Religion that is no more about SPIRITUALITY...

I am a tolerant person, well mostly! I believe that God and religion is a bunch of hoopla and hoax created to control the human free spirit. But, I am tolerant to those who find God or find peace in God. What I do find wholly bewildering are the people who hide behind religion when their individual purpose is solved. And I am not talking of politicians and self proclaimed tricksters, er, religious leaders! I am talking of every day idiots who hide behind religion to justify asinine behavior, incompetence and malicious intent. 

A Mark Twain quote comes to mind...

And I live in India. The Motherland of Religious Escapists. Everything impractical and sometimes everything that defies basic logic can be justified by religion. Whether it is fasting yourself to illness or making excuses for not working (the never ending inventory of religious festivals and functions) to shunning basic human dignity. All this can be justified by using religion as an argument.

And there is always a loophole to exploit. At the very least to ensure that all is forgiven! If you commit a sin, no matter, there is always some temple you can ring the bell at or a river you can bathe in to clean up! And then you can go right back to sinning, whatever your choice of sin may be. Every time I go to any relic of religious worship, the number of crooks praying can only be outdone by the number of people exploiting God and the crooks to make a quick buck. 

To say nothing of religious extremities! Some of them are just plain stupid and others are reflections of poor character that is preached in the garb of religion. An extreme example is that of the Aghori Sadhus. These are members of a Hindu sect who worship Shiva, whom they see as the supreme god. Because they believe that Shiva created everything – they consider nothing to be bad. For this reason they engage in a variety of sexual practices, they drink alcohol, take drugs, and eat meat. A perfect example of leveraging religion to eat, drink, fuck and make merry! 

In some parts of India it is believed that ghosts can inhabit certain people of the living world. Most notably, girls who are born with a baby tooth already erupted through the gum and girls who are very ugly or have some facial deformation are believed to be possessed by ghosts. The only way to exorcise the ghosts is for the girl to marry an animal, typically a goat or dog. Even though there is a lavish wedding ceremony complete with booze and dancing, the girl is not expected to copulate with the animal – which is good news!

And how can we talk of religion and it's bullshit (pardon my language but I cannot find a better word) and not talk of the Muslims and their matam and the Sati Pratha among Hindus. Thankfully the latter has not been outlawed. But I am sure if you search deep and wide enough, it is still practiced.  

By all means, pray and be spiritual. But you don't have to burn women, be violent and marry animals to achieve fulfillment. And if you truly find charity in your heart and good will to the world, practice it instead of using it as a facade to commit atrocities.

My God, Broken...

I woke up this morning to a cold wind

No thoughts, no words, no feeling

Into an emptiness, a hollow with no meaning

Like my God, this dawn, had not woken 

I looked out of the window to a sunless stretch

No character, no colour, no shape

A monotonous plain, featureless with no end

Like my God, this day, had not spoken

I looked up at a grey and dull heaven

No streaks, no hues, no promise

A canvas with no paint, 

Like my God, through the night, was broken

The Truth vs. what we think is the Truth…

Is what we see a manifestation of the truth? The human sight is not the equivalent of an HD Canon DSLR – the downside of the human, or for that matter any life form with an evolved brain, process (if I can call it a process) is that seeing is not limited to a visual image capture. What makes sights so beautiful is the complex process of interpretation that the visual representation goes through. It is what makes the otherwise chemical composition of organic and inorganic environment so beautiful or ugly or whatever chord it might strike with the individual beholder. In my blog If There Was No God, I spoke about the individual motivation being the representation of their Gods. And from the very enthusiastic response I received from readers through comments, here and elsewhere, I am pushed to ponder over the crux of many similar debates.

“Why can’t you believe what you cannot see?”

And then there is the endless debate around how we can explain the perfection and balance of what we do see?

