Between God and Satan
Trying to understand whom we can thank for our happiness and whom to blame for our sorrow
This is an excerpt from some thoughts I wrote in my second year engineering...When the promoters of God were questioned about why there was so much misery in the world, they were in a fix. After all, they had themselves proclaimed that God is responsible for every activity on earth.
A catch there, the promoters had to be more specific. So, they quickly rewrote their marketing script. They declared that God is a force which is responsible for all the good things that happen around us. And the evil force, Satan, is responsible for the misery in the world. Good is a much-desired element which gives pleasure, and bad is obviously that much-detested element which causes pain. Pleasure and pain are the two extremities that human beings are bound to experience during their lifetimes.
If we examine an act of rape, we see that the victim suffers and the rapist derives some perverse enjoyment. In this case, the act is sexual. What does this mean? In this act, God cannot have taken the side of the rapist who derives pleasure. It is equally absurd to believe that the Satan is on the side of the woman in the form of pain. By the promoter’s manner of reasoning it would seem that God and Satan have joined hands in this venture.This can be the only ridiculous conclusion we can arrive at.
In any act, pleasure and pain go hand in hand, for the simple reason that one’s gain is another’s loss. For example, when a man kills a bird and eats it, he gets pleasure whereas the bird gets pain. So, here too, God has taken the side of power and caused misery to the bird. The man could have easily avoided the act. To satisfy his hunger, he could have surely chosen to eat vegetables. But because of his carnivorous instincts,he killed the bird.Thus, in proportion to the amount of pleasure he desires to obtain, he causes misery. Gain in pleasure is directly proportional to the loss in pain.
According to me, there are no two polarised forces: one good and one evil. If I am to believe in God, there is only one force which is responsible for every act — good, bad or ugly around us. To be honest, I began thinking of the concepts of God and Satan, nearly three decades ago, when I was doing my civil engineering in Vijayawada. Obviously this was much before I had even dreamt of becoming a film-maker.
When I read this stuff — which I wrote in the form of notes way back, when I was in engineering college — I am frankly surprised by the clarity of my thoughts and the way I could conceptualise them even back then. Sure enough my language and some of the examples seem too simplistic and I had primarily written this back then to impress a girl called Satya. The tragedy is that she never read this essay of mine because she got bored in the first para itself. I am super sure that quite a few of you will either share her feelings or feel pained by my thoughts. But then I got immense pleasure while writing down my thoughts. So If you are pained by my pleasure then you decide who you should blame – God or Satan?
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