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God of Hope

During my first semester in NUS, I took a philosophy module ( Reason and Persuasion), partly out of curiosity and partly out of a budding interest in the subject. The module mainly covered the dialogues of Plato, on his concept of morality, justice etc etc. Soon it became frustratingly obvious to me that philosophy was something that never really provided any answers, but just lead to even more question.


The only notable highlight though was halfway through the module, the professor predictably enroached on the ground of religion, on the idea and the purpose behind religion, existence of God and so on. The depth of the discussion soon started to plant doubts about my own attitude towards religion. All these years, despite being an Hindu, my concept of religion was more that of an agnostic. I believed in the existence of the all powerful God but not in the forms that all the religions presented him to me. Religion to me was simply a human creation, a philosophy,a code of conduct. I still prayed, partly because it was a habit, partly because I did not want to displease the Almighty and partly because I hoped he would give me some things in return.


However even that changed halfway through the module. For once it did not make sense to me to spend minutes every day praying to man made figures. And it just seemed absurd that I was praying to someone of whom there was no proof of existence, someone who was probably not anyone and maybe just a source of energy that created the whole universe. The way I saw it, the energy created us, thats that. Why pray to it?


And so I stopped praying.


That however did not last long. As the stress and workload of the semester piled up without stop, I desperately needed something to keep me going. Hope. And through all these years I realised my main source of hope was in the form of my prayer to God.


Yes, it did not make sense. Hope is a blind belief. But it what that keeps many of us going during the lowest moments of our lives. I have seen some not so religious people turn to prayer in their old age. Why? I sense that, late into our lives we will all suddenly realise that despite how well or how far ahead we plan our lives, it never really goes according to plan. We can never predict the surprises that life will throw at us. All we can hope for is that these surprises are in our benefit.


And for that hope we pray. Pray to someone whom we have never seen before, whom we have never done anything for before, but someone who will still never fail to lavish us with all the hope that we request him for.


What more can we want?

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