God: The Sacrosanct Superhuman

"In God We Trust"- Common phrase ofcourse.
But how can we trust someone we don't know?
This piece of pondering was inspired by some old memories (not that there are new memories). A maternal uncle's story as narrated by my mom, and some of her sisters. Till his late teens, my uncle was an extremely religious, highly devoted follower of the Hindu Gods. Legend has it that he spent a whole day at the local Vishnu temple attending puja during the Utsav a day before his matriculation exams. Interestingly, this same person is now a staunch disbeliever in the concept of the almighty. A rather contrasting change! From a sanctimonious devotee to a blasphemous atheist.

That brings me to the question I have been wanting to ask.
What is God?
Note that I have deliberately settled for "what" instead of "who" due to my need to accommodate a definition of God which goes beyond the deityfication of the almighty into a human-like entity which most religions, and their associated mythology, have propagated for centuries and beyond.

And the next question is:
Is there a God, the way we know "Him"?
Now, the answer could be quite simple for this one. We don't really know "Him". So the existence of God can not be validated at all.

Millions of people have, in billions of pages of religious literature, written about The Almighty, and his amazing strengths, and the miracles that only he is capable of, and how their lives have changed for the better due to their "coming together as one" with The God. I am, certainly, not in the same league to argue about what these great people have written. However, it does get me to think as to why people delve between the extremes when it comes to faith (or the lack of it). Case in point is my uncle that I mentioned about. How can a person change his religious orientation so drastically overnight? Is it an admittance of complete ignorance till the day he realized that his new faith (which is actually no faith) was the impeccable truth? Does he now believe that there is no supernatural, super human entity that was responsible for this world that we live in?

Two Answers.

One. If there was no supernatural being, then everything must be science. And since we cannot conclusively explain genesis even with our advanced knowledge of science, I'll have to live with the disheartening thought that our scientific achievements are nowhere as close to where our pragmatic thoughts would demand. Some divine intervention is definitely welcome. Ironic.

Second. There is a God. Simple. Uncomplicated. But is He a he? Or is He a she? Questions that cannot be answered. Apparently, on second thoughts, this interpretation is not as uncomplicated as I initially thought. But really, once we have accepted the existence of this supernatural entity that governs our lives and much beyond, it is really not that important what form we want this entity to be in. Being very basic, God could be just some speck in space which could be causing and controlling the world and everything that happens in it. And the deityfication of this space into human-like entities could just be a poetic interpretation of our ancestors. Over the eras, the metaphor may have been lost on the future generations, and therefore, people may have started to believe that God is, really, this human-like entity with superhuman strengths.

Interestingly, the superhuman strengths of God has helped the English Language coin the word "Juggernaut" to refer to an unstoppable force. Etymologically,the word is a distortion of the Hindu deity Jagannath. The chariot of Lord Jagannath, at Puri in Orissa is considered to have amassed such massive momentum that it crushed several people in its path due to its unstoppable force.This deityfication has surely not gone waste since there are thousands of people who earn their livings through the religious images and paintings that they have found a booming market for. A picture of a huge statue of Lord Ganesha being immersed in the ocean in yesterday's Times is my vindication.

Since the entire concept of The Almighty is , but, a speculation, each person would either invent or conform to an interpretation of the existence of God that would suit him best. Wonder what made my uncle change his interpretation of God from the Sacrosanct Superhuman to the Spatial Blackhole!