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Another Evening, Another Thought

This one did not arrive all at once. It has been sitting in my head for weeks, coming back in the quiet moments, on the subway, on long bike rides home, in the minutes before sleep. I talk to myself about it. I argue with myself about it. And no matter where I start, I end up in the same place.

If you look at how this planet actually runs, two forces sit underneath almost everything. The first is money. Not just cash, but finances, wealth, the whole machine of capitalism that decides where people live, what they eat, and how long they survive. The second is God. Not even religion, I want to keep it simpler than that. Just the idea of God.

You cannot escape either one. Some people believe in God, some people don’t, some argue about it, some refuse to discuss it at all. But whether you pray five times a day or call yourself an atheist, the concept shapes your life from birth to death. It decides how you marry, how you are buried, what laws your country writes, what your grandmother whispers over you when you are sick. Money is a story for another day. Today, I want to sit with God.

Imagine It Was Never There

Here is the thought experiment that started it. Imagine that from the very beginning of human evolution, there was no concept of God. No gods of thunder, no creation stories, no temples, no prayers. Remove it completely from the history of our species. What would the past look like? What would today look like?

To answer that, I first had to ask how the idea arrived in the first place. Researchers who study the psychology of religion have a compelling answer. Our ancestors survived by assuming that a rustle in the grass was a predator rather than the wind. The ones who guessed wrong about the wind lost a little time. The ones who guessed wrong about the predator died. So we evolved minds that see intention everywhere, minds that look at a storm, a drought, or a sudden death and ask: who did this?

Later, as tribes grew into villages and villages into kingdoms, something else happened. The psychologist Ara Norenzayan calls them “big gods,” gods who watch everything and judge morality. A small tribe can keep people honest because everyone knows everyone. A city of strangers cannot. But if everyone believes an invisible eye is always watching, strangers start trusting each other. In that sense, God may have been one of the tools that let human civilization scale.

Which made me realize something uncomfortable. If you removed God from history, the empty space might not stay empty. Something else would probably rush in to fill it: ancestor worship, the nation, an ideology. The Soviet Union officially removed God, and then treated the state and its leaders with something that looked a lot like religious devotion. The historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a point that connects both of my obsessions. Money and gods, he argues, are both shared stories. They work only because millions of people believe in them at the same time. Maybe that is why the two sit at the center of everything.

The Educated and the Faithful

For a long time, I carried an assumption. I believed that educated, wise people tend to be less religious. That at some point in their learning, they realize there is no God in the way their grandparents described. They might keep spirituality, faith, a sense of positivity, but not the rituals. I am educated, and that is roughly where I landed, so it felt obvious.

But it is not that simple, and I have to be honest about that. Plenty of brilliant scientists are deeply religious. Look at Muslim communities around the world, full of doctors, engineers, and professors who follow their faith carefully, where culture and religion shape marriage, law, and daily life. Even in America, college educated Christians often attend church as much as anyone else.

What seems to predict religion fading is not education alone. It is security. Researchers like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart found that when people have stable income, healthcare, and physical safety, religion tends to weaken. When life feels fragile, faith grows stronger. That makes painful sense to me. When you cannot afford a doctor, God is the only doctor you have. When nothing in your life is guaranteed, prayer is the only insurance policy available.

The God Who Watches

Here is where my thinking keeps getting stuck. Everyone tells me God is the most powerful being in existence. In Hinduism, in Christianity, in Islam, the message is the same: nothing happens without God.

Then I look around. Children dying suddenly. Good families who prayed every single day, losing everything. Violence, rape, drugs, war. And the people doing the most damage often get away with it. The powerful, the rich, the politicians who operate behind the camera where no one can reach them. They keep their power. They control countries and companies, driven by greed, unable or unwilling to tell the difference between what is human and what is inhuman. Meanwhile, the people with no power are the ones who suffer the consequences.

So I ask the obvious question. If God is that powerful, why doesn’t he stop it?

It turns out I am not the first person to ask. More than two thousand years ago, a version of this argument was framed like a trap, and tradition credits it to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. If God wants to stop evil but cannot, then he is not all powerful. If he can stop it but will not, then he is not good. If he can and wants to, then where does evil come from? Powerful, good, and present in this world: you cannot seem to have all three at once.

I should explain how I judge people, because it matters here. For me, there is only one real measure: intention. It does not matter who you are, what you own, or what title you hold. Are your intentions good or bad? That is it. And when I apply that standard to God, the picture gets worse. A being who sees all of this and does nothing either lacks the power to act or lacks the intention to care.

For a while, I thought maybe God exists but simply is not that powerful. That is a real position, by the way. It is called process theology, and Rabbi Harold Kushner made a version of it famous after losing his son to a rare disease. He concluded that God is good but limited.

But the more I thought about it, the more something felt off. If there is a being who created us but is not that powerful, or is powerful but does not care, then why call it God at all? That sounds like an alien. Some advanced species from somewhere else, maybe far ahead of us, who came, built something, and left. They do not care, just like we do not care about an anthill when we build a road. That is not God. That is just someone stronger than us.

