My answer to If bugs and mosquitoes were theists wouldn’t they theorize that in this perfect world God made humans …
Answer by Vishu Menon:
Perfection is what one is used to. Mother’s cooking is the best. To a white man white woman is pretty; brown men used to believe the whites lacked an outer skin. Pigmy thinks the Swahili is too tall thin and can’t appreciate elephant flesh. Chinese think the large eyes of Indians and Africans make them look like demons. Hindu Gods were all as black as the cumulo-nimbus clouds, but they have all become white ever since white men became their bosses for three hundred years.
I once complemented a strikingly beautiful Nigerian-American lady, telling her she belonged to the World Beauty Pageant. “No chance,” she said; “they give the prizes to white ugly bitches. Now that I’ve been in New York for so long, I can see that they’re not all that bad.”
Your visible spectrum is so limited that you cannot see what the mosquito can easily spot – red blood corpuscles under your skin. Your audio spectrum is so narrow that you cannot hear notes that a dog considers too loud. You carry a tailbone called coccyx that does nothing but cause crippling diseases. Man sports nipples and mammary arteries that serve him no purpose, but if he is fat, makes him a laughing stock. Woman has a birth canal that is so narrow that it gives her excruciating pain for hours to carry out a basic function or reproduction and often causes her death in agony (and your God takes credit for it). Children are born without eyes, limbs, defective brains or nervous system; some congjoined hip to head. Not very perfect creations of God, won’t you think?
The earth lives in constant fear that a huge meteor could end all lives in it like it had done possibly any number of times before. Man’s idea of time is so limited that he doesn’t realize that it happened only yesterday by the universal clock. You call a single spin of a tiny top of an earth a day in your life; an ancient Hindu scripture says 4.8 million years makes one God’s day. Bible says a thousand years does the same. Scientists tell us you call it day or night, our solar system has been here for, yes, nearly 4.8 million years.
Beauty we see in the mountains – shapeless, abstract, featureless, yet we have learnt to write poetry about them. Like an abstract painting and classical music, perfection is in the mind of the perceiver. Our eyes deceive us that God created a blue dome above us and that stars are hung from it like on the ceiling of a child’s room. We do not even realize that liquid is a collection of loosely bound solid balls; though that is how bacteria and probably the ants would see water. Most of what we see is an optical illusion. Earth looks flat and stationary, and that is an illusion. The airplane above appears to crawl while it flies at 800 kilometers an hour. From ten metres you would fall and hurt yourself, from 40 metres you would fall and scatter into pieces, but at 400 kilometres you wouldn’t fall at all. PC Sarkar can make a train or Taj Mahal disappear, feats which a Christ or Krishna couldn’t do. The problem with religions is that their theories are based on optical illusions. Gods are ancient Saibabas – cheats by magic.
Mahabaharata, the great Sanskrit epic, tells us that an infuriated Krishna stood up and displayed his terrible universal form. It frightened everyone but one present; some fainted. Duryadhana, a king renowned for his wisdom and cunning, said, “Wow, but I am not impressed by your illusions!” . Luckily for Jesus, his audience were illiterate peasants and fishermen. Muhammad, wiser than both, never tried a direct miracle display, but showed them in hindsight – see how God helped us in Badr.
The universe is but an accidental collection of congealed pieces of helium, its varying degrees of solidification creating different elements and compounds. Universe is like a mansion made by the bricklayers -not by an architect. Usable, but neither perfect, not intrinsically beautiful, not even durable. “If you come from another universe, you would find this one disorganized, ugly, unliveable and temporary. We’ve been in it for umpteen generations; like dung beetles in the dung, so we find it perfect and specially made for us. The bug and the mosquito share the belief that God created you and me to provide them food.
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