century earlier the same statement was made also by Copernicus but nobody paid any heed to his utterance. Fortunately, his countrymen did not force him to leave his country of Poland. In India, Aryabhat, the 5th century mathematician, too, did not face any hard criticism from his countrymen for postulating a similar theory; he even correctly determined the cause of the lunar and solar eclipses that happened due to the spread of shadows of moon and earth on a fixed alignment of the sun, earth and moon respectively in their orbit. The Indians who were equally in the complete darkness about the celestial laws that governe the two most important events in the sky simply ignored him and went on with their age-old superstitious beliefs and convictions. However, we all know today that Galileo, Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus and Aryabhat held the same truth about earth and its revolution around the sun. Before them, man was completely under darkness about the earth and its revolution for at least nine thousand years. This perception has been scientifically proved incorrect today as it was a blunder. Billions of people have been similarly moving on earth under the same type of wrong perception. It is painful to say that although we know them to be pursuing false and incorrect ideas, we do not say anything against them but accept their falsehood and blunder and worship them because they are powerful people like priest, mollahs, maulvis (muftis and imams) and purohits (priests). The concept of God, heaven, sky, this world, and the outer space as well as heaven-hell, puja-worship, obeisance-invocation, esotericism and mantra, pilgrimage-tirtha-tapovan, namaz-azan, mass-sabbath, meditation-adoration and such other various activities, beliefs, perceptions etc are what we all pursue blindly. There is no truth in favor of their authenticity.

In the ancient Indian scriptures called purans (legends), the echo of evolution theory of science is heard. The ten avatars of fish, tortoise, boar et al as we know can in fact be the brief history of evolution which was so lengthy. The Bible also provides a similar creation theory and its evolution for ages: In the beginning . . . the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep (Genesis 1:1-2). But the evolution theory as current up to the 19th century through ancient texts has been smashed under the cover of one eternal and omnipotent God, which is why the Europeans did not think much on this. Against this background, the eastern world of India, Bharat, was following a more advanced concept about the theory of creation in ancient times. We find clear reflection of this in their scientific approach. Despite this, there was never any scientific culture in Indian or eastern thinking and philosophy on modern lines.

In the middle of 19th century only, Charles Darwin in his Origin of the Species (1859 CE) proved for the first time that God did not create this world and the animal and human life in one single moment; rather through a evolutionary process of billions of years, this world, universe, matter and life and its various formats have evolved gradually by some natural laws. God has no role to play in this. Through this naturalist’s established theory we the educated people of the world have come to know the real story behind the creation. But, in reality, have we? No doubt Darwin explained his theory in a scientific way, and following him more scholars and scientists in the following generations have established this theory of creation in yet more perfect manner. Nobody can deny the truth of this theory of creation through natural evolution process. As geometrical and mathematical axioms are accepted as final, so is the evolution theory of Darwin. This is the way the scientists all over the world have accepted it. But ordinary people everywhere do not care for this theory of Darwin, because they do not know him or have ever heard his name. Inevitably, common people everywhere on earth follow the dictum and direction of all ancient religious scriptures and what is written in them to be the end all and be all of everything. This means despite profuse advancement in scientific pursuits in the present times, old beliefs and ancient superstitions prevail everywhere merrily in this world of our times.

What more painful and grievous can be in a man’s life than this? They say man is a rational animal, but if you throw away science and accept blind faith, superstition, malicious social practice and ignorance to be the sole guiding factors in life, then how can you say man is rational? When Yaksa asked Yudhisthira (of Mahabharata) on what is the most astonishing thing in life, what the latter replied can be cited as an eye opener; he said: Everybody watch living beings dying every day, yet people wish to live for eternity in this world. There is no greater astonishing thing in the world than this. In the same way, the behavior of modern man seems to be astonishing. Having learnt the truth advanced by science and the natural laws of the world, man still blindly follows many of the ancient world’s beliefs, concepts and superstitions.

NATRURAL LAWS

The ancients had a common belief that God created this world in one moment. According to Indian Purans, Brahma took only one nimesh to create this world of us, nimesh being less than 1/60th part of a second. The Biblical God took a little more time than this – six days. The Allah of Koran, too, created the world in six days. So, they also did not take much time. And, more important, there is clear indication about when or on which particular day or year the God or Allah created the world. The Brahma created the world in the beginning of Satya Yuga, Age of Truth. That is about 4000 years before the birth of Christ as we have found it through mathematical and astronomical calculations. Almost at the same time or a little after it the three worlds of Heaven, Earth and Hell were created by God; the Islamic time sense is more modern: it is conjectured a little before the birth of Christ their world began.

