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Saturday, February 7, 2015

Religion -The Great Brand

The blessings, benedictions, beauty, businesses, battles, browbeats, bluffs, barrenness and much more are packed as mixture inside a box with a brand name called ‘Religion’.

However, certain items are expected in this box as ingredients of the mixture especially items like God, Enlightenment, Spiritual experience, philosophical concepts, rational explanations, debates, syncretism, ideological veneration, blind faiths, belief systems, scriptural authority, devotion, worship, socio-cultural activities, traditions, customs, scripture sponsored or life’s experience propelled doctrines and so on.

Human beings born in different environments, cultures, societies are invariably initially initiated without their consent at a very young age as children and most cases even as babies to behold the box with a brand name called ‘Religion’.

The mixture is the result of the churning process wherein at different times and at different places different ingredients of the mixture dominate to the detriment of other ingredients or perhaps to compliment other ingredients.

Blessed are the poor, innocent, ignorant are meant to assuage lack of growth.


The whole problem arises because we are all groping about in the dark and are trying our best to grasp the spiritual aspect/element/facet of human life besides/beyond its two other fundamental aspects physical and mental life. 

We are all injected with a belief in a supreme power/god/divinity/universal energy which is supposed to be/ really in charge of or part of this spiritual dimension of human life.

There are many things or even anything can help in the process [ as Dhattareya is said to have learnt from many things and rightly so] like religion, reason, philosophy, psychology, science, social life, events, ideas, intellectual sharpness, crisis, nature, attitude and cultural milieu.

It was perhaps religion which primary dominated the discussion on many issues or perhaps assimilated and appropriated many rules to decipher the hitherto unknoen aspects of life and developed  multiple  belief systems and ensured that most human beings had a great affinity/attachment/atavistic association with religion along with all its beliefs, faiths, rituals etc.

While other mediums of attempting to know the unknown may have produced many works of tangible benefit to humanity;

Religion has not, except many activities of  entertainment value, festivity, unrealistic/unverifiable/unverified pronouncements  of the self proclaimed/institutionally appointed marketers of divinity/god starting from a local priests to great saints.

They have neither shown nor produced God /Divinity as they claimed.

So, as much as these marketers claimed it was all  consumer rights violation.

The whole problem hinges there on the hinge with a swaying door of uncertainty wherein some get in; some get out; some watch the door swaying whether and when the God/Divinity will reveal for sure , whether is he /she inside or whether/when he/she will come out and reveal himself/herself or can humanity have any easily recognizable/visually apparent  confirmed clarity  on this issue; let us also put aside multiple theories or long winding lectures with trite words used for the convenience of language or satisfaction of the status quo addicts because it is always easier to say that you believe in some god for various reasons and get on with life rather than getting into skeptical mode/philosophical mode/scientific inquiry  and get branded as someone with multiple labels attributed [mostly with a condescending tone] to such a position that one takes . 

Many things exist and happen irrespective of one's belief/non belief or irrespective of what any brainy chap claims/ or criticizes/condemns.

One credence that can be given to religious beliefs is that the very fact so many religions have so much of literature, culture etc indicates that some people somewhere at some time would have come in contact with someone/something like a powerful passing lightening impacting them with enlightenment and /or bliss and also played perhaps, though a very remote possibility, some role in the evolution of human species.

Otherwise humanity as a species would not have bothered to spend so much of time, energy and money in the name of religion.

Or probably in some dire situations like insurmountable crisis when all human faculties like reasoning, thinking and intellect  have failed to come to the rescue but some unknown element or happening beyond or besides the known human approaches has given a solution and helped, then, perhaps, it is only normal and expected of the beneficiaries of such elements to extol, popularize and perpetuate those elements or aspects that have helped them out in such dire situations. Some aspects of religious belief fall in this category too. Whatever happened was perhaps a part of evolutionary process wherein in probability some coincidences may have occurred. 

Of course, we have an overwhelming sea of blind beliefs, fettered faiths, frenzied following, silly superstitions, presumption that the greater the number of adherents the greater the religion is and doing many things to achieve it and many other negative and irrelevant things, unfortunately, form a major part of many religions and these things in fact bring the greatest disrepute to religions in general.




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