Skip to main content

For a world of thinking people


After reading a blog post of mine (Legal Lawbreakers), an ex-colleague of mine sent me a message yesterday that the criminals would be punished by God.  She has absolute faith in her God, she wrote. 

Is there any justification for such faith?  Nowhere in the history of mankind do we get any reason to believe that divine intervention has awarded justice to any people at any time.  On the contrary, we have infinite examples to show how the wicked flourish and the naive perish. 

It is easy to delude ourselves with such beliefs as divine justice after death.  Hell and heaven, the Judgment Day, Karmic consequences, and other such religious carrots-and-sticks don’t serve any purpose to make human life more equitable on the planet.  Religions also offer believers ways to circumvent the stick and secure the carrot: a confession or a bath in the Ganga or some other ritual can wash away your sins. 

If religion were indeed effective in helping people resist evil with the carrot-and-stick eschatology, the world would have been a holy place long, long ago.  For centuries, religions brought terrifying notions about life after death.  But the evil in the world has only increased by diabolic leaps and bounds. The situation is as hilarious today as it is alarming because it is the religious people themselves who are the biggest swindlers.  Examine the assets of some of the religious institutions in India, for example, and one will be astounded by their enormity.  Even the Ambanis and Adanis would want to rethink about their entrepreneurial strategies!

That’s why I always recommend the cultivation of rational skills.  People should be taught to use their rational faculties in order to understand why evil is undesirable and how goodness can be cultivated if we all choose to leave gods and demons to themselves and exercise our reason and imagination. 

Have you ever wondered why religions never encourage people to think?



Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Very true, sir. Carl Sagan in contact said the exact same thing. I believe an alien invasion would definitely end the blindfaith people carry towards their religion. Life in other planets would make them believe in the theory of evolution and Big Bang :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Quite many people want to remain blind when it comes to scientific truths. They prefer the delusion provided by religions and their gods. Psychological reasons. I think only an evolutionary mutation will change people. :(

      Delete
  2. Religion is only a palliative to promote enduring injustice in the hope of better days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Very correct, Uppal ji. I hope more and more people realize that.

      Delete
  3. It's funny what people will believe! God may exist, but it's really hard to believe that first He makes one commit 1 crime, then goes about punishing one. I mean, there doesn't seem any logic to it! It's like I first ask my son to kill a kitten, then starve him for doing that!

    Religion is just an opium and the religious are simply an addict to believe those narcotic induced hallucinations.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's no logic in religion, Rakesh ji. Look at the religious stories. God sending his own son to save the world which he created in his omniscience and omnipotence... It's all so absurd.

      I agree with you that it's just a narcotic with which people delude themselves.

      Delete
  4. i think the same is the thinking of our Rushi's ,these are concepts to understand common people & to correct their understanding stories are created .

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think if we all do what is logically, practically, and morally correct, we would all do better collectively...and the world would be a better place!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think more than belief, it is consolation. Sometimes we are unable to punish those who wronged us. And at that moment we want to push it to God!!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. It was okay till we were told the stories about God and his justice and love. All of it went wrong as soon as we were made to believe that we belong to a religion and this is how we need to pray, think, eat and shit.

    We have forgotten that the God lives within us. Our decisions and choices matter.

    I agree to all that you said.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...