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Why is God so biased? || Acharya Prashant
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1 year ago
God
Ego
Creation
Suffering
Advaita Vedanta
Truth
Projection
Atman
Description

Acharya Prashant responds to a question about God's impartiality and the existence of suffering by first deconstructing the premises of the question itself. He states that the question is based on a collection of stories and fundamental assumptions, primarily the belief in a God who created the world and who must adhere to human values like justice and equanimity. He explains that this is a projection of one's own values onto a conceptual God, questioning why a creator entity would exist in the same manner as the world or why it would espouse human values like mercy. The speaker elaborates that the belief in a creator God is an extrapolation from our limited experience: since everything we see has a creator, we assume the universe must have one too. This line of reasoning, he argues, incorrectly places one's personal experience as the absolute truth. If this logic were to be followed, then the individual themselves would be the sole creator of their perceived world. He asserts that the world as you perceive it is your own creation, and one should not attribute it to an external creative agency. Acharya Prashant clarifies that this is why Advaita Vedanta has no place for a personal God; concepts like Atman or Brahman are not God, and Truth is not God. He categorizes people into two types: the first includes theists and atheists who debate God's existence, whom he calls egoists because the God they affirm or deny is a projection of their ego. The second type includes those who seek to transcend the self by recognizing the ego as false and moving towards Truth. This process of seeing the falseness within causes the perceived world (the creation) to dissolve, as the experiencer and the experienced are linked. This dissolution of the seer and the seen is what he defines as spiritual progress and the alleviation of suffering.