Skip to main content

Freedom and religion

This is one of the thoughts that amuses me again and again: Suppose we give absolute freedom to people in matters regarding religion. No force of any kind. You go to temple or church or whatever only if you want. There are no priests. No preachers. No godmen or ammas.  No theology. No rituals. You do what your heart tells you to do in the temple or church or whatever. You and your god. Nothing in between. No middleman. Just you before your God.

How wonderful that would be!

Or

Will the temple and the church or whatever remain desolate once there are no power brokers to perform their rituals?

Is religion merely another power structure that holds people together for certain worldly benefits and nothing more?

At least, will the killings in the name of gods stop? Will people rediscover love or compassion?

I'm amused to ponder.

Comments

  1. Absolutely. In an evolved society there should be absolute freedom to worship. That is the only way to end any kind of fanaticism. But, will the vested interests allow it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, I'm sure the vested interests won't. That's precisely why religion is a terror today more than anything else.

      Delete
  2. It is definitely for the worldly benefits, excluding a select few who wants to attain the highest peak of maslow's hierarchy, that people buy this stuff and sellers sell this stuff. And thus forming a vicious syndicate and thus enter the Godmen and the likes of them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have seen people with criminal minds acting as the spokespersons of a Baba. They make use of religion for nefarious purposes with total impunity. A lot ordinary mortals join them for petty benefits some of which are assumed to be spiritual!

      Delete
    2. Yes, in that sense the seekers of spiritualism can as well fall in their trap. I guess that's where the use of common sense comes which many of us fail to apply to our beliefs

      Delete
  3. The last one is a worthy hope. If that could happen then all relinquishment will be worth it.

    Beautiful thought Tomichan.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If people would stop harming others in the name of religion and gods,the world would be a far better place.

      Delete
  4. Religion is something which connects us to God, it should not be there to create boundaries. Spiritual connect is of supreme importance rest is baseless.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Spiritual connect - if only a fraction of believers really longed for that!

      Delete

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...

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...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

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...