Prayer and Religions
(Gujarati version at ભક્તિ અને શ્રદ્ધા)
Do religions inspire real prayers? No.
Praying and religions are generally considered to be pious activities. This is an assumption that needs to examined carefully rather than accepted as an axiomatic truth.
Just as loving is far different from making love, praying is altogether different from making prayer the latter being what is practiced in the places of mass worship.
Praying is an extremely private and personal communication between an individual and God taking place spontaneously at no predetermined time or place nor in a predetermined manner and mostly in a silent way unknown to others. For a true devotee, each and every moment of life is a prayer. All actions of such a person are guided by the conscious awareness of God. There is no time set aside for praying because praying can not be separated from the other activities of hisr life.
On the other hand, what happens in the places of mass worship is making prayer. Such mass prayers are mechanical repetitions of ‘prayers’ written by persons other than the devotees, performed on days, times, places and in manners previously determined by others. These other persons, called gurus, prophets, incarnations, etc. had the audacity to believe and make their followers believe that the former were somehow authorized by God to regulate their followers’ modes of praying God. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
When two or more persons get together to pray, the so-called ‘prayer’ becomes hypocrisy. The purpose of such joint ‘prayers’ is to indicate the conformance of the participants to the religious norms and certainly not to communicate with God. Such joint ‘prayers’ create human machines programmed to repeat high sounding but essentially hollow words in the name of praying. They are the equivalent of gang raping (or gang-sodomizing if the victim is a male). This is even more despicable because it is done in the name of God.
The worst thing that any body can do is putting words in another person’s prayer. Religions routinely engage in this sin because they have no faith in God’s ability to reach and be reached by each and every individual directly. Therefore the religions are truly blasphemous and not the people they consider so. Most disgusting are the attempts to introduce school prayers. It is the adults who need to pray and thereby eventually improve their own behaviors and not the mostly innocent school children. School prayers will only produce praying human machines and not true believers in God.
Religions are sets of assumptions. To the believer, these assumptions appear to be self-evident truth requiring no proof. To the others, they are obviously wrong. All these sets of assumptions include at least one common belief that a particular individual was so close to God (or was God himself) that Ge granted himr the exclusive right to speak on Gis behalf and make rules governing other peoples’ lives forever thereafter. Changing religions, therefore, only amounts to changing the set of assumptions without getting closer to God. For the same reason, supporting one religion against another only amounts to choosing between two equally unreliable sets of assumptions.
The sets of assumptions that are religions attempt to answer some very fundamental inquiries, vexing the inquisitive human mind, such as the origin of self, the purpose of life, etc. Rather than accepting the fact that there can be no answers to such questions, or giving clear credible answers, religious leaders want their followers to assume that one and only one particular individual, or group of individuals, knew all these answers and that worshiping in a manner prescribed by him (or them) will solve all the puzzles of life including achieving salvation.
The worst aspect of religions is that their dictates contradict the fundamental attributes of God. Ge is almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc. Nevertheless, religious leaders want their followers to pray in an ancient dead language as if Ge does not know modern languages. They want people to go to supposedly holy places for pilgrimage as if Ge does not exist elsewhere. They declare punishment including death sentence for persons considered blasphemous as if Ge lacked the capacity to Gimself punish those individuals if they were really guilty of sins against Gim. Most of the souls are expected to wait until some day when they will be judged and rewarded or punished in accordance with their acts committed by them during their lifetime. But a few particular individuals are not allowed to wait and are punished right away, not by God, but by the religious leaders.
Preaching itself requires a combination of complexes. The preacher must have the complex of being spiritually superior to the others. Of all superiority complexes, that involving spiritualism is the worst and contrary to the very concept of spiritualism because a truly spiritual person is supposed to be humble. On the other hand the listeners must suffer from an inferiority complex. In fact, the most probably intentional effect of religious preaching is to perpetuate such inferiority complex of the masses.
The tools used by religious preachers are many. Impressive oratory is perhaps the most important and illusive tool of the preachers. More often than not, the listeners are carried away not by the facts but by the style of the speaker. They also have a cunning ability to twist facts around to make every thing else than their religion appear to be bad and wrong particularly when it comes to science. They take full advantage of the discoveries and inventions of science for their propaganda and yet bad-mouth it.
Most of them use the stories of the scriptures. These stories are all man made ones, internally inconsistent and full of miracles. Not only are the miracles unbelievable but also insignificant and unnecessary. However, these stories do inspire awe among the masses and create a semblance of faith, not in God but in the makers of the miracles.
Celibacy is another tool widely used by religious leaders to control their followers. Since most people cannot be celibate, its breach is used to create a sense of guilt or sin among the individuals thereby strengthening the stranglehold of religions. Celibacy is not a sacred practice. Those who claim to practice it are either hypocrites or impotent. God, being smart, would not have created the apple if Ge did not want Adam and Eve to eat it. In all probability, Ge did want them to eat it and forbade them only to make it more attractive and thereby to insure that they eat it. UnGodly Genesis
Symbols serve to enforce the grip of the religions. They are very ironic. If a person understands the meaning of a symbol, hse does not need it. If the person does not understand the purpose of the symbol, it becomes useless.
God has given the most precious gift of intelligence to mankind. It is ungodly for religions to forbid the use of our intelligence in the name of faith. When one is asked to believe in some thing without thinking about its validity, in the name of faith, one is essentially being asked not to use one’s God-given intelligence. This is one more way in which religions defy God.
The worst abusers of the concept of faith are the religious leaders who want their followers to believe in rituals established by the self-appointed agents of God. These rituals only serve the religious leaders, boost up their income and ego and prevent the followers from realizing that faith in God and Gis principles is the only true faith.
Religion may be a necessity for those who want to go to heaven after death, but is only a nuisance for those who want to enjoy this life and an inconvenience for the rest of us.
According to Aldus Huxley, religion is the price that the mankind has to pay for being intelligent but not sufficiently so. It also is the curse that the humanity has to live with for our need to feel good without really doing good.
Organized religion is worse than organized crime because religions mislead and destroy far more people than the organized crime and for ever. All religions have miserably failed in achieving their stated objective of improving the behavior of their followers. Why else do we see more and more people being killed in the name of religion than any other cause?
The so-called ‘Religious Right’ is a self-contradictory term. Those who believe in every thing wrong call themselves rightists. Actually, they should be called ‘wrongists’. At least in propaganda, all religions pretend to preach compassion for the poor and suffering. Whereas the religious rightists have nothing but contempt for the down-trodden. They only use religion to justify their ill-gotten wealth by donating a small fraction of it (claiming income tax exemption) and blaming their victims for being poor, conveniently forgetting their part in making others poor. Some of them even start charitable organizations and draw excessive salaries and honorariums from them at the cost of thousands of not so rich contributors.
Religion is the most enslaving concept, which takes away the follower’s freedom to worship God in one’s own unique way and even the freedom of thought. Religious freedom is therefore an oxymoron. Humanity needs freedom from religion rather than ‘freedom of religion’.
Prayer cannot heal someone or delay death. Sincere prayers of tens of millions of people could not heal or save Pope John Paul II. It does not mean that we should not pray. It only means that we should not ask for material favors. Shri Ramakrishna Paramhansa was in severe pain due to his cancer but refused to ask Goddess Kali to relieve it saying that he would pray only for spiritual well-being.
Logic, Faith and God, Uses and Abuses of Faith