Man is the new God, and he’s loving it

Acharya Prashant
4 min readJan 20, 2020

Man has become more empowered in an external sense than he ever was in his history. That is what is peculiar about this age. Man was never so powerful with respect to his environment as he is today.

No virus can harm you, no bacteria can harm you. There are no plagues, no black-deaths. You can produce as many objects as you want. You can order them at the click of a button. Everything is home-delivered.

Was it ever so good for man?

Today you have reasons to feel omnipotent.

Tomorrow you can have fast-food delivered on Mars as well. Man never had it so swift, and so easy, and facile. What size do you want? What colour do you want? What kind of customization is needed? Just express your desire and it will be fulfilled. Was it ever this way in human history? Today it is.

And that is why today’s age is peculiar.

There is very little to make you acknowledge your limits and smallness.

There is very little to make you bow down.

Man bows down to only two things.

Either to fear, or to beauty. Today the world has neither of these. There is very little to be afraid of. If the Earth is being destroyed, you can colonize another planet. So don’t worry, we will fly away. At least the rich ones would.

And man also kneels down in front of beauty. And there is very little beauty to be seen. So man is not kneeling down. Man is not at all bowing down today. There is neither fear nor beauty.

Man is de-facto God in his own eyes. Man is determining when man would be born. Man is determining how man would look like. Man is determining the colour of his eyes. Man is determining his gender. Man is also just about to determine his death. Very soon man would come to a point when natural death would become impossible.

So why should there be any space for God left? All the historical, all the usual reasons for the existence of God are no more applicable. Null and void.

There were things unexplained in the physical, material world. So man attributed those things to God. Now everything stands reasoned out — logically, scientifically explained. So God is discounted.

Acharya Prashant