[The following has been translated from a small part of an original article written in Assamese language by Homen Borgohain with the same title. The content and it's meanings are the author's; I am merely the translator with no change in meaning from the original.]
"Do you actually believe that with death, everything is completely finished for a human being? A person who sings hymns of the Upanishadas, a person who writes the Hamlet, a person who composes the fifth symphony - do all these people get diffused in the dust after their death? All about the immortality of soul which religions speak of - is it completely a luxury of human imagination?" - I asked him.
"I shall try to answer your questions in a rather skewed manner instead of directly answering", he replied. "Actually, as a matter of fact, I shall tell you the answers which I have received having asked your questions to myself repeatedly. ..... 'Death' is the greatest question as well as the greatest mystery of human life. Its significance is even higher than that of God, because in the absence of death, whether human beings would be so curious about God is a matter of doubt. Confronting death, a person asks: Will I vanish for eternity as soon as I die, or will some part of mine remain even after I die? If it remains, then in what form and where will it remain? Personally I believe that with death, human life comes to a complete end; nothing remains after that. But for the sake of debate, let us assume that something called a 'soul' lives on even after a person dies. It can not be certainly like this that - what all religions of the world say is false, and what an ordinary human being like I say is true. If the soul lives on after a person's death, then irrespective of one's religious belief, won't the eventual consequence of the 'soul' be the same for all human beings? Suppose we three friends - one Hindu, one Muslim and one Christian - live in one house. One day, suddenly, a bomb drops on our house and we all die together. What will happen to our 'souls' after we die? The soul of the Hindu person will reside temporarily in heaven or Narak (hell) after which it will return to the earth to re-incarnate (as person or animal), whereas the souls of my Muslim and Christian friends will have to lie in their graves until the day of final judgment arrives. On the day of final judgment, some souls will be rewarded with an eternal happiness of heaven while others will be subjected to an endless misery of torture in hell. I am speaking it in very brief. It would take much more time if I want to elaborate. My question is: if the immortality of soul is a universal concept or rule, then shouldn't the future and eventual consequence of the souls of all human beings be exactly the same? In the thousands of years that a soul of a Muslim person lies in the grave awaiting the day of final judgment, a Hindu person's soul will be re-born multiple times - how can the outcome of the soul and life be so different for two human beings? It then, no longer becomes a matter of logic and rationality after all; rather it becomes a matter of faith. You wouldn't forsake your faith, and even I won't discard mine. 'Faith' can fulfill a profound emotional and psychological need of yours; but it can not certainly prove one to be 'true' and the other to be 'false' between two mutually contradictory 'truths'. That is why I had told you a little while before that only 'faith' - only and only 'faith' - is unworthy of faith. I do not wish to hurt the faith of anyone, but at the same time, I can not allow anyone to hurt my faithlessness. I have no faith on 'faith'. The mutually contradictory outcomes of life after death as proposed by religions are all self-bluffing imaginations according to me. There is no certain way to know what happens to life after death, because so far no one has returned from the other side of life to tell us about it. If we recall Shakespeare's words:
But the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will....."
"Would you speak anything further on God, or have you already spoken whatever you had wished to speak on this matter?", I asked him hesitantly.
He laughed "So you aren't still convinced that I am an atheist? But you've guessed something correctly though. I can not claim to have spoken everything on God which I want to. I have written several essays on God in the last forty years but I have to agree that those essays have no similarities among them. Basically I am - myself - unable to discern what I am trying to write about God all these years. But I know that I am writing about God with different perspectives as a result of having sustained a continual debate within myself about God. If you would ask me on my deathbed, "With what final decision or understanding on God would you like to seek eternal adieu from this world?", then perhaps I would reply 'God is purely a manifestation of one's personal experiences. One can not learn anything about God's existence or non-existence by reading books or listening to what others say. Every person has to discover God for himself or deny the existence of God. Having lived on this world for so many years and having pondered about God for so long, at this moment of seeking eternal farewell from my life, what is the final understanding of God that I have arrived at? One thing I can say for sure is that I totally do not believe in that God who has been shaped or imagined by religions over the last few thousand years or who has been appealed to be followed and worshiped. I do not believe in any such God who responds to human prayers, or who can be labeled as omnipotent and merciful. Rather, if indeed the God imagined by religions does exist, then it has to be agreed that the religion-inspired God is very weak, helpless, biased, partial, flattery-lover, cruel and self-incomplete. Existence or non-existence of such a God is identical. Rather, non-existence if far better than existence. I do not feel the necessity of such a God in my life. In fact, I do not feel the necessity of any God at all in my life - just as Stephen Hawking opines that there is no role for God to play in creation of this universe.....but, but everyday I sit down to pray for sometime. I pray to an existence-less God. I do not pray seeking anything. I do not believe that prayer can have any response or replies. I pray to invoke some meaning on this meaningless life, to forget my insignificance, to imagine being a part of something supreme, to spread my eyesight to eternity through a small hole on the walls of the isolated prison of a mundane earthly life.... No, no. Even after speaking so much, it amounted to saying nothing...I pray to weep in solitude, or perhaps it may be such that I try to create a God in my prayers - such a God, who does not exist, but who should have existed.'
