There was this Captain of a ship which set sail from a port to another somewhere in the Middle East. On the way, a storm brewed and all the passengers, the crew and the Captain realised that their journey was in jeopardy and escaping with their Lives became their ONLY PRIORITY. Bad Times don’t support our pet theories and ideologies, consequently, the Captain of the ship issued an edict as follows:
So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.
The Shipmaster was the Captain of the ship proceeding to Tarshish from Joppa and the sleeper was Jonah, a Jewish Prophet, running away from the instructions of his God to proceed to Nineveh.
The Captain says: O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not. The Captain’s personal beliefs notwithstanding chides the sleeping Jonah to call upon HIS GOD and doesn’t even ask the sleeping Jonah to identify his religion or the name of the God he worshipped.
The prayers sought was for the storm to subside but the answer came from Jonah, who felt penitent and told the Captain to throw him overboard. Sure enough the crew, Captain and the passengers threw Jonah out and sure enough the storm abated.
Well it is not uncommon to say that God had plans, rather other set of plans to deal with the errant Jonah. Doctrinally that ‘plan of God’ is odious to my ears and thought. God is God and Time is in His hands. God could do anything, so why plan? Plan is a forethought of a
possible future. When it is God who creates ‘future’, where would be the necessity of a Plan? Plan is an anthropomorphic idea laden with the deficiencies of human understanding. Why ascribe that to God?
God send a fish which swallows Jonah and he his transported to another location and he finally lands up in Nineveh.
The point of this blog is that, when absolute necessity arises in one’s life one may surrender to the will of God, whom he or she believes. But as a Captain of a ship, having the responsibility of the ship, the goods in the ship and the human lives involved it is the DUTY OF THE CAPTAIN not to ascertain the names of the gods those humans worship but to exhort every human in his ship to pray to HIS OWN GOD. That full-throated participative prayer is what a Captain is to exhort and hope for a relief.
The prayer was not answered in the way it was imagined. Till Jonah was offloaded, the storm did not subside. The proposal itself came from the person who was to suffer the consequences of his own proposal. That is how the prayers of those who called their own God’s was answered.My best example for Secularism is the Captain of that ship caught in the storm with Jonah.
Getting human participation retaining their own beliefs is more important than proselytising humans in distress or cataloguing them during distress.
Like that Captain, leaders ought to shed the divisive distinguishing mapping of people and exhort them to give their best.
Tag Archives: god
Ford & God!
One of the jokes which went round while in college was:
Henry Ford dies and goes to heaven. At the gates, an angel
tells Ford, “Well, you’ve been such a good guy and your invention,
the assembly line for the automobile, changed the world. As a
reward, you can hang out with anyone you want to in Heaven.”
Ford thinks about it and says, “I wanna hang out with God,
himself.” The winged fellow at the gate takes Ford to the
Throne Room and introduces him to God. Ford then asks God, “God,
aren’t you the inventor of Woman?”
God says, “Ah, yes.” “Well,”
says Ford, You have some major design flaws in your invention:
l. There’s too much front end protrusion
2. It chatters at high speeds
3. The rear end wobbles too much, and
4. The intake is placed too close to the exhaust.”
God replies , “hold on.” God goes to the Celestial
Supercomputer, types in a few keystrokes, and waits for the result.
The computer prints out a slip of paper and God reads it. “It may
be that my invention is flawed,” God replies to Henry Ford, “but
according to my Computer, more men are riding my invention than yours.”
Actually what God said was: do you know why THE NUMERAL ZERO AND THE LETTER ‘O’ are placed behind each other in a QWERTY keyboard?
Upon Ford being speechless, God said: When one of the keys doesn’t work, one could substitute the other key and keep it going!
FORD was SPEECHLESS!
WHY NEGATIVE PRAYERS ARE DOWNRIGHT FATAL?
The biggest hurdle one faces with asking God for Death, Destruction or Deprivation is that, like all other prayers, none of these would be taken up and granted IMMEDIATELY. Consequently, the human mind goes back to its bitchy ways and repents for having made those negative prayers.
But when any of those negative things aforementioned happens, the mind says, ” DO YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU WISHED FOR IT ONCE? NOW THEY ARE ANSWERED!”
Let me narrate a story concocted by me based on the above principle.
One day a snake met God and when God enquired him of his weal, the snake said that even though he was harmless people chased him and harmed him. So God asked what he wanted, the snake replied, “I WANT YOU TO GIVE ME FANGS AND POISON TO INJECT ON PERSONS AND ANIMALS WHICH ARE LIKELY HARM ME.”
