How We Turned an Abstract God into Concrete Hate
How We Turned an Abstract God into
Concrete Hate
God was never meant to be owned.
In its earliest human
understanding, God was abstract, unknowable, and undefined. People did not
claim certainty over it. They sensed it in nature, in conscience, in fear,
wonder, and humility. Worship had no walls. It happened under open skies, near
rivers, in forests, and in silence. Spirituality was personal, inward, and
restrained by doubt.
Everything broke the moment
humans tried to contain the abstract.
The moment God was locked inside
stone, gold, and spectacle, spirituality was replaced by religion. And once
religion took physical form, it demanded control. Someone had to manage God.
Interpret God. Defend God. Faith stopped being a personal search and became a
collective identity. Identity demanded loyalty. Loyalty demanded enemies.
This is where belief became
power.
At some point, humanity reached
an absurd conclusion: an all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal God apparently
needed human protection. Armies were formed to “defend” the divine. People were
killed in the name of saving an entity that supposedly created the universe.
Imagine that for a moment: fragile humans, convinced they were guarding
something that cannot even be proven to exist, let alone threatened.
And one begins to wonder what was
really being protected.
Because while people were told
they were defending God, massive religious structures were being built. Gold
flowed in. Land accumulated. Authority concentrated. Corruption found the
safest hiding place imaginable: behind faith. The public was told these were
holy centers. In reality, many became vaults of power, money, and influence,
protected by fear and sentiment. Question the structure, and you were accused
of questioning God himself. It was a perfect system. God could not speak back,
but his “representatives” spoke very loudly.
Across the world, this system
produced the same result. People who share bloodlines, geography, food, music,
language, and history were trained to hate one another over interpretations of
something no one can prove. Christians and Muslims in Europe. Jews and
Palestinians in the Middle East. Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. These groups
did not turn violent because they were incompatible. They turned violent
because religion became the easiest weapon to divide people who were otherwise
the same.
Nowhere is this contradiction
more brutal than in the Indian subcontinent.
Indians and Pakistanis come from
the same civilizational source: the Indus Valley. Long before modern religions
or nation-states, this land supported one of the world’s earliest urban
civilizations, built on trade, agriculture, planning, and coexistence. When
people from the West encountered it, they did not describe it by faith. They
described it by geography.
The Greeks called it Indus.
Its people were Indoi. The Persians called the river the Hindu.
The identity of the land was
civilizational, not theological.
And yet, when a modern nation was
created, its name was chosen not from history, but from religion. “Pakistan”
was a twentieth-century political construct, designed to assert separation
rather than continuity. It served a moment, but it erased memory.
Now pause and consider the
alternative.
If the country had been named Indus
Nation, it would have anchored identity in one of humanity’s oldest
civilizations, regardless of what faith its people practiced. It would have
said: this land belongs to history, not to a single theology. It would not have
erased difference, but it would have refused to make difference the foundation
of the state.
Names matter. They shape how
people think, who they feel they belong to, and who they are taught to fear. A
geography-based identity invites inclusion. A religion-based identity demands
conformity. When a nation defines itself by faith, disagreement becomes
betrayal and violence becomes defensible.
The consequences are visible.
Decades of hostility between India and Pakistan. Wars, paranoia, military
obsession, and the routine loss of innocent lives. All while ordinary people on
both sides remain nearly identical in how they live, eat, speak, laugh, and
dream.
This is the deepest hypocrisy of
modern civilization.
Humanity is willing to fight
endlessly over God, an entity it admits it cannot fully define, while feeling
little pain in hurting real, living human beings. Debates about the unknown
have become more sacred than compassion for the known. Belief has been elevated
above humanity.
We did not lose peace because God
demanded it. We lost peace because humans chose certainty over humility,
identity over empathy, and power over history.
The tragedy is not that people
disagree about God. The tragedy is that we forgot we were human before we chose
sides.
This article stays with you. The idea of calling the country Indus Nation feels both powerful and heartbreaking. One cannot help but wonder if a shared civilizational identity might have reduced the bloodshed of 1947 and spared countless lives. An Indus Nation could have stood as a bridge, not a boundary, and become a place the world came to celebrate, especially people from India who share that history. The reflection on faith cuts even deeper. The moment God was locked inside temples, mosques, churches, and gurudwaras, humility was replaced by ownership. From that ego, hatred was born, and spirituality quietly slipped away.
ReplyDeleteDevotion to the unknown is not inherently wrong. In fact, humility before what we cannot explain has always been part of human spirituality. The problem begins when millions are made to forget that they are following a concept, not a concrete reality, and are still willing to do anything in its name. An abstract idea of God has been turned into stone idols across the world, treated as living entities. These idols are fed, clothed in luxury, and decorated with jewelry, while millions of real human beings remain hungry, unclothed, and without shelter. Resources flow endlessly toward symbols, while suffering lives are treated as secondary. What makes this even more troubling is that people are prepared to protect these symbols with violence. Armies are formed, borders are drawn, and lives are lost defending objects that represent an idea no one can fully define. Those who question the concept are treated as enemies, while the moral responsibility toward fellow humans is quietly ignored. It is not devotion that has failed humanity. It is the willingness to sacrifice real people for an idea that exists only in belief, not in flesh and blood.
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