It must therefore be accepted that according to the religious belief and convention, the world is not more than six thousand years old. But history, anthropology, paleontology, physics, astrophysics and various other sciences of modern times give a completely different picture about the birth of our world. Even the records of language and literature of many countries are conclusive enough to suggest an older date. The Sumerian civilization was born at least 5000 years before Christ; the Egyptian civilization too appeared not later than 4500 years BCE. Many a primitive society had much older dates. This means the time of advanced human life on earth is pushed back to ten or twelve thousand years back. Many artifacts and crafts of these people are preserved in the renowned museums throughout the world; so there is no room for doubt about the existence of those people at that hoary past. And if the role of anthropology is considered, then it will have to be told that man (Homo sapiens) appeared at least 200,000 years ago. Before that his ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus spent no less than eight million years before the advent of Homo sapiens, precursor of the present man.

According to the science of biology, life began on earth at least 1250 million years ago. Even a large number of gigantic reptiles like dinosaur, tyrannosaur, stegosaur et al roamed over all parts of the earth until 65 million years ago. By analyzing geological data, the geoscientists have come to the conclusion that the earth is at least 5000 million years old. According to the astrophysicists, the universe was born exactly 13.8 billion years ago before which there was no time and space; and the universe (Brahmanda, to be exact) means the sky, supernova, pulsar, nebula, black holes, galaxies, stars, planets, and so on. Even they are of the opinion that the universe is still growing and expanding leading to the growth of innumerable other universes every moment. The essence of this is that the universe is so vast and its vastness is growing forever since it was born. No religion has set forth such a long and inconceivable past time. This means the data offered by religion is not acceptable by any science, history or even sociology. Under the situation why will we accept their version of the birth of humans and other animals?

Besides, every moment millions of events are taking place in the universe and they are all independent incidents without having any relation to one another. There are some basic laws in the universe: nothing in it is without a cause and effect syndrome. Behind every event, there is a specified cause; and no event can take place blindly or in an opposite manner. That will be a break of law, which never happens anywhere in the universe. Darkness goes out as soon as the sun rises; without the sunrise, darkness cannot be removed. The cause of the removal of darkness is sunrise. If after the sunrise darkness prevails and light does not come out, then that must be an opposite event, event that never happens under normal circumstances. Similarly, water flows downwards, this is the law; if for some reason or other water flows upwards then that would also be an opposite event. In this universe never such opposite event takes place. Of course, some apparently contradictory things are seen to take place here, for example, artificial fountains in cities sprout water upwards, artesian wells also similarly sprout water upwards. But the upward flow of water in these cases has a limit up to certain heights, 10 ft, 20ft or even a hundred ft and so. However, for these apparently looking impossible events, what works behind the force to generate upward flow of water is the strong pressure that lies hidden in a machine nearby or resting naturally underground. This we do not find in open eye but know only by analyzing everything scientifically.

There happens, of course, one or two really impossible things, like, say, pregnancy of a five-year old girl or restoration of life after death. Pregnancy takes place at certain age of a girl when her physical system is fully mature for bearing a child; that cannot be before 12/13 years of age and there must be through conjugal mating: without mating, pregnancy is not possible. But a case of pregnancy of a five-year old has been found true by medical examination. Events of this nature are called nature’s freak. In this case, the pregnancy is not due to any sudden development of the girl’s body followed by sex; it can be traced to some defective placement of a second embryonic cell in mother’s womb with which the girl is born and that cell at some later age, say at fifth or sixth year, blooms to be a child-like object in the immature girl’s womb. Death occurs when the heart stops beating. Some people are said to have returned to life after death. There is a scientific explanation behind this seemingly impossible act. Heart may stop beating for a few seconds or minutes in some cases, it is possible then the patient’s relatives think that the patient has died and they arrange for the cremation of the body in quick haste and in fact be brought to cremation ground; by that time heart gets reactivated and starts beating and the person rises up. The famous Bhawal Sannyasi who returned to life in this way was the prince of Bhawal state, Dacca; Kadambini in Tagore’s immortal short story Jibita O Mrita also got to live in the same manner. But bhasmibhutasya punaragamanam kuto (Charvak)? How does one reduced to ashes come back to life? If a man die shall he live again (Bible, Job 14:14). When the body is reduced to flame, it is not possible life comes back to it. We never hear a story of coming back to life after one’s body being burnt or death occurring long ago. The reason is obvious. Devout Christians believe Jesus resurrected after remaining three days in a grave. He was crucified on Friday forenoon and his body was buried hurriedly the same afternoon because of the next day Sabbath, when all public activities remained suspended in the Jewish society. Possibly, he was buried alive. His disciples took out his body without anybody’s notice and nursed him to life. But his disappearance forever thereafter cannot be explained with this story of his resurrection.

