Skip to main content

Religion

At prayer :)


My religion is one of the accidents that happened to me when I was an infant. I was just a few days old when my parents took me to the church for christening. Thus I became a Christian without my knowledge or consent.

For most people religion is a similar accident; it is given to them at birth. You are a Hindu or Muslim or whatever merely because you were born in a family whose members also had their religions foisted on them by others. That given religion becomes a part of our personality. Christianity played a major role in shaping my personality. It gave me a lot of guilt feelings because almost everything good is a sin in that religion.

I outgrew my religion when I became an adult. I could not accept most of what it taught me. So I gave up the religion and sought truth in my own personal way. Life becomes magical when you begin to discover your own truths though the process is not easy.

Religion can help in the discovery of your personal truths, no doubt. It can offer guidelines, inspiration, solace and much else. The problem is when we accept religious truths blindly. Scriptures written centuries ago need not be relevant today. There are no eternal truths except values such as love and compassion. Every religion was an effort to foster those eternal values. But most religions have ended up as tools for acquiring power in its various protean shapes.

If Jesus were to return today, he would be shocked by what people are doing in his name. There is very little that is common between Jesus and the hundreds of churches that function in his name. Similar is the case with Prophet Mohammed or Lord Rama or whoever.

Religion becomes meaningful only when it helps you become a better human being. What we see in the world, more often than not, is hatred and violence perpetrated in the name of religions and their gods. Such religion is absolutely useless. If you want to bring about a magical transformation to your life, religion is a good place to begin with. See whether and how it helps you to be a good human being. If it doesn’t help, It’s better to chuck it and discover your personal truths. If it does help, carry one, of course.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z
Tomorrow: Secret

PPS. I received a WhatsApp message this morning from one of my most beloved students. “Today when you write about religion, make it gentle,” said the message. I hope I have not been harsh J


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Shilpa GargApril 20, 2018 at 12:05 PM

    Agree with you completely. Religion should teach us to be the best version of ourselves, the values that help us and others too. But these days it is just used to spread hatred, differences and violence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 20, 2018 at 12:20 PM

      That's a sad thing especially because what's happening is just the opposite of what's expected or what's possible.

      Delete
  2. SubrotoApril 20, 2018 at 7:55 PM

    Absolute agree with your 'gentle' post on religion. I think religion or to more exact - the blind followers of religion - who are causing more grief than joy these days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 20, 2018 at 8:09 PM

      All that hatred and violence show that religions are failures. Yet they attract more and more people. A paradox?

      Delete
  3. VinithaApril 21, 2018 at 7:18 AM

    Agree with you. Religion should bring the better in us not the worse. These races on my religion is better than yours which is happening everyday now isn't doing anyone good.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 21, 2018 at 8:09 AM

      Religion is being misused for political purposes. But that has been done all through history. I wonder whether gods were invented just for the sake of keeping people under subjugation.

      Delete
  4. JaiApril 21, 2018 at 7:53 PM

    Hats off to you! Your post echoes my feelings about religion hundred percent accurately!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rajeev MoothedathApril 23, 2018 at 7:55 PM

    "The problem is when we accept religious truths blindly."- So true!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more