I got the sweetest seat in the airplane. It was right next to the window and had no seat in front of it. My long legs stretched out while I found myself being engaged in a conversation with my neighbor. What had he been up to in Finland? Where did he go and did he wander elsewhere on this earth? The questions bounced. “So you went on a Hindu retreat? How interesting!� He was an academic and having an academic background myself, we came to the subject of believing in God and going to college. It seemed like that was a mismatch. At least in the Netherlands it is unpopular to say that you believe in God when you have a college background or consider yourself an intellectual.
Back on the ground, this kept me thinking. Was this just a Dutch phenomenon? There were enough reasons to claim that. The Dutch dislike for authority would probably be a major one, but I felt this could be filed under worldwide postmodernism. When we look at our world, or, for instance, more specifically web2.0, it is very easy to conclude that it is about self creation and interpretation, the basic notions of postmodernism. We ask ourselves the question “Who are we?� constantly and web 2.0 hands us tools to facilitate this. It speeds up the process, because the tools constantly rejuvenate the perceptions of our selves. By uploading pictures to flickr, statuses to twitter, and colors to facebook/myspace we are in continual flux and in redefinition of our identity.
In such an environment, a higher authority does not flourish, because its acceptation begs for a helicopter view and thus rejects the notion that our lives are completely ours to interpret and give meaning to. But we can’t deny that our independence would be better off called interdependence anyway. The perceived self-creation is dependant on whichever platform we have surrendered to. If we have surrendered to an identity of green-living, jolt drinking, google reader, twittering, apple mac guy than those are our gods. When they crash, our identities merely yield system failures. The self is tiny in this whole and ultimately dependant on it.
So accepting God may not be hip, but it is not unintelligent either. It comes down to faith and reason. Although infiniteness cannot be reasoned into finiteness, by engaging in discussion, there is still a lot to be said about God. Even scientists find themselves cooperating with Buddhists and proving that there is subjectivity and intelligence in creation. Desire is the path on which we all tread and our desires determine our goals, so why couldn’t this work for our evolution?
Thinking back about the time at the monastery, Krishna came to my mind. Krishna tends cows, is a vegetarian and multi-billionaire, though lives in a self-sustainable village, and has no carbon footprint. Who said God wasn’t hip after all?

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