Originally Posted by barney

Lord is to be understood, not believed
The lord is not a matter for belief. He is a matter for understanding. This world is not a matter for belief because you perceive it. Therefore Lord is also not something to be believed, it is a challenge to understand him. If the Lord is in heaven, not within the range of your perception or inference, then He becomes a matter of belief. In that case you simply accept what you are told without asking questions. But the Lord of the Hindus is not a matter for belief. Hindus do not simply believe in God, they understand God. That is the reason why Hindus even worship space. There are temples in India that worship the five elements. You don’t require a particular altar to invoke the Lord. You can invoke Him anywhere because what is it that is not the Lord? The whole Order is the Lord, all the laws are the Lord.
We are objective when we are alive to the reality. We are talking about what is and so there is no question of belief. We can see that gold is different from copper and that is different from lead because each metal has its own atomic weight, its own physical and other properties. But a physicist knows that all of them are nothing but energy, quanta of energy. That is not a belief. If someone says, ‘I don’t see that’, then that person may have to believe, but that is not a belief that one has to live with and die with. What we have here is belief pending discovery. There is something to be understood. We understand the difference and at the same time, understand the non-difference, something more than meets the eye. That is the vision of the Veda that this whole universe is non-separate from the Lord because He is the efficient cause as well as the material cause.
Since the Lord is everything, he is all the names, all the forms and therefore we can invoke Him in any name, any form. This is the mature way of looking at the worship of God. We can pray to Him in any language because He is Omniscient and therefore should know all languages. In fact He should respond even before we call Him. This is not tolerance or anything, this is only understanding. They say that Hindus are tolerant of various forms of worship. We are tolerant no doubt, but in this particular case, we are not just tolerant. We have total acceptance as far as worship is concerned, prayer is concerned. That is why very often we find many devatas, deities in a typical room of worship. Every aspect of the Lord is represented there. We look upon the Sun as God, so we have Surya devataa. We look upon air as God, so we have Vayudevataa; we look upon earth as God: so we have Prthividevataa and so on. We worship the efficient cause, the intelligent cause and the material becomes the symbol for that. We worship the omniscient, omnipotent Lord through the symbol of the material. The sun, the moon, air etc become the symbol through which we worship the Lord. We have a variety of devatas (deities) through which we worship one God.
The Only God
We don’t even say, ‘one God’. We say ‘only God’. When you say there is one God, that means you are different from Him and He is situated somewhere else. If God is different from you, He does not include you, which means His power does not include your power. If He is different from you, then He is different from me and different from all the living beings. That means God’s power does not include the power that you have, I have, that other gods and demi-gods have, that the mosquitoes and the bugs have. Then He can only be mighty but not Almighty. He is like my uncle who is also a very powerful man. But even a mighty person is subject to limitations. Even the president of the U.S.A, a mighty person, is subject to mosquito bites and attacks from viruses! Similarly, the mighty God will also be subject to such limitations.
So, understand, it is not that there is one God. There is only God and so if someone invokes Him as Allah, that is fine; if someone invokes Him as Jesus, that is also fine. We have no problem at all. If someone cannot accept the fact of people invoking God in different names and forms, it is his/her problem. We have no problem because we do not have many gods, we do not even have one God, we have only God.
Om Tat Sat