The Story of God with Morgan Freeman

The blues were born right here in

the Mississippi delta.

John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, BB King, Jessie Mae Hemphill,

I can't see 'em anymore, but their spirit lives on,

right here.

I can lose myself in music.

Hear it?

I feel it, and it transports me to another time and place.

Some would call it a religious experience.

Can't say that I disagree.

Makes me think of the all the ways people around the world

connect to god.

Moses saw god in a bush.

Buddha found enlightenment under a tree.

Muhammad experienced Allah on a mountain.

Is there some universal concept of god that

all religions share?

Or, is god fundamentally different to people of

different faiths?

I'm setting out to discover who god is.

God wants to be your best friend.

To find out how believers around

the world see the divine.

The holy people are around us, right now.

I'll explore how the identity of god

has changed over the millennia.

He thought that there were too many gods,

and not enough focus was on him.

I'll learn how many gods merged into one.

It's a single force that gives order into

our whole world.

And, I'll search for the

presence of god...

So, you're looking for physical manifestations of god?

Yes.

Inside my brain.

I grew up with the Christian concept of god, a single,

divine being who created and governs the universe.

Of Jesus as god's earthly incarnation.

I know that's not the way everyone sees the divine.

I want to know how other religions see god.

So, I'm going to India.

To hindus, there's not one god, there are millions.

Busy little thoroughfare.

In the holy city of varanasi, I'm meeting historian,

binda paranjape, to find out how hindus see their gods.

At every corner of the Lane, and just you'll see

anywhere, and you'll see a shrine.

And no corner they can leave without having a god there.

So like, we have got this small little shrine here,

and it has got that elephant headed god, ganesha.

Ganesha?

Yeah, it's a god who removes obstacles.

Removes obstacles?

Yeah.

Hindu deities come in many forms.

Some are male.

Some female.

Some are part human, part animal.

Each one has its specific powers.

So, she's the goddess of disease.

So we...

Disease?

Yeah, so when you're diseased,

your body gets inflamed, then you invoke her and she

sends the cool breeze, and the body gets cool.

All right, here's a question for you.

You've got a choice of how many?

Millions of them.

Millions of gods.

How do you choose?

Usually, it's the family.

The family, each family has got one family deity,

and that is passed on to the next generation.

Or, sometimes, in the times of distress,

one goes to a god and say, or goddess, that,

"please take me out of this difficult time,"

and forever I'll worship you as my personal god,

"or goddess."

I'm interested in finding out how

these statues become vessels for divine beings,

how hindus connect to their gods.

So, binda is taking me to an intimate prayer ritual.

Yeah, can you hear these chants,

which are going on?

Uh-hm, yeah.

They're chanting the chants for

invoking the goddess.

So, now we are going to be blessed.

This prayer ceremony is dedicated

to the goddess, Lalitha.

And so, this is Lalitha here,

this is her physical representation?

What kind of god is she?

She was created to kill a demon,

and that is the power of the virgin,

this 16 year old woman.

She's a virgin?

Yeah, so all the potential is still in her,

so she has got the highest form of energy in her.

And she gives that power to others to fight

against their demon.

So, what they're doing is that they're invoking the

goddess' one thousand names and with every name,

they will offer her the flowers.

So, anything, any syllable that we'll pronounced goes

to the goddess so, we're saying these thousand words.

You have almost got all the possible syllables that

you could have uttered.

So you can invoke her with just

about any syllable.

The goddess is any form a speech,

the human sound, and the world is supposed

to have been created out of these rhythms.

For her devotees,

Lalitha exists in the rhythmic energy of their chanting.

A divine energy that powers their lives.

Anyway, the goddess has blessed you,

that she has invited here, believe me.

I believe you.

Seeing this ceremony really helps me understand

what god means to hindus.

Behind all the gods, binda tells me,

there is a single divine energy that believers

seek to tap into.

They say that it's just a principle,

it's like pure energy form, which is neither a male

or a female, or having any name.

So they are just given one name, brahman.

So, in the western church,

in christianity, judaism, even islam, there is one god,

it's just, it's pure energy.

There is no name you could put to him.

There's no face you can put to him.

There's nothing you can touch.

Can we make a comparison there?

Yeah, it's like the tree having the trunk,

and then the branches and leaves also.

We have the shade tree of brahma, right?

Okay.

Yeah, so beautiful,

that's really nicely described.

Thank you, all right, how about some lunch?

You game for that?

Right, and we can invoke gods for

giving us good lunch.

I like the way believers here find gods

that best suit their own beliefs.

It's like a spiritual fingerprint,

unique to each person.

It's unlike the monotheism of the west.

But, maybe that's only on the surface.

On the surface,

hinduism looks like a religion of many gods.

But underneath the surface,

there is a single divine energy.

So, why do some cultures see many gods and some only one?

Where did the idea of worshiping a single god

first take root?

Perhaps it began here,

Stonehenge, britain's iconic,

5,000 year old monument.

The culture that built Stonehenge had to endure long,

cold winters.

Their survival depended on plentiful crops,

so it would make sense to focus on the single source

of energy that drove all of that, the sun.

An archaeological team is uncovering new evidence that

may reveal the beliefs of the people who once lived here.

We're going to look at the ditch

and the interior, here.

Vince Gaffney and Paul Garwood have been

studying a giant, c-shaped enclosure,

less than two miles away from Stonehenge.

The enclosure, called Durrington walls,

was built around 4,500 years ago and appears to be

aligned so its opening faces the rising sun on the

mid-winter's day.

This is a ground-penetrating radar device.

But what interests Vince and Paul is

the remains of an older monument they found buried

underneath it.

The radar located a series of

very large features.

There's a long arc of stones,

or large buried features underneath the bank.

So they've remained undetected,

effectively, for several thousand years.

The hidden rocks are massive.

Each of them as tall as two men.

They also form part of a c-shaped monument,

but the direction this c faces is different from the

orientation of the mound that buries it.

There was an earlier monument of a very

different form on this site.

It was looking towards beacon hill and these dramatic line

of hills to the east, which is a dominant,

topographic feature in this area,

and certainly must have had significance at the time.

Vince and Paul think the original monument