If there is a God how should he/she be like ?

About 10 years back, I was on my way to a christian youth camp. I was on a bus travelling all night and there was a guy who was sitting next to me and he was surprised that young people like me are wasting our lives with religion and he asked how my religion is going to help us survive in the model. I was not able to give an answer then. But that got me thinking more and I spent researching the role of religion in our lives. Like a true software engineer I started building a requirements document for my religious choices.

So the first question I asked myself was, is religion supposed to help us make more money ? I realized that happiness does not necessarily come with more money. I realized that one of the most happiest people in the world are kids. The one thing that kids have is that they do not really worry that much about their future and also they have that beleif in their parents that they would take care of them. So money is supposed to just provide us with the sense of security in terms of our future. However, this is hardly acheived. Most of the time having more money makes some people more insecure. So we spend most of our time in pursuit of happiness than acheiving real happening. When I look at different religions in the world they all have different ways of getting eternal happines.

Since most religions have a God of some sorts the second question I wanted to tackle was that if there is a God how do we find him and what would be his role ? Most people seem to have the notion that God is like a vending machine. If you want something you pray and you will be provided with your needs and that is all that is required. Then there were other questions like If there is a God should I be really searching for him, should I not know him already. Then at some point in this thought process there were a couple of things that just stood in front of me. If there is an all powerful God and he ruled the world then shouldn't the world revolve around him and not around us. Then it is not upto me to choose a God it is for me to find Him and follow Him. The whole exercise of finding a religion for myself becomes a journey of finding the right God and follow him. Now when you look around there are different world view on who God is. It all involves certain amount of faith. That makes things lot more complicated.

To Be Continued ....

Worthy Living

Paul urges ephesians to live a life worthy of their calling. It made me think a bit. The question is what is my calling and how do I live my life worthy of it. In the book "Purpose driven life" Rick Warren states the way to find our calling is to see what we are good at or what we enjoy doing. The logic is that if we are created to do something then we should be good at it. I agree with that but then how many of us are able to pursue a career in something that we enjoy doing and we are good at. Most of us just follow the benjamins.

Donald trump in his book says that the secret ingredient to success is passion. Our CEO states that life is too short to spend in things that you are not passionate about. He also went on to add that if you are passionate about something even if it fails you would learn a lot from it. I kind of agree with that based on my life experience too.

Now if you find out you are called to be a computer engineer then what does it mean to live a worthy life. How can you be passionate about it and what should be your goal ? Should it be making more money or should it be for the love of it. One classic example of somebody who did just for the love of it and is now very influential is linus trovalds. Should we set our goals to enhance the value of the companies we work for or should we set it so that the consumers see value or should we set it so that we make a difference to humanity as a whole. I think this would mark the domain of influence that we would build.