God granted its wish and the snake immediately developed poison glands and the fangs to inject the same on whomsoever he wished. Armoured with his fangs and poison, he became a feared creature and both humans and other animals avoided the snake.
Many years later when God met the snake and enquired his health, the snake was thankful and added that now he was not molested as before as he had the minimum deterrent of poisonous fangs and that the animals have understood it.
When the years of the snake drew to an end, one day he felt a shooting pain on his mouth. He could not understand the reason, his body was heating up that he felt his blood on a boil. Unbearable, he shouted for God’s help and God appeared before him. The snake asked God to remove the excruciating pain he was going through.
God said, “See, the pain you feel now is nothing but the poison, which you had held back in your own glands, mixing in your own blood stream. It is merely the laws made by me which are taking their course. Now that your poison sac has lost its toughness, the poison is seeping into your blood stream and causing this pain. So please bear with it and go through it, as it is my PRINCIPLE that HE WHO LIVES BY THE SWORD SHALL DIE BY IT and I see no reason why I should change the principle.”
As God completed the line, the snake felt his life ebbing out, his resistance was gone and he surrendered to the principle. As he lay dead, a few rats which passed by said, “where was the need for him to inject the poison, when all he wanted was to eat us for food? I had seen our brother rats twitching in pain when the poison of this snake made their nerves jangle! Thank God he is dead.” The rats seldom realized that it was the same poison which got the snake.
OATH OF OFFICE IN THE NAME OF ALLAH.
The Supreme Court of India is reported to have dismissed the petition wherein the petitioner had prayed for a declaration that the oath of office taken by the Governor in the name of ALLAH, was to be declared as void. This was an appeal taken by the petitioner from the High Court of Jharkhand. The Supreme Court of India had instead declared the appeal to be MISCHIEVOUS and DIVISIVE.
When the newspapers report such news items- especially the ones relating to sensitive issues like religion- the media should clearly state the JUDICIAL REASONING forwarded by the petitioner and the JUDICIAL REASONING given by the Justices so that such issues are settled forever. Instead the news item in today’s TIMES OF INDIA (13/12/2011) merely states that the petition was dismissed as MISCHIEVOUS & DIVISIVE. No doubt, if one goes for the intention of the petitioner, such a MOTIVE is ascribable. But since the Supreme Court of India is the last resort for our declarations, the media should give the kernel of the judgement and not merely carry the interconnected opinion expressed by the Justices in the case.
A few weeks back my Muslim friend said that his God’s name was ALLAH. I said that ALLAH meant GOD in Arabic and it was also proven from internet resources that the Christians inhabiting the Gulf (predominantly Islamic population) call their God also as ALLAH. Please refer to WIKIPEDIA:-
Allah (English pronunciation: /ˈælə/ or /ˈɑːlə/; Arabic: الله Allāh, IPA: [ʔɑlˈlɑː] (
listen), [ʔalˤˈlˤɑː]) is a word for God used in the context of Islam.[1] In Arabic, the word means simply “God”.[2][3][4] It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá’ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and Sikhs.[5][6][7] It is related to ʼĔlāhā in Aramaic.
So ALLAH means GOD in Arabic. So some Christians in the Arabic speaking areas have not allowed the name ALLAH to be appropriated by Muslims alone to refer to their idea of God.
Coming back to the Constitution of India, the Schedule prescribes the forms for Oath taking by Constitutional functionaries and the oath is taken in the name of God or through solemn affirmation. So when the Governor of Jharkhand takes the oth in the name of ALLAH, he has merely used the Arabic word for God. In fact one should be appreciative of the Governor having taken the oath in the name of ALLAH, in whom he believes, than in the generic English term GOD or the Hindi term PARAMESHWAR. If the media had reported the kernel of the judgement and given the JUDICIAL REASONING behind the dismissal of the Appeal, the readers would have stood edified.
The news item further states that the names of INCARNATIONS could be used- i do not understand that. For example if a person were to use the name Jesus or Krishna or Rama would that be okay? I suppose NOT. The Constitution of India envisages the generic name of GOD (of course in any language) than a specific incarnation. Maybe a Thamizhan might take the oath in the name of KADAVUL or AANDAVAN, which are the generic names of God in Thamizh. Why make a fuss if GOD IS ONE? But as readers of NEWS PAPERS we should prefer the Judicial reasoning that went into that DECISION MAKING.
ALLAH HU AKBAR. GOD IS TRULY GREAT.
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