From An Atheist’s Eyes- What Is Religion?

By Sanjay Dudani:

Religion,religion, O my dear religion,
Listen listen how you spread like a contagion;
Influencing our ideas without rhyme or reason,
Beyond our memory and beyond the oblivion;

They must find it difficult,
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
Rather than truth as the authority.

The word “believe” in itself carries the word “lie”. The more we think about “who we are”, the more we think about “where we come from”, the more we believe in our religious institutions, the more we begin to see we have been lied through the cascades of generations after generations. These religious institutions have been established by the same bunch of authoritarians who gave us our corrupt education, our bank cartels etc. etc. in order to claim their hegemony over the race of mankind. We have been made to believe that there is one invisible object in the sky who is watching us, keeping a vigil on our activities and prohibits us from doing certain things and maintains a high profile record of everything we do and finally when the day of judgement comes on, we are either sent to heaven where virgins await us and prodigality costs nothing or we are sent deep into the earth’s crust where we are subjected to all sorts of torture, burns, heat, dead skeletons etc. and where we are forced to rot. But… still that invisible object loves us. Doesn’t it suit the plot of a comedy drama whose protagonist is a hypothetical object and the vivid imagination of the author has anthropomorphized that object.

Every morning we wake up, we claim ourselves to be deeply religious but at the same time we take offence very easily at the slightest of the criticism of our religion. So haven’t we entrenched ourselves into the marshy land of hypocrisy by doing so?

Religion is nothing but a form of scholarship sponsored to us by our masters who manoeuvred themselves over time to manipulate the masses and who do not care what will happen to us and our family but care about only one thing which they always have cared that is to control the society. Or, to be more liberal let me put the definition of religion from a different perspective. “Religion” is nothing but a construct devised by men in order to combat the fear of death. Men always needed to blame someone else for their deeds and when they couldn’t blame anyone for death they finally coined the term “religion”.

Peter Joseph in his documentary “Zeitgeist-the movie” eruditely justifies that all religions and deities are mere iterated results of the Egyptian Sun god “Horus” of around 3000 B.C. Horus himself was nothing but merely the sun anthropomorphized in his life as a series of allegorical myths involving sun’s movement in the sky and so as the other deities and religions.

But now since religion has become a harsh reality in our lives and I always start quaking in my boots when I rake through the blood which is shed in the name of religion, I would like to analyse the causes of violence in religion which challenges the very doctrines of any religion which is peace and harmony.

If the role of religion doesn’t remain confined to the domain of religion and when it becomes the only way of defining people politically then we start plunging into a humiliating mess. It sometimes catches me in the highest forms of bewilderment when I question myself that “how human beings suddenly go berserk and transform themselves into bloody Hindus and fierce Muslims during a communal riot?” although all of them had shared the same past and culture since a very long time. There had been ruthless Muslim invaders but at the same time there existed Muslims who were great messengers of peace. But when we start seeing the Muslims only as invaders (we entitle them with the single identity and undermine their contribution as artists, poets, architects, singers etc or repudiate their other forms of identity entitlement) this is where we fundamentally and morally go wrong.

As a child I was often told that one day when Lord Shiva will open his 3rd eye and the earth will complete her cycle as designated by Lord Brahma, the earth will tear apart obliterating and destroying every single proof of life which she has nurtured through billions and billions of years. I always wondered how can a mother kill her own child? I always wondered how can a lord’s wrath who has been worshipped by the millions can cause their demise? Whole of my life I kept on questioning the veracity of this divine relationship which is not taught in any school or university but is eternal in it’s very kind and nature. Now I wonder why no one ever told me that it won’t be gods but it will be men themselves who will be responsible for the demise of this beautiful planet.

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