God: Heavenly Father or Big Brother?

Relax, Bhikku. God isn't watching you. He has too little time and too much taste.

-- The Diary, date unknown, the summer of 498 BC

The trouble with the white man, I've always said, is that he never does anything with his own hands. He uses forks for input, toilet paper for output and outsources everything else to Brownistan. Since he has no hands-on experience, he knows nothing; and since he knows nothing, he's afraid of everything. He lives in constant terror of bird flu, anthrax, hurricanes, gas prices, differential calculus, and of course, death. He's scared of brown people with beards, and brown people without beards. He's afraid of black people's children, and he's afraid of his own.

The most peculiar of the white man's phobias, however, is his positive horror of the Lord. And nowhere is this more apparent than in his approach to the burning social issues of each era.

Take, for instance, the abortion debate in the US. From 1950 to around 1975, white people were liberal, meaning they had sex all the time. During this period (strangely called the Baby Boom instead of the Big Bang), the Supreme Court of the US legalized abortion. More precisely, Roe v. Wade ruled that it was illegal for states to pass laws which made abortion difficult. The fact that such an obscurely worded ruling is so well-known itself shows that the white man takes the law way too seriously. But at any rate, around 1980, lots of white people started suspecting that all this sex was way too much fun and God most certainly wouldn't approve. These people, strangely called conservatives instead of Inquisitors, soon took over the country. And now they're slowly, but surely rewriting the law. By the time they're done, they'd have made abortion, among other things, illegal. (And then they'll all probably have another wave of pseudo-liberalism again. Every time I reflect that my forefathers were ruled by these omadhouns, I hang my head in shame, may family pride be damned!)

Here's where God enters the picture. The reason conservatives are so pissed with abortion is not mere envy of cooler people, who get to have more sex. Their baadha, as the Gults put it, is that they think abortion is sin. And they think so because they believe that the foetus has a soul, and killing anything with a soul is a strict no-no. (Factoid: A soul is something like a Platinum membership, for which only Man among all of God's creations, is pre-selected.) The liberals, sheep that they are, meekly bleated that noone really knows exactly when a human baby gets its soul. And then all heaven broke loose. The Conservatives started pulling out lots of old books, which stated that a soul enters the picture

4. When the embryo quickens, i.e., when momma can feel it move. --St. Augustine
3. Forty days after conception for boys, and ninety days after conception for girls. --Aristotle
2. When the fertilized egg is implanted in the womb, about 1 week after fertilization.
1. Immediately after fertilization. -- St. Gregory something
0. Even before sex, so you shouldn't use the Pill -- St. Dubya Bush

The conservatives saw that there was too much inconsistency in the textbooks. So, just like engineers, they picked the worst case, namely case 0, and have been sticking to it these last fifteen years. Having chosen the most unreasonable interpretation available, they are convinced that God is on their side because He is after all beyond Reason. And with this smug superiority, they have been morally castigating the liberals ever since.

As a brown man, I find all this tamaasha laughable, for we brown people take an altogether different view of matters. We treat our babies like our bread. For our bread, we follow the five-second rule. If it has been on the floor for less than five seconds, it is not really dirty and you can pick it up and eat it. For our babies, we follow the two-day rule. If it has been alive for less than two days and if it is a girl, then it is not really human and you can kill it. We know that this is extremely unright, even disgusting. But we do it because we are either too poor or too barbaric, depending on how you look at it. In either case, we leave God out of it.

It is not that we Brownistanis are specifically bright. We are as stupid as anybody else, but we have the distinct advantage that our sacred texts were written in a language we don't remember anymore. At any rate, our religion is either vague or tolerant enough to permit almost anything. God is just not in our genes, at least in such matters.

Ultimately, it's a question of instinct.

In the spring of 1999, my friend VR and I worked in a lab whose keys were always with a rather religious TA. After the infamous incident of Topless VR and the Peeping Professor, the TA had been specifically instructed to not give the keys to depraved undergrads like us. However, like all brown people, we thumbed our nose at the law and went and asked for the keys one Sunday. The TA said she couldn't give them, because the professor wouldn't allow it. VR, sharp cove that he was, immediately pointed out that the Professor wouldn't really know she had given us the keys, if we all agreed to not tell her. He even generously volunteered to keep it is a secret till his dying day. To which the TA said, with horror, distaste and outrage in her voice, "What if Madam doesn't know? God does, doesn't He?" Even VR couldn't reply to that, so we left. We had cycled halfway back to the hostel, when VR turned to me and breathlessly croaked in anguish, "What has f***ing God got to do with it, man?" We cycled on in silence.

VR, being brown, instinctively saw the point. The white man, alas, does not.