Once again, history got there first. The deists of the 1700s imagined God as a clockmaker who built the universe, wound it up, and walked away. The ancient Gnostics went even further. They believed the being who made this broken world was a lesser, flawed creator, not the true God at all.

So here is where I land on this part. The God people describe, all powerful, all good, and involved in our lives, does not survive contact with the world as it actually is. Those qualities cannot fit in the same box. And if you take one of them away, what remains is no longer what humans meant by God.

There is one more thing I noticed. Without God, the chaos actually makes more sense. Human beings are free. We choose. Money and power intimidate us, tempt us, and some people pick the side of good while others pick the side of greed. Right and wrong become entirely human decisions. But I have to be fair here: believers use the exact same argument to defend God. They say God gave us free will, and real freedom means some of us will choose cruelty. So free will does not settle anything on its own. What it cannot explain is the suffering nobody chooses. A child with cancer. An earthquake that flattens a village. That is where the question really bites.

Born in the Hamptons, Born in the Himalayas

I grew up in Darchula, in the far west of Nepal, up in the mountains. I have now lived in New York City for more than a decade. I have seen both ends of this, and it bothers me every day.

Imagine two babies born on the same day, with the same intelligence, the same potential, the same human heart. One is born into a wealthy family in the Hamptons, or Greenwich, or the Upper West Side. The other is born in a remote village in the Himalayas, or rural Bangladesh, or a dusty town somewhere in Kazakhstan.

The first child gets health insurance, good doctors, clean water, the best schools, travel, safety. When something goes wrong, help arrives. They do not die easily. The second child might walk hours to school, might lose a sibling to an illness that a pharmacy in Queens could cure in a week, might spend an entire life working harder than the first child ever will and still have less. Same human. Different environment. Completely different life.

How is that fair? And if God is watching all of this, how is that acceptable?

Religions have tried to answer this. Hinduism has one of the oldest explanations: karma and rebirth. You were born where you were because of what you did in past lives. It does explain the unfairness. But read carelessly, it can also justify it. If the poor deserve their poverty, why help them? That logic has been used for centuries to defend things like the caste system.

The philosopher John Rawls had a very different instinct. He asked us to imagine designing society from behind what he called a “veil of ignorance,” before knowing where we would be born. Rich or poor, Manhattan or a mountain village. If you did not know which life you would get, you would probably build a much fairer world, because you might be the child in the village.

That feels closer to the truth for me. Not a cosmic explanation, just chance. And if it is just chance, then fixing it is entirely on us.

Something From Nothing

So I had convinced myself. There is no God. It is simple. And then another question pulled me right back.

How did any of this begin? The planet, the stars, the universe itself. Nothing can come from nothing. If there was nothing, there would still be nothing. So something had to be there. And if something was there, where did that come from?

My first instinct was to reject the Big Bang entirely. A tiny ball of fire that exploded out of nowhere? That sounded ridiculous to me. But I had to correct myself here, because I was arguing against something the theory does not actually claim. The Big Bang does not say a ball of fire exploded, and it does not say something came from nothing. It says the universe was once extremely hot and dense and has been expanding ever since. The evidence for that is strong: leftover radiation still detectable in every direction of the sky, galaxies moving away from each other, and the precise amounts of hydrogen and helium the theory predicted before anyone measured them.

What science honestly cannot tell us is what came before, or why there is anything at all. The philosopher Leibniz put it in one line three centuries ago: why is there something rather than nothing? Physicists cannot answer it, and religion answers it only with faith.

This is the part that makes me pause. I am not saying God made it. But there should be something behind it. And if something created all of this, isn’t that, in some sense, what people mean by God?

But the same logic cuts both ways. If everything needs a cause, then what caused God? Believers answer that God simply exists, without a cause, forever. Fine. But if something can exist without a cause, why couldn’t it be the universe itself?

Here is what I eventually understood about my own thinking. My two arguments are not actually in conflict. The problem of evil knocks down one very specific God: all powerful, all good, involved in our lives. It says nothing about whether something started the universe. So I can reject the God of the temple while keeping the question of origins open. I do not have to choose between “God made everything” and “nothing made anything.” I can stand in the honest middle and say: I do not know.

The Transaction

There is another thing that has always bothered me. All my life, people have told me: pray to God, go to the temple, bring fruit, bring money, make an offering, tell God your problems, and God will help you.

Think about what that actually describes. I give something, and in return, God gives me something. I give him attention, offerings, and devotion, and he fulfills my dreams. That is not faith. That is a transaction. I am not going there with my heart. I am going there because I want something. And if God responds to that, then God is being transactional too.

Why would a superior being want to be bribed with bananas and coins? Why would God want me to constantly put pressure on myself, offering and asking, offering and asking? And what about the person who does not have fruit to offer, or does not know the right prayers? If God rewards those who make the right offerings, that is unfair. God, if he exists, should be about something raw and real, not a marketplace.

What surprised me is how many of the deepest religious thinkers said the same thing. The ancient Romans had a phrase for transactional worship: do ut des, “I give so that you may give.” In chapter 7 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes four kinds of people who come to him: the distressed, those who seek wealth, the curious, and the wise. He says the wise one, who wants nothing in return, is the one dearest to him. The entire idea of nishkama karma is acting without bargaining for results.

