The Need to Believe
Looking for God? Get Reasonable!
Belief in God is part of the nature of human beings. Their souls yearn for Him and they cannot remain contented for long without Him. Man has a natural tendency to search for a higher power, to acknowledge and to submit to Him. Until he has accomplished that, he remains inwardly restless. Therefore, it would be a reasonable measure for every individual to search and find for himself his true Lord. An object of worship is that to which one devotes the greatest portion of his thought and effort. So a person either worships God or he worships something other than Him along with Him or instead of Him. The worship of God is liberating in that it frees one from servitude to all else.
If one does not worship God alone, he will surely succumb to false deities regardless of how well educated, academic and sophisticated he might be. If not idols, sun and moon gods, or the ancestral gods of the past, a person will worship “saints,” national leaders, political figures, athletes or other famous personalities; or else he will worship wealth, social ideologies, science and technology, customs, fashion, music or his own ego. But worship a man must.
Today we observe attempts in Western countries to revive some of the old European and Middle-Eastern pagan religions. They are also looking into the FarEastern and African religious practices. Not only have new religions sprung up, such as the neopagan “Church of All Worlds” and the cult of “Scientology,” but there have been attempts to revive dead customs. People can be found flirting with elements of this or that belief, consuming hard drugs and even dabbling with magic and witchcraft in the hope of attaining spiritual peace.
When driven by spiritual yearning, people may call out to God, or they may call upon false gods. To some, God is a tribal deity; to others, one of three or one of several hundred. They might pray to an angel, a sun-god, a wealth-god, stone-god or whatever else that they think is endowed with divinity. But He is one God, the Creator of the heavens and earth and everything within them. Wouldn’t a rational man do better by taking the natural path, acknowledging his true Lord, and directing his devotions and invocations to Him? The Qur’an confirms:
“Due to Him [alone] is the invocation of truth. And those they call upon other than Him do not respond to them with a thing, except as one who stretches his hands toward water to [make it] reach his mouth, but it will not reach it. And the supplication of the disbelievers is not but in error (13:14. The analogy illustrates the fact that false deities will never respond to them at all)
Author : Syed Iqbal Zaheer
