I have been writing about different views on God and the concept of having a God in general. There are many different religions that give different ideas about how you should see God. In Hinduism itself there are already two different ways of how you should see God.
If you look at the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, you will read about a formless God. God is there, in everyone and you go back to being God once you get liberated from the circle of reincarnations. There is a whole philosophy surrounding this concept in which you imagine God just as a form of energy or force.
People had difficulty however understanding the concept of a formless God. It is just as you would teach a child what is inside an apple by actually cutting an apple and showing the seeds. Some people may be able to imagine without you showing them anything but others need to see it. So people used a simple stone to symbolize God. It was just a simple stone and they said ‘See, this could be God’.
Obviously they then started worshipping this stone as God’s statue, doing rituals with it and decorating it. They started dressing the stone and putting a crown on it. At some point they decided to add eyes and a mouth and thus give the stone a face.
Later, stories of different Gods were created and you now can read about Krishna, Shiva and Ram, about Lakshmi, Durga and Kali. At this point God takes a form and becomes a small boy who does naughty things or a grown man, a warrior, a powerful destroyer. He does not only get a body but a whole personality. No, not one personality, many different personalities with different shapes and different life stories.
All these attributes were actually added to different Gods and Goddesses in order to make it easier for people to relate to God. Of course the statues kept on changing along with the stories and people started carving full statues out of stone. These statues became more and more detailed and Krishna got his flute or a cow by his side. Finally, painters started painting these statues of God in pictures.
In this way the stories, the different characters of God were invented, described, decorated and pictured in many words, in different scriptures. Those who start with this religion, who hear of it for the first time, will first of all see the pictures of those different characters and hear about their actions and words. Later on, they get to know the concept of one superior, formless energy, a cloud with which your soul reunites at the end.
So you see, these two ways of introducing God to people have been created a good time apart from each other but have become part of one and the same religion. You never know what will happen in future, maybe the statues and paintings will vanish again or develop further. Maybe God will wear jeans and t-shirt on his pictures and in his statues and maybe he will someday be using a computer in his stories. A couple of years ago a priest of the main Krishna temple in Vrindavan, the Banke Bihari temple, decided to dress the statue of Krishna in a modern way with jeans, t-shirt, glasses and a baseball cap. Thousands of people saw it and it was a big scandal. But perhaps someday it will be Krishna’s normal dress.
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