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Jul 29, 2010

Man's Godly Paradox


What came first, the chick en or the egg, the phoenix or the fire….
We have been dueling with paradoxes all our lives, but isn’t it time to retrospect the greatest of them all… isn’t it time to think where we came from … the greatest paradox in the history of human kind –
Man or God! Who was the beginner and who followed.
According to reliable historical sources, we can say that man was indeed the source, contrary to the popular belief.
The nomads used to worship the forces of nature … because they depended wholly on nature for sustenance. The leaders, for better control of the tribe, used to perform various rituals and tell the followers that if they don’t obey, they’ll be punished by the nature gods. Any offender used to be prosecuted by using him or her as sacrifice for the gods, and earthquakes, storms and volcanic eruptions
were regarded as god’s anger upon the wrong doings.
The beliefs were further given air in ancient Egyptian civilization and even in the Vedic time. Astrology and Astronomy were in their hey – day. The natural disasters and other events were at the time understood by a fair few… who took advantage of their knowledge to influence or rather frighten the common man into following them. If my readings are correct, then the Egyptian Pharos – all of them had a council of royal priests by their side… ‘Priest’ was just a post, given to the best astrologers of the land. In India as well, how many of us have heard an ancient ruler without the ‘Raj Pundit’ or ‘Maha Muni’. These were learned men… no doubt… but still manipulators of hearts of the masses. Then came the time of Liberalization of Religion and the Romans.

It was Moses who led the way by setting forth “God’s 10 Commandments”. He was a great leader, I will not go into the history of it because frankly, I am no scholar in history and it is not my place to comment. However this is a fact that he led the Hebrew s out of slavery and we should salute him for it. This event, in my opinion was the turning point in human history. This event single handedly gave rise to religion as we know it today.
Thousands of books were written in this era … the Gospels, the Bible, the Geeta, the Quran….. Even some mistranslations of the Vedas. The Indian epics of course belong to an earlier age of the world … Coming to the Roman Empire, it was the Cesar who actually pumped out the last of the “Sacred Feminine” followers and enforced his own religions on them … The same pattern was followed by the Christians a few years on…
All I can say is that that this trail of development of religion has left us a Bloody Trail that most of us choose to ignore “for the common good”. Basically, this is the principle where ‘the old maketh way for the new’.
Coming to the Indian context, we had never been religious fanatics as we were now. Every god of every religion was given his due respect … even in the Mugal age. There have been thousands of instances which can be quoted in the context dating maybe upto the Godhra riots recently. There were several instances of Hindus being protected by the Muslims and vice versa.
However, there have been certain individuals of an extremist nature, who, unfortunately were in the position to upsurge the masses in the very wrong way – The Partition Riots, The Babri Masjid Massacre to name the recent few.
Unfortunately, recently I can see a few events in this enlightened society of o ur that can and should shame our very conscience out of existence. “The Religion Vote Politics, the Fascist Ideologies, the Babagiri” that we see is really unhealthy and influencing the masses in ways we could never have imagined. Recently I read an article in a leading newspaper which said that a mother sacrificed her 4 sons to gods – by repeated banging their heads on a ‘sacred’ rock!!!!
Do we need this blind idol worship or following? Why do we need a religion in the first place? Why?
In the earliest times, it was just ‘saying thanks’ to nature. Later it was a means to rule – the real phrase being “Your Priest can’t be Everywhere, So he Created God ”. Till this point, it was acceptable… but now it has become a weapon for murder, of torture and extortion – malice to the civilized world. Remember the Terrorists’ reason for terrorism – Jihad. The Quran in reality as most people who have read it will say does not support violence of any kind.
There will always be those who take the advantage of these sacred scriptures because the common man on the streets will always believe the scholars and the pundits … thats human mentality. If this is the kind of society we are heading to, then we need to ask ourselves – do we need such gods. 
I am a profoundly religious man, but in my own fashion. But I can answer for myself the above questions without any doubt in my head.
I am a human first, then an Indian. I do not accept and will never accept any other distinction. My God is my Conscience and I know it will guide me to the right path.

I will never say follow my words, but I would like to request you to ponder upon them. Think for once and then decide what we were supposed to become and what we have become. We are all brothers – in life – in death – in religion – in faith. Let us be one and fight what truly is a demon worse than any that mankind has ever fought – and this one survives and grows stronger on our differences and fights!!!!

Religion and God are as personal for a person as his skin or even his soul … lets keep them there!!!!!

1 comments:

Neha said...

brilliant post..interesting thoughts..love reading ur blog :) keep writing