Before I even begin to make my point, I just want to clarify that this issue is extremely debatable and personal and is supposed to serve as an eye opener as opposed to being offensive and I have no intention to attack any particular race, culture or religion; rather my focus is on the bigger picture.
This is such a taboo topic that I must say it made me wince at the audacity of my own thoughts and logic. Why is it that everyone around us would give anything to glimpse past reality? They find the newspaper insanely mundane because it depicts death, rape, murder- “reality” in other words that is constantly taking place around us. We do not wish to take part in the prevention of any of it and God forbid, be a part of it, so we do not even wish to think about it. What we do seem to enjoy however (which I find quite depressing) is to seek solace and loose ourselves in the realms of unknown and to a certain degree are prepared to do anything for a world full of promises that we, in all honesty, do not even understand.
My attempt is to provide a satirical account of what happens around us in the name of religion rather than ridicule the religion itself. No, religion I have no grudge against, in fact if I am not entirely mistaken, religions spawned all over the world due to a crisis in human nature and in times when all signs of humanity was disappearing from this world. It was a lack of accountability that needed to be addressed and in a nutshell different religions subsequently must have followed depending on the structure of the society, culture, climate and belief with the help of an extremely powerful person being the harbinger of the world unknown. If you come to think of it, it was an ingenuous concept to mould people into acting more responsibly (since all humanly constrictions failed) but the most notable achievement was perhaps the fear that every religion successfully managed to infiltrate into people’s mind. This fear is what we carry in our hearts till to this date.
I personally believe that in this day and age when all major discoveries and inventions have already been conducted there is almost nothing unattainable left for the human brain to perform. Thus, it must only be a guilty conscience that would make people desperate enough to resort to the consolation of a religion! If you know in your heart that you have done nothing wrong, if you have a clear conscience, there would be no need to delve into an unknown future and even if the thought of an afterlife does occur to you, why would you change your current lifestyle in fear of what your actions might result to in the future far away when most of us do not even think about karma in this current life? So the common rationale has become that if I commit a murder today, I go sit in a church/temple/mosque for the rest of the week in hope of being forgiven whereas I would have thought the most common reaction to remorse would be to try and help the dear ones of the person I have killed or if that is too far-fetched, to ensure that no other person does what I did.
There are so many issues that are palpable; we see it happening around us all the time. If good deed is our only objective, we could help improve the standard of living around us, help build a conscience in people to be more accountable, help people in need or maybe just smile at a person to make them feel better! I do not know if it occurs to anyone that it is really selfish that while people are dying around us and needs all the help we can give, all we are concerned about is what would help us go to heaven! My point is, why waste time obsessing over something we know nothing about when there are so many issues around us that could really use a bit of our attention and interest?
Is not the most humane part of being human the fact that we can love? It is such an irrational quality and yet our first and foremost identity that separate us from all other beings. Religions are there to make us accountable but what about our own mind and essentially our feelings – should not that be enough to let us justify our action as adults? If we do something out of fear of ending up in hell, is the intention really right? You cannot stretch a day longer than 24 hours and if out of the 24 hours we spend most of our time preparing for the life after, what is our purpose of being in “this” world? What about “now”?
If our conscience is clear, if we actually believe in ourselves and know in our heart we do not intend to do anything that would harm others, I do not believe there should be any need to conform or succumb to act in the name of religion. There is a fine line between reverence and fear and most of us are on the wrong side of that line. If there is love and not fear in our heart, being religious ought to mean we radiate love all around us, wherever we go we only spread happiness and not brood over our own fate.