There must be some scientific reason behind every event. Nothing takes places without a cause. Lightning never occurs without cloud formation, because lightning happens when a cloud dashes against another. Cloud is necessary for rain. Without a cloud there cannot be any rain. If somebody says that or gives a vivid description of such a thing, then that is unacceptable. Rama of Ramayana went to Sri Lanka from India with his army of monkey soldiers by crossing the sea on foot. This is impossible and so cannot be acceptable. Sea is deep and 20 mile wide between India and Sri Lanka, there is heavy current; under the situation it was not possible to construct a dyke over it in those days (about 1000 BCE). We have not yet attained this kind of technological feat, let alone the monkey soldiers of Ramayana age. King Canute had conviction that because he was a king everybody would obey him, including the sea. He ordered the sea to stop waving; obviously the sea waves did not stop. There is no proof that the sea stopped in this way or its depth lessened by an order of Rama. In the Exodus of the Bible it is described that the sea was suddenly divided into two with a median allowing Moses and his people to pass by unhindered through the waterless path thus created. King Janaka got his daughter Sita from the belly of earth – this story has also no real basis. Heaven is described in every religious scripture with its location being always referred to in the sky above our head. For this reason gods and goddesses live there; virtuous people also go there to live after death but nobody has the right to be in heaven when living. Only Yudhisthira of the Mahabharata arrived there alive. But this is not wholly true: Arjuna too went there in his mortal form. Prometheus also visited heaven and stole fire from there to give it to man on earth. There are many such stories in almost all religious and ancient story books. If heaven is located in some galaxy or nebula billions or trillions of miles away from us, then it is not at all possible for anybody to go there in naked body, without any scientific protective gear. Only in 1969, two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, landed for the first time on the moon, our nearest satellite which is within a distance of one million miles only. They went there not in naked bodies but in protective gears valuing billions of dollars and traveled by high speed spaceship and not on foot or horseback. In the Ramayana, Meghnada went into sky and fought with the monkey army of Rama while hidden in the clouds, for which his name was Meghnada, one who roars like a cloud. This is not trustworthy. The story of Rama took its shape around 1000 BCE; it is possible Rama and Ravana, the lords of two different principalities in northern India took to war among them for certain trivial ground and one of them was defeated by the other as is likely in any war. But at that hoary past man did not have learnt the art of flying in sky as there was no technology. We have obtained this technology just now. For this reason war is fought today in the sky from where they throw powerful bombs on the enemy lines killing thousands, even hundreds of thousands at one go. We had our memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities in Japan that were destroyed almost completely by two American Atom bombs in 1945. It must be agreed that what is possible today through the advance of science was not achievable three or four thousand years ago. Today we can travel from one end of earth to another in days because we have the facility of train and plane but it was impossible three-four thousand years back. It took the Aryans nearly two and a half thousand years to arrive in India from Hungary, their original homeland, as they came by foot, or bullock cart or camel- and horseback halting at places on way for hundreds of year at a time. In comparatively recently, Alexander arrived at the western edge of India after a three-year journey from his native Greece. In this situation, it was not possible for Hanuman to cross over the sea in one big jump and reach the Himalaya and back in one night. The Bible clearly describes that Moses saw God face to face and talked to Him personally in a wood. In addition, God gave him His ten commandments recorded in two rock tablets which He created before his eyes. Moses took them to his people in concrete shape and earned their faith by showing the tablets. But this is also a mere story-book tale and so not acceptable. Krishna showed Arjuna the biswarupa (outlines of the universe), the entire universe in his open mouth and said I am the universe and I am the God; I am everything and you all and everything are just playthings in my hand. This is also a tale-tale talk and nothing more than one’s self-conceit and excessive pride. Many kings and emperors in the past exhibited their conceit in similar manners. Canute of England thought himself to be like a god due to his excessive pride and so ordered the sea to stop. The Egyptian pharaohs considered themselves to be God’s representatives and even God himself. Alexander, too, thought himself to be the God. But however powerful and big man cannot be God because man is mortal whereas God is immortal and eternal. Or does also God die?

Christ claimed to be the only son of God. Then who or what were his parents, brothers and sisters (by village relation), or his countrymen, the Israelites? Are they then fatherless orphans? Krishna too declared himself to be the God as we have found above and like Jesus he too came to earth to save them from its many sins and uncleanlinesses.

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