By Raghu Seshadri
Pain with a cause is punishment. But what’s pain without a known cause? Even more pain. All sufferers wonder which misdeed of theirs led them to their extant pain. Pity, even saints have endured horrors.
Sage Mandavya was impaled by the king for a heist he didn’t commit. Upon being questioned by Mandavya after his death, Yama replied that the sage had suffered despite leading a pious life since he had tortured an insect as a kid. The sage cursed Yama saying a juvenile is not responsible for his actions. Yama was born Vidura.
Both the king and Yama erred on judgements, the latter informing the victim only after getting queried. The question is: why were the sage and the public, threatened to the core not to err, not informed of this, by God or Yama or whosoever, when the sage was going through the pain? An omnipotent God must be capable of making a ticker appear before people stating the cause when Mandavya was impaled; or a voice, which God employs only too often to inform the coming of an apocalypse, could have played.
Who knows, Mandavya could have defended himself and eschewed the cruelty, had he been told of his ‘misdeed’. And what better way to ‘educate’ people of ‘the wages of sin’ than giving them a live demo?
Democracies — ‘human’ governments, considered inferior to ‘God’s kingdom’ — tell outlaws, and the public, the reason of their punishment — in real time. The ‘superior’ God doesn’t bother to inform people of what sin the sufferer committed to undergo the pain. Without information in real time, punishment remains pain.
Now, the query: is sin real?
Pain with a cause is punishment. But what’s pain without a known cause? Even more pain. All sufferers wonder which misdeed of theirs led them to their extant pain. Pity, even saints have endured horrors.
Sage Mandavya was impaled by the king for a heist he didn’t commit. Upon being questioned by Mandavya after his death, Yama replied that the sage had suffered despite leading a pious life since he had tortured an insect as a kid. The sage cursed Yama saying a juvenile is not responsible for his actions. Yama was born Vidura.
Both the king and Yama erred on judgements, the latter informing the victim only after getting queried. The question is: why were the sage and the public, threatened to the core not to err, not informed of this, by God or Yama or whosoever, when the sage was going through the pain? An omnipotent God must be capable of making a ticker appear before people stating the cause when Mandavya was impaled; or a voice, which God employs only too often to inform the coming of an apocalypse, could have played.
Who knows, Mandavya could have defended himself and eschewed the cruelty, had he been told of his ‘misdeed’. And what better way to ‘educate’ people of ‘the wages of sin’ than giving them a live demo?
Democracies — ‘human’ governments, considered inferior to ‘God’s kingdom’ — tell outlaws, and the public, the reason of their punishment — in real time. The ‘superior’ God doesn’t bother to inform people of what sin the sufferer committed to undergo the pain. Without information in real time, punishment remains pain.
Now, the query: is sin real?