And this triggers the subject of this particular blog.  What we see, hear and feel, very often are almost always subject to the beauty of interpretation of the human mind. And such interpretation is determined by the design and shape of the looking glass through which we view the world. For those of who have grown through a conservative dogma or have at some point in life been influenced by religious or spiritual discourses, the world and its part in the universe looks like bountiful beauty that cannot be solely a matter of science and coincidence.

Then there are those who have been surrounded and trained in discourses that rely on numbers, facts and truth that can be experimented and replicated in practice or on the basis of known theory. People believed that the Earth was the center of the universe – it was not so much ignorance by character as it was ignorance by a distorted viewing glass. There was never any evidence that suggested otherwise and hence there was no reason to question what you saw. The Sun going around the earth or vice-versa, would have the same manifestation to the human eye – what the hum eyes saw and brain interpreted was day and night as manifested by relative motion between the sun and the earth – it exemplifies the kind of dogma that colors the looking glass.

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all times, once said, “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

The weakness of the act of seeing lies in the fact that most human beings tend to judge and absorb partial truths and groom them into rationalizations based on skewed perceptions that have been built through interaction with extraneous environmental factors that are skewed in terms of their understanding of the nature and laws that govern all things that are. Religion, in its truest sense, is (or should be) the expression and articulation of the absolute truth. Einstein also went on to say “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

As Swami Vivekananda once said, “Each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.” It is the complete assimilation of the universe around us, complete knowledge of it and its components that one and all Religion should be united to preach. Whether that is preached from the perspective of a God as a driving force or science as a reasoning force, or a combined faith, it must be preached to inculcate that opportunity to learn, change and evolve.

Reasoning based on limited knowledge and information, and attribution to God or the Divine or whatever our personal rationalizations may provide, without searching for absolution is not the equivalent of being religious, spiritual or a believer. It is ignorance that drives human beings down the wrong path, the outcome of this is the negativity we see and feel around us – because we seek God in the wrong places and, justify and judge actions based on half Truth driven perceptions.

The Difference between Disbelief and Choice of Faith…

To my blog yesterday, talking about the role of the concept of God, I received a few comments. One of them was particularly interesting and pointed me to the controversy that surrounds those that simple undertake a choice of determination of faith. The comment is re-quoted below.

“There is good definition of Atheism… The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason what so ever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.”

If that is what Atheism really means, then I am no atheist. In my heart I believe that there is a general construct of laws and rules that drive the shape of the future. Many people call it fate and destiny while others, like economists and speculators, try and seek the shape of the future in numbers. And there are those of us who choose to believe that there are outcomes and ways of science and mathematics that we do not understand – while our understanding may be skewed towards ignorance given the size of the cosmos, it does not mean that everything that is beyond our grasp amounts to magic and divine intervention.

A friend of mine once quoted a gentleman called Erich Von Daniken to explain how faith and belief take shape – I will try and capture the gist of it. Imagine a cluster of people who have lived in complete seclusion for generations, since before the industrial revolution took off, in Africa. They had children and their children had children and all they learnt and practiced was basic sustainability – hunt, cook, build roofs, etc. while staying completely secluded from the rest of the world that was advancing so fast. Imagine their consternation, one find day, when two men and a woman with clothes they had never seen before, complexion unlike their own and accessories that made no practical sense, landed a helicopter and got off it with guns firing. How difficult would it be to convince the aborigines that the new entrants of their lives with fire weapons and strange ways had superpowers and were higher beings?
 

Sadly in the reality that has been documented, this is the general path to slavery and exploitation. My point however is this - the origin for faith and belief is not founded in rationality. It is essentially an emotional reaction to ambient circumstances and outcomes. Very often we come across outcomes that we cannot control – be it in the form of plagues and hurricanes to the pre-historic man or a flying chariot with rotating blades to the African aborigine or be it in form of death of a loved one in spite of the best medical care money can buy. As I mentioned in my previous blog, humans are slave to their need to rationalize outcomes to conform to what makes them comfortable and helps them cope with the reality.
 

