God vs Religions 3
Concludes the previous discussion
God vs Religions
PART 3
‘Religious freedom’ is the worst oxy-moron. Freedom is the first victim of all religious preachings. No follower of any religion is ever free to think on hisr own. Hse must accept every word of hisr religion’s holy book to be God’s only word. All the knowledge and wisdom Ge wants mankind to have must be assumed to be contained in the Vedas, Gita, Bible, Koran, Granthsahib or the particular book of the believer’s religion no matter how obviously incorrect it may be. Is this freedom? Certainly not. Freedom of religion is nothing but freedom to chose one’s own captor. Yet, seemingly intelligent people do engage in the futile acts of changing their religions. (Why I did not convert) What mankind really needs is freedom from religion.
Religions assume that God cannot reach individuals directly and separately. Therefore they dictate going to Gim through Gis self-appointed agents.
Religions also deny God Gis right to differ from their dictates. For example, Christianity would not accept God sending many sons (and daughters), or Islam would not let God keep sending prophets or Hinduism would not let God act between the incarnations. Therefore, it is also necessary to liberate God from all religions.
Organized religions are worse than organized crime. It is much easier to fight crime than the religions.
Aldous Huxley said that religion is the price that the mankind has to pay for being intelligent but not sufficiently so. I do not know his background explanation for saying so. I believe that we humans are intelligent enough to ask some tough questions about spiritual matters but dumb enough to accept the unbelievable answers provided by the religions without questioning them. We should be wise enough to realize that there cannot be any definite answers to the spiritual questions. “Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know” as aptly stated by Voltaire.
One of the questions that perturb most of us is, ‘Why do good people suffer but bad people enjoy?’ Different religions try to answer it in different ways. But we fail to realize that bad people only appear to be happy, whether they are really happy or not is known only to them. It also implies that we pass judgment against people we consider ‘bad’ and doubt God’s judgment. Besides, if all good people were to be happy and all bad people were to be miserable, there would only be two types of people. This lack of variety is not characteristic of God. Ge would love to make all sorts of combinations of various degrees of goodness or badness and happiness. In a way Ge is like a writer, director and producer of a giga size soap opera who needs to create all sorts of characters to make the story interesting.
People, who accept remuneration for preaching and particularly those, whose only means of livelihood is preaching, cannot be expected to tell the truth. Therefore, all those ‘saints’, ‘gurus’, priests, ministers, maulavis etc. cannot be relied on because they have vested interests in starting and perpetuating ffaith.
One of the characteristics of a true devotee (Vaishnava jana) is that he would not even touch other people’s wealth. Yet, in India, and probably elsewhere too, people who have never earned any thing themselves are called not only devotees but also saints. This is outrageous.
The concept of ‘Guru’ is inherently self-contradictory. A truly spiritual person is supposed to be free from ego. But, only a person with the ego of being spiritually superior to others can become a guru and take disciples. Most if not all the gurus have been found to be extremely egotistic. When one starts making rules for others to follow, it is a sure sign of a very boastful person. Therefore, true Gurus cannot exist and the fake ones do not deserve any respect.
Idol worship is considered to be bad. Idols, however, do not prevent devotees from using their God-given intelligence. What is worse than idol worship is hero-worship as in worshiping one’s guru, or worshiping Krishna, Jesus or any other subject of ffaith. The worst of all is worshiping books, like Ramayan, Mahabharat, Bible, Koran, Granthsahib etc. and believing that all of God’s wisdom is contained only in that book, because it stops one from thinking on hisr own. For more on this, please see Forms of Worship.
Forgiveness is good only if it is given to others. Asking to be forgiven for one’s own wrongdoings means lack of sense of individual responsibility. One must be prepared to accept the consequences of hisr deeds, good or bad, intentional or not. God would not be Gim if Ge keeps forgiving us just for praising Gim. On the other hand, punishing people for being ‘blasphemous’ goes against the very nature of God who is supposed to be kind and forgiving.
The only ritual that serves some useful, although limited, purpose is the wedding ceremony. All others are nothing but sources of income for the worship business. Most are ridiculous and carry no spiritual significance. They are based on make-believe rather than reality.
Religious literature and lectures by religious propagandists are mostly collections of high-sounding hollow words. They are also full of concocted stories which are self-contradictory. These guys could not even write good believable stories!
Symbols are either needless or useless. Those who know the significance of a symbol do not need it. For the others, it is meaningless or useless. Would displaying a flag or a cross four times as large as my neighbor’s make me four times as much patriotic or religious as him even if I cheat on taxes and violate religious principles? The truly patriotic need not salute the flag of their country. For the others, saluting the flag is a hollow formality only. Religious symbols too serve hardly any purpose.
One of the ways religions maintain their strangle hold on their followers is by making them feel guilty of committing sins even when the acts are not sinful. The most common act considered sinful is sex, which is perhaps the most common ‘weakness’ of mankind. Intelligence and spousal sex are God’s best gifts to mankind. Not using them is an insult to Gim. Using them is considered sinful by religious leaders only because it serves their wicked purpose of keeping followers under control.
Similarly, there are preachers who place excessive, and often exclusive, emphasis on vegetarianism, being a teetotaler, not eating beef, pork or even vegetables like garlic, onions, potatoes etc. as if abiding by such restrictions makes a person virtuous and others sinners. Such rules only help the preachers by inducing strange complexes among their followers but do not necessarily develop better human beings.
Forms of Worship, Why I did not convert