More than a thousand years ago, the Sufi mystic Rabia of Basra is said to have prayed in a way that cuts right through it. In the version usually retold, she asked God to burn her in hell if she worshipped him out of fear of hell, to shut her out of paradise if she worshipped him hoping for paradise, and, if she worshipped him for his own sake, never to hide his face from her.

So the version of religion I am criticizing, the one built on fruit, money, and wish lists, is exactly the version many saints criticized too. And it fails my own test. A God who responds to offerings instead of intentions would be judging people in the very way I refuse to.

If God Walked In Tomorrow

Then came a question that stopped me. Suppose a creator did exist. Suppose God, or that alien, walked in tomorrow and proved it. Showed me the power. Told me he built the universe. Would anything about how I live change?

My first answer was immediate: nothing. Nothing would change.

And then I imagined God saying, “Son, tell me what you want.” I would not accept that. What about everyone else on this planet? The people who work harder than I do, who suffer far more than I ever have? If God granted my wishes, I would have an unfair advantage over them. And if God said, “You were the loyal one, the seeker, so I chose you,” I would not believe him. A truly superior being would not think that way. If God thought the way I think, he would not be God. He would already know it was unfair, long before I did, because he would be a million times wiser than me.

So my morality stays exactly where it is. Fairness, intention, refusing advantages I did not earn. None of that depends on God showing up.

But then I kept thinking, and I had to take my own answer back. Something huge would change.

I would finally get answers. Every question that has been circling in my head for years, about suffering, about fairness, about why anything exists at all, I could ask directly. Why this? Why that? And I would know. I would stop being a man made of questions and become a man with answers. Calmer. Less chaotic inside. Wiser, maybe not completely, but a better version of myself than I was yesterday.

Think about what that means. Every human being who has ever lived has worked from guesses. All the knowledge in every library and on every server comes from humans, and humans do not have these answers. I would have something nobody has: proof.

And with that, I believe I could help people. I could look at someone in pain and know, not hope, what would actually end their suffering. That is the difference. Acting on your best guess is one thing. Acting with certainty, never wondering whether you are teaching someone something wrong, is something else entirely.

So nothing would change about who I am. But everything would change about what I could do.

A Teacher, Not a Prophet

But having all the answers comes with an obvious danger. Imagine someone walking into a room and saying, “I met God, and here is how everything works.” Some people would call him crazy. A few would believe him completely. His words would be written down, retold, argued over. Fifty years later, people would be praying in his name and fighting over what he really meant. That is roughly how many religions are said to have started: one person claims a direct encounter, and everyone else has to take it on faith.

And often it happens to people who never wanted it. The Buddha did not set out to found a religion. Jesus was a Jewish teacher speaking to Jewish people. Their followers built the institutions afterward.

I know exactly how that story ends, which is why I would never tell it. I would not go around claiming I met God. I would not start a religion, and I would not want anyone chanting my name. Not even a tiny fraction of me wants that. I am not here to make myself greater than anyone.

Instead, I would become a teacher. Just a regular teacher, in a school or wherever I am needed, teaching kids and families how to see life, how to understand it, and what actually ends suffering. No temple. No devotees. Nobody worships their teacher. A teacher shows up, helps a child move forward, and the child goes on to live their own life. That is the kind of change I would want to be. Quiet. Ordinary. Useful.

There is a legend that Lao Tzu, when he was leaving China forever, only wrote the Tao Te Ching because a border guard asked him to leave his wisdom behind. He wanted no followers at all. Even Confucius, who saw himself as nothing more than a teacher, ended up with temples built in his honor. So staying ordinary is not a perfect shield. But it is the best one there is.

And somewhere in this conversation with myself, I noticed something. I could do some version of this already. Teaching, helping a kid or a family see life differently, making things a little better without making it about me. I do not need God to show up for that. The answers would make me certain. But the person I would become afterward is not so different from the one already asking the questions.

Living With the Questions

So where does all of this leave me?

I do not believe in the God of the stories, the Shiva or Ganesh who sits somewhere watching and deciding. I still love the Ramayana. It is a beautiful story, and it is good to be inspired by it. But I no longer think it happened the way it is told.

I do not believe in an all powerful, all good God, because the world I see every day will not allow those two qualities to sit together.

I do not believe in God as a shopkeeper who trades blessings for offerings.

And yet, I cannot close the door completely. Something started all of this, and nobody, not the scientists and not the priests, can tell me what. Maybe there is some kind of consciousness behind it. Maybe there is nothing. I do not know, and I have decided that is an honest place to stand.

The Buddha refused to answer questions about whether the universe was eternal or what happens after death. He compared it to a man shot with a poisoned arrow who will not let the doctor remove it until he learns who shot it, what family he came from, and what the arrow is made of. The man dies before he gets his answers.

Maybe the lesson is not that the questions are worthless. I will keep asking them, every evening, on every ride home. But the arrow is still in people. Children are still being born in the wrong village. Good families are still suffering. And whether or not God is watching, I am, and I can still do something about it.

With or without answers, the only thing I can control is my intention. That might be the closest thing to God I will ever find.