The matter of not believing that the universe, and all in it, is being driven by a single or a group of super-powerful individuals with power to make or remake as they choose fit is not so much an active disbelief. It is a matter of choice. As an individual there are multiple ways of dealing with any given manifestation of reality that cannot be explained with existing information and knowledge at hand. A large majority think that there is a divine plan that has been written and will play itself out as time progresses. Some believe that it is coincidence. There are others who believe that everything is driven by cause-and-effect. Every outcome is caused by an input. And if we believe that time is infinite going forward, we must also believe that it is infinite behind us too – thereby choosing to not believe in a specific origin of all things. Cause and effect have been playing out forever and will continue playing out forever. That perspective does not necessarily mean an active disbelief in an alternate answer to the problems of life and other parts of the grand picture.
 

Much like religion and God, it is a matter of choice. What do I choose to have faith in? Physics? Or a divine power? I choose to put my faith in mathematical precision of physics. There is a lot that I don’t understand about it and a whole lot that no one understands about it. That does not make me and more right or more wrong until we can have comprehensive proof of everything that is anything – one way or the other. Till then, I believe, that I should have the right and freedom to choose any way that suits my appetite for faith.

If there was no God…

Voltaire said, “Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.” Translated to English it means ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ In a discussion I was having with my mother the other day, we were debating the need for physical manifestations of the abstract for people to believe. Therein stems the need for rituals, deities, books and chanting for the average mortal to believe the existence of a God.
I am an atheist and am loved and hated in different circles for it. In the circles that I am hated for my opinions, I am told that the equivalent of being an atheist in their minds is drawn with being an anarchist. And the more I speak with people, especially those who hate me and despise me for being godless, the more I am convinced that Voltaire was right. Let us assume that there was no God – in essence let’s start at the beginning, before religion. The human mind, as I see it, is not independent and does not possess the strength to deal with reality as is. God, genetics, or whoever made man, equipped us with an inquisitive mind; and the natural next step of the inquisitive mind is to seek reasoning and meaning. It is never enough for things to just happen. They must, for us to be able to cope with the reality, happen for a reason and that reason must converge into something that either can be controlled or not. When it cannot be controlled, it is the weakness of the human mind that leads it to attribute the occurrence of an event to a higher power.
If you and I were told that we are organic beings destined to be born, feed, reproduce and die, which would be a depressing thought. The lack of purpose, the ability to not being able to control and alter or change the outcome would be difficult to consume. We then found a way of justifying the outcome in terms of God, religion and complicated theories of sins and afterlife. In essence what purpose did religion and God serve? It helped, us humans, justify the seemingly meaningless organic process of life that would have otherwise been a purposeless journey towards a pre-determined outcome. If you think hard enough and draw out the fishbone long enough, you will realize that everything we do is to make life, as we know it, have greater purpose and meaning, and possibly an outcome in whatever way possible.
So what is wrong in searching for meaning? Nothing, if you ask me! The human mind craves meaning and purpose and therefore we are different from the average stray dog that we run from or the fish that we slay to consume. And different people search for meaning in different ways. Some find meaning in God and religion. Others find meaning through different pursuits ranging from knowledge to money. And to a significant population, a hybrid approach provides greater solace. To the pursuer of money, money is God. To the hungry seeker of knowledge, knowledge is God.
Without the comfort of our individual Gods, we humans would basically end up as meaningless organic existence who, must fight to feed and run from danger to survive, till age or said danger catches up and terminates our lives. There would, in essence, be no motivation to strive for a better or different outcome in the short term or the long term. Without the motivation to strive for a different outcome we would never have become a civilization, and thereafter, a modern civilization spoiled by technology, as we exist today. That is why we need God. As for the argument of whether God is a super-human entity who exists on different solar systems, as energy or in physical bodies, or any of the other manifestation we choose to fantasize into reality, is a question that must be answered by the individual. Because, the individual answer is the source of the individual’s sense of purpose and motivation towards betterment.