Delayed delivery of blessings

Been talking to a friend of mine the other day on God and religion... my pet topic to bitch about. She was angry at God for consistently neglecting her requests and prayers. She has declared moratorium on God and religious rituals for some time now. Her complaint is that even when she is asking for very small and simple things in life, God seems to pay little attention to them. That's definitely frustrating, when your concept of God is about an all powerful being who takes care of you and can alter things in life once you ask. After all, prayer is not just a time killing activity, right? It is firmly based on the belief that HE will carefully listen to them and take positive action as long as they are benevolent in nature. Makes sense!

I was trying to explain the logic behind these prayer-answer sessions. I knew she wouldn't buy the standard explanation of absence of God. So this is something that I came up with, which wasn't enough to answer her questions but good enough to explain the phenomenon of 'delayed-delivery of blessings' by Him. When there are so many stupid excuses for everything in life these days, I don't think one more really hurts. Whenever you ask for things that are not existing in the 'present', you are unknowingly requesting a deliberate collapse or expansion of 'time'. One of the best definitions of time I have heard is that 'time is the thing which prevents everything from happening at once'. Time being something that is common to everyone and everything, you can just imagine the repercussions of such a time-altering activity on the world at large. Its like the Chaos theory situation of 'a butterfly fluttering its wings at one corner of the world, creating a cyclone at another corner'. The whole world and its beings are connected by such delicate linkages that the action at one point will inevitably result in a reaction at some other. Probably God himself is very much aware of these things and make sure that his actions do not cause unnecessary imbalances..!!

Realizing that I am at my maddest-best, she decided not to contest the theory and we moved on to different topics. Religion has become such a nasty cancer on society these days that you cannot talk for 5 minutes on any subject without mentioning the 'R' word at least once. So it came up again. This time it was some Hindu religious rituals that became victims of our discussion. Hinduism, which was a 'way of living' till recent times, has got some beautiful and meaningful rituals. That is why you find most of the Hindu religious ceremonies so natural and nature-oriented like many of the 'so called pagan' religions. They were all intended to develop a healthy relationship with the surroundings we live in and the things we live with. This way of living was based on the realization that we share the world with others, that even the meek has a unique role to play here, that you need to respect everything - living & non-living - and so on. The basic intention of life was peaceful coexistence. Accepting and respecting things around will automatically take care of the "God' factor... Who was perceived as nothing but the collective conscience of all that we see around.

Only when Hinduism had to transform itself into a religion - perhaps to resist annihilation by more aggressive faiths - that these rituals lost their meaning and people started understanding them literally. This is in stark contrast to the artificial, person-oriented ceremonies in modern religious faiths, their only focus being keeping HIM happy and contented..

Ya he is watching you!