My tryst with faith : Part two

continued from Part one…

In this post am trying to articulate how I got fed up of organized religion and why finally I turned agnostic. This is a bit tricky as I never attempted before to stitch those bits and pieces together to trace a logical path to this whole thing.

Let me start with sharing some hypothesis’ which I always deliberated in my mind about ‘Why religion’ & ‘Why God’ ?. Am sure some of you would also have thought about this in similar fashion.

1) When you try to think or examine the root of all religions, you will reach at same starting point. Most were started as an off shoot of 1 person who by all means was powerful and was god send. Entire foundation is then built over this one holy concept. Now for time-being am going to assume that this concept is man-made. Then what happens ? Immediately your ‘religious identity’ will be wiped off. Coz you were told that you were born to  X & Y, who belonged to an XY religion whose forefathers belonged to an XY religion which originated from an AB person. The moment first person (here AB) becomes non-existent, the entire lineage loses its identity. Then the implication would be that, a ‘human’ is born to X & Y as opposed to ‘a hindu or ‘a christian’ is born. Who will then be the victims of these identity crisis ? It can’t be us. We will still be identifiable with our skillset or nature of work or something else. But a sect will become identity-less immediately. They are the custodians of these concepts, the so called Priests / Pujaris in each religion. It is in their best interest that ‘GOD’ should exist, else ‘Religions’ cant exist and subsequently they themselves can’t exist. Best way to protect this from not happening is to package it in such by which it instills fear in everyone’s mind and hence every unknown facts were attributed to an unknown entity and called it God.

2) Next is about thinking religion as ‘Founded by God’. This is under the impression that God is a Megalomaniac. She is the one, the omnipresent and she created the universe. She also created some creatures called them humans so that she can enjoy seeing them living, making love, kicking,  fighting and killing each other. If they dont kill each other, she is gonna weed them out anyways as she likes variety in life and no repetition of faces. Being a Megalomaniac, she wants everyone to worship her. Wants to remember her name every day/hour/minute/second. If those creatures fall into trouble she want them to call her name so loud and so continuous that ‘if’ she happens to hear it, their needs will be met. If not they live and die, she wont give a damn. May be she will give a damn and punish them for not remembering her. Thts wht the scripture says after all… On the judgement day, frying the left sided people in a hot oil pan.

Now dont you think this is the nastiest a God could get ?. I mean, if I were God, I would leave heaven and runaway to some remote jungle. Imagine, you make people call your name 24×7 just coz you wanna feel good and those poor souls are doing that as they are shit scared of you. Cant be worst.

3) Last is the most common justification given by people who dont wanna sound superstitious and want a logic for everything. i.e Organized religion makes humans disciplined. So according to them, seeing the immoral, unethical, unorganized life of our fore forefathers a genius devised a tool called religion and attributed its power to a non-existent entity called God. Some smart people might have devised it to scare people off doing crimes, to bring some order into their lives. Sounds good and logical. To an extent I believe this too. But if it is so, how come they allow some sect of people to exploit this. How did such a noble concept got slipped into wrong hands and it started creating different castes, barriers, superstitious rituals in the society ?. There should have been someone who knew this whole idea and who would have tried to stop it ?

But all said and done, I believe organized religion has many benefits. I am not so naive to think that entire world will become enlightened enough to behave normally without the fear-factor. So definitely it works for a majority, but there is also a minority who behave morally, ethically and lead a disciplined life devoid of fearing the omnipresent. At least I believe so. Morality based on fear seems a crude concept to me.

Truth remains that none has a clue. All are hypothesis and none are validated. To our misfortune, none has come back from heaven/hell to tell about the story there. So lets stay ignorant.

I absolutely have no qualms with any of these concepts. If I consider religion as a legal commercial activity or a business and if people are confidently willing to invest both time and money in that business looking at prospective substantial returns, a person like me should not have any problem with that.

As in case with most businesses only people who run the show has any actual idea about its working and all other shareholders out there are only interested in its returns and nothing more. Fair enough. But my problem starts when that ‘business’ is being exploited as a platform for selfish motives, just coz it provides a good camouflage. 

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if they had functioned fairly to everyone.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if it were not used for vote bank politics.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if it were not used to amass insane amounts of money. (and not used ‘just’ for the needed)

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if people hadn’t use it to kill others to attain power.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if its authorities had expelled the wrong doers amongst themselves with immediate effect.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if they hadn’t allowed a sect of people to use its name as a reason for killing people from other religions.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with religions if they acted more like an NGO and less like an ‘Inc.’

To a great extent all religions goofed up. They screwed up life on earth in a big way. On whatever noble concept where they founded, as  of now organized religion is doing more harm than good. On one hand they proclaim themselves pro-life and on other hand they give freedom to some fanatics insiders to take non-believer’s lives. On one hand they proclaim they are the custodians of chastity and on other hand they themselves pry on little kids & women to quench their pervert repressed thirst. On one hand they say stop war, dont kill and on other hand they will do anything to protect ‘their brand’, and if it takes some lives, they will call them martyrs.

Now many people justify this by saying, ‘an act of a single person cant be taken as representative of the entire community’. Humans remains as humans and we cant expect them to behave ideally every time. But let me ask, will a snowflake in an avalanche ever be responsible ? This is precisely how it is being exploited. People who are nothing when they are alone, create groups so that they can do whatever they want to in the name of that group.

I was not sure if I were doing the right thing, but I wanted to get out of this madness and look at it as an outsider. That’s what am doing right now. Observing it as an outsider, jumping in whenever I think I can make a contribution, criticizing without bias whenever I feel things are not moving in right direction. It feels great, surprisingly light and freedom to be on your own. No more reporting to clouds or thanking the unknown.

Atheism is equally fanatic and it is dangerous. People who proclaim there is no god will never be able to prove it. It is about proving 0 is actually 0, you cant do that. In pursuit of doing it, they unknowingly become fanatic. I dont want to be part of it, hence I stay agnostic. It’s a beautiful word, a – gnostic (knowledge), unaware of knowledge. You declare you are unaware of anything and just live your life. The advantage of this approach is that you are never blind ‘to faith’ or ‘against faith’. You keep your eyes & ears open for others to convince you that you were wrong.

Am waiting for that day, just like that 🙂

I purposefully haven’t touched the topics of ‘Zen, Osho and Zeitgeist’. This itself got into many pages and hence am stopping here.

Will share in coming posts about how the vacuum created by non-belief was filled in by Zen.

Thanks for taking the pain to read. Appreciate it.

P.S: Using She instead of He, is coz am just bored of people addressing God as He. Why cant ‘it’ be She ?… She= Creation, He=Destruction..ryt ?