Blokesblogin

Conversations on Conversion
Awaiting our flight at the airport, we meet a very friendly, elderly couple. We exchange rhetorics and soon the conversation veers towards God. The man says that their youngest is in Brazil proselytizing the word of God. I ask him what that was. He says that God is a man and His son got on the cross to atone for all of us and His resurrection is to take care of our afterlife. I ask him what about the BC era or a time when man had not yet evolved. What about the time before this Earth even existed/ What about a time when there was neither space nor time? What form or shape did this God have to have created this universe in the first place? He could only say that I thought differently. He got curious about what my concept of God was. I said, for me, God was an experience. It could be a he/she experience or it could be an inanimate experience amidst rocks and canyon walls. Or it could be just this intense silence that is also peaceful and comfortable. It could be nothing too.
That conversation set some neurons buzzing. What does anyone know of God to go around proselytizing about? Even if they do, how can one person's truth or experience be the same as another's? Given that many experienced God in Krishna, in Rama, in Jesus, in Mahavir, in the Buddha. My Jewish friend along with my Sikh friend while having lunch today agreed that one could start a religion around parathas, lavosh bread or dosas! As a Tamilian, my experience of making and eating a dosa is more intimate than making and eating Lavosh bread or parathas. Likewise, with my other two friends. If this was the experiential truth with just our food, what about an abstract concept such as God? How can anyone judge objectively that dosa is better than parathas or lavosh bread?! How could I possibly go around defining my experience seeing "blue or white light" as being greater or better than someone else who has seen "red or purple light"?! When I am in ignorance myself, how could I possibly go around telling others about the God that I have heard being described as a He on a cross or carrying a flute, as a She with a thousand arms or putting her child to sleep or as an It a piece of red sandstone sandwiching layers of time within its folds...
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