Skip to main content

Gods of Savages

Source: WHO


About 800,000 people commit suicide every year in the world. That is, one person chooses to die every 40 seconds. More than 20 times that number are attempting suicide.

This is not the statistics of one particular year. This is happening every year. Every second somebody somewhere on our planet is pulling the trigger on himself or consuming poison or slipping on the knot round the neck or…

There are over 4,000 religions in the world. Between them they have over 10,000 gods [not counting the dead gods like Zeus and Isis or neglected ones like Indra]. Add to all these the countless religious cults that mushroom year after year.

Isn’t something wrong somewhere? So many gods, so many religions, so many cults, and yet so many people losing hope and choosing death.

Isn’t something seriously wrong somewhere? So many gods, so many religions, so many cults, and yet so many people dying of starvation in the world.

Albert Einstein reportedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We clutched the same or similar idols for thousands of years. We uttered the same prayers, chanted the same mantras, and performed the same rituals over and over again. And expected a better world! Are we insane?

Sometime in the evolutionary line the ape mutated into our first ancestor. Ever since, this new ape called man became more and more intelligent. More and more crooked, if you wish. More and more vile.

The brain evolved while the heart did not. On the one hand, we created scientific wonders and, on the other, we remained savagely fierce and destructive. The skyscrapers and the atom bombs coexist in the human world.

Our religions and all their gods failed to tame our hearts. Our hearts still belong to the ape.

Or is it the other way around? Our hearts are savage and hence our gods are failures? After all, what kind of gods can savages create?

Is that why 800,000 people find life unbearable every year?
Can we make the world a kinder place for those sensitive souls who choose to leave it before time?
I think we need to work on our gods.



Comments

  1. DashyMay 5, 2020 at 2:13 PM

    That is an alarming number of suicides. Religion and god mean different things to different people. Even the cruel minds pray to the same gods as the good ones do. I doubt if the gods have anything to do with how the minds develop.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 5, 2020 at 3:40 PM

      Aren't gods creations of our own minds? The good minds have good gods and the gods of the bad minds help them justify themselves. God is a tool to ease our conscience with.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeMay 5, 2020 at 6:46 PM

    'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.' - Robert M Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 5, 2020 at 7:21 PM

      Hahaha. That's the best definition of religion.

      Delete
  3. Yogi SaraswatMay 5, 2020 at 10:15 PM

    About 800,000 people commit suicide every year in the world. That is, one person chooses to die every 40 seconds. More than 20 times that number are attempting suicide.scary figure

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sonia DograMay 6, 2020 at 6:21 AM

    Mental health is the last priority on the minds of people. In India even more than several other nations. Suicide is a result of poor mental health.
    I can't comment on the aspect of God but I do know that we have invested too much time on building IQs and too little on EQs. Hence the evolvement of brain over heart. For me God and religion are different.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 6, 2020 at 7:32 AM

      If one can separate God and religion, one is already on the right path, I think. I'm also happy you mentioned EQ. That's precisely where the problem lies: the neglect of the heart and the onslaught of the brain. Our gods will evolve only when our hearts do.

      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
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
34 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
12 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more