Skip to main content

How to end religious terror – one suggestion


Yahweh by Michelangelo
Recently I stumbled upon a quote from Robert G Ingersoll’s book, Some Mistakes of Moses.  The quote which puts the Jewish God on a dissection table is reproduced below:

It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.

There are people who believe in such a heartless, mirthless, starkly absurd God too.  It is then that I fell on the contemplation whether most gods aren’t similar one way or another.  They make inhuman demands.  They do things which many of us human beings will find atrocious and brutal, absurd and hilarious, or plainly stupid.

One challenge which I am tempted to hurl at believers is this: how many of them have actually studied their religion and its god(s) - both scriptures and history - systematically?  I’m sure there won’t be very many who will raise the hand.  If they really study their religion systematically, most of them won’t find the god(s) worthy of devotion.  And all religious terror will come to an end.


Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Reminds me of a poem by Harivansh Rai Bachchan that has a line that says that without religion things would have been better.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sadly there has been no civilisation so far without a concomitant religion. So mine is only wishful thinking. But dreams are free...

      Delete
  2. There was a time I used to pray...but then things changed....Now after having become a mother, I am charged by many as to why I am not letting my kids become religious. Not that I tell them that there is no God, since I don't know about that too, but the moment I think of telling them these 'stories' about Gods, I am stuck and struck by the 'terror' in these stories - birth of Ganesh - the wrathful Shiva, the helpless elephant - is one such example....so I keep telling them only one thing - that be kind, try not to hurt anyone, but if you do, accept your mistake....and other stuff like that....Looking at the way 'religious' people are behaving, I feel so numb when it comes to praying and other related stuff.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I now live in a village which is apparently very peaceful and almost idyllic. But I wake up at 5.30 am to religious songs played from the Christian church and the Hindu temple both of which are equidistant from my home. Neither songs are clear because they seem to be competing with each other with the volume levels.

      When I mentioned this to a villager I was told that the competition takes place at many levels. The church has Sunday catechism classes and so various Hindu organisations have started the same. The Christians started organised community-home prayers and it was soon emulated by the Hindus. So religion is a kind of competition. What are children going to learn, I wonder.

      Delete
  3. world without religion is impossible in today's world as it is used by rulers to rule their people, if people started questioning god they will question them which they didn't want

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. Religion and politics have always gone hand in hand making use of each other.

      Delete
  4. नोटबंदी के बाद डिजिटल पेमेंट पर जोर, जानें क्या है डिजिटल पेमेंट
    Readmore Todaynews18.com https://goo.gl/BgzxC9

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Good Friday and Some Arithmetic

Two and two is not always equal to four, my young friend Tony says. 2 + 2 ≠ 4, he reasserts. Tony doesn’t think linearly though his thinking has the precision of mathematical logic. See these two, Tony offers an illustration, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Then add another 2 to them, Ambani and Adani. What do you get? I smile in answer. It’s dangerous to answer Tony verbally. Now, Tony continues, let’s take two beggars from the street. And then add you and me, another two, to them. What do you get? Tony goes on with more arithmetic because he thinks I didn’t get it. (Modi + Shah) + (Ambani + Adani) = 4 persons (Beggar 1 + Beggar 2) + (You + I) = 4 persons Is the first 4 equal to the second 4? T oday is Good Friday. Good Fridays are sad because they are about the victory of vicious political power over simple goodness. Just a few days back, on what’s known as Palm Sunday among Christians, Jesus was led like a hero to Jerusalem, a political fulcrum in those days, by a hu