This article will explore the way belief in God helps us.
Belief in God helps us in many ways and I am sure most of you have something to say about how your belief has helped you. Regarding the existence of God, I have said pretty much everything that I am capable of saying in an earlier article. Link is below:
Now regarding the practical aspects of how belief helps us:
- This point is most important to me as I am a solitary bachelor and the time will come when I have to live and die alone. The point relates to remembrance of God as we go through the day. This practice was taught to me by the Ramakrishna Math. The practices of Islam (especially Sufism) also stress remembrance of God. We have God almighty himself for company as we go through the day.
- Next, belief in God in some form is essential if you are to practice the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita tells us that we have the right to act but not to the fruits thereof. The results of the action is in the hands of God. The practice of Nishkama karma (desireless actions) assumes belief in God.
- Thirdly belief in God helps us accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Karma is karma and the Universe works in its own way without necessarily paying much attention to our desires and comforts. I find that belief in God helps me to surrender to necessity. This is also the basic teaching of Islam according to Thomas Carlyle. What follows is a paragraph from Carlyle’s classic book – On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History:
He is real. He made us at first, sustains us yet; we and all things are but the shadow of Him; a transitory garment veiling the Eternal Splendor. “Allah akbar, God is great;”—and then also “Islam,” That we must submit to God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign ourselves to God.—”If this be Islam,” says Goethe, “do we not all live in Islam?” Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God’s-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable
I’ll end here. Thanks for reading and please comment on this article if you liked it or even if you didn’t. Feedback from my readers keeps me going.
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