Was Sathya Sai Baba a Divinity?

The alleged dual nature of Sathya Sai Baba as avatar – divine and human in one – is nothing more than the common Hindu doctrine that human beings are divine themselves, but invariably do not realise it. Only when a ‘fully realised’ spirit descends to take on a human incarnation, so the avatar story goes, is a human being able to be fully conscious of everything… and that means nothing less than omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.
This makes a distinction between two kinds of manifestation, actually being God in a human form vs. being human in only a Godlike form. This doctrine aims to convince people that they should strive towards realisation of God.

It would be hard to devise a more subtly beguiling doctrine to gain influence over people without the preacher of it having to deliver any convincing proof. So those who hold this, and who claim to be avatars (and there are a surprising number of them in India), are promoting a speculation, sometimes even knowing it to be a falsehood.

So can human beings really become liberated and hence omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent (i.e. fully God-realised)? To test this, one has to believe it positively and to strive totally towards that end using all time, energy and other means, because it is a lifelong task (all gurus agree on that). This is even more risky than betting absolutely everything on one belief coming true, though one has no real information about it whatever. Because everyone one knows who dies evidently has not achieved that goal, the doctrine explains that – though you has hard luck this time around, the soul will then be reborn in a fresh body so one may try again, and again and so on. In short, an extremely uncertain wager for a goal, the nature of which one cannot possibly know. It is sheer belief without any empirical foundation whatsoever.

What self-proclaimed all-knowing Sai Baba predicted about hundreds of matters did not come true. His own life ended in a most ignominious way and long before he had famously predicted. His constant deceits and frauds are well known by now, as well as his sexual abuses and involvement in the cold-blooded murder of four devotees in 1993 and massive bribery to cover it up.. No one in their right mind can claim that he demonstrated divinity or turned out to be what he claimed, the eternal and pure Creator of the Universe!