"I shall try to answer your questions in a rather skewed manner instead of directly answering", he replied. "Actually, as a matter of fact, I shall tell you the answers which I have received having asked your questions to myself repeatedly. ..... 'Death' is the greatest question as well as the greatest mystery of human life. Its significance is even higher than that of God, because in the absence of death, whether human beings would be so curious about God is a matter of doubt. Confronting death, a person asks: Will I vanish for eternity as soon as I die, or will some part of mine remain even after I die? If it remains, then in what form and where will it remain? Personally I believe that with death, human life comes to a complete end; nothing remains after that. But for the sake of debate, let us assume that something called a 'soul' lives on even after a person dies. It can not be certainly like this that - what all religions of the world say is false, and what an ordinary human being like I say is true. If the soul lives on after a person's death, then irrespective of one's religious belief, won't the eventual consequence of the 'soul' be the same for all human beings? Suppose we three friends - one Hindu, one Muslim and one Christian - live in one house. One day, suddenly, a bomb drops on our house and we all die together. What will happen to our 'souls' after we die? The soul of the Hindu person will reside temporarily in heaven or Narak (hell) after which it will return to the earth to re-incarnate (as person or animal), whereas the souls of my Muslim and Christian friends will have to lie in their graves until the day of final judgment arrives. On the day of final judgment, some souls will be rewarded with an eternal happiness of heaven while others will be subjected to an endless misery of torture in hell. I am speaking it in very brief. It would take much more time if I want to elaborate. My question is: if the immortality of soul is a universal concept or rule, then shouldn't the future and eventual consequence of the souls of all human beings be exactly the same? In the thousands of years that a soul of a Muslim person lies in the grave awaiting the day of final judgment, a Hindu person's soul will be re-born multiple times - how can the outcome of the soul and life be so different for two human beings? It then, no longer becomes a matter of logic and rationality after all; rather it becomes a matter of faith. You wouldn't forsake your faith, and even I won't discard mine. 'Faith' can fulfill a profound emotional and psychological need of yours; but it can not certainly prove one to be 'true' and the other to be 'false' between two mutually contradictory 'truths'. That is why I had told you a little while before that only 'faith' - only and only 'faith' - is unworthy of faith. I do not wish to hurt the faith of anyone, but at the same time, I can not allow anyone to hurt my faithlessness. I have no faith on 'faith'. The mutually contradictory outcomes of life after death as proposed by religions are all self-bluffing imaginations according to me. There is no certain way to know what happens to life after death, because so far no one has returned from the other side of life to tell us about it. If we recall Shakespeare's words:
But the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will....."
"Would you speak anything further on God, or have you already spoken whatever you had wished to speak on this matter?", I asked him hesitantly.
He laughed "So you aren't still convinced that I am an atheist? But you've guessed something correctly though. I can not claim to have spoken everything on God which I want to. I have written several essays on God in the last forty years but I have to agree that those essays have no similarities among them. Basically I am - myself - unable to discern what I am trying to write about God all these years. But I know that I am writing about God with different perspectives as a result of having sustained a continual debate within myself about God. If you would ask me on my deathbed, "With what final decision or understanding on God would you like to seek eternal adieu from this world?", then perhaps I would reply 'God is purely a manifestation of one's personal experiences. One can not learn anything about God's existence or non-existence by reading books or listening to what others say. Every person has to discover God for himself or deny the existence of God. Having lived on this world for so many years and having pondered about God for so long, at this moment of seeking eternal farewell from my life, what is the final understanding of God that I have arrived at? One thing I can say for sure is that I totally do not believe in that God who has been shaped or imagined by religions over the last few thousand years or who has been appealed to be followed and worshiped. I do not believe in any such God who responds to human prayers, or who can be labeled as omnipotent and merciful. Rather, if indeed the God imagined by religions does exist, then it has to be agreed that the religion-inspired God is very weak, helpless, biased, partial, flattery-lover, cruel and self-incomplete. Existence or non-existence of such a God is identical. Rather, non-existence if far better than existence. I do not feel the necessity of such a God in my life. In fact, I do not feel the necessity of any God at all in my life - just as Stephen Hawking opines that there is no role for God to play in creation of this universe.....but, but everyday I sit down to pray for sometime. I pray to an existence-less God. I do not pray seeking anything. I do not believe that prayer can have any response or replies. I pray to invoke some meaning on this meaningless life, to forget my insignificance, to imagine being a part of something supreme, to spread my eyesight to eternity through a small hole on the walls of the isolated prison of a mundane earthly life.... No, no. Even after speaking so much, it amounted to saying nothing...I pray to weep in solitude, or perhaps it may be such that I try to create a God in my prayers - such a God, who does not exist, but who should have existed.'
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