About Religion

 

Religion, which man whether alive or dead can claim to be an expert in such wonder, such mystery?

Religion has been the force of great good, pushing the world to its limits through civilization, love, and great hope.

It has also been the driving force for great destruction, deaths in the millions, slavery, and all forms of human ugliness.

In a way, it opens up our psyche, leaving it vulnerable to outside influences, whether good or bad.

For me though, I believe what I know of religion is an equivalent of a drop of water in the ocean, one puff of air in the universe, a grain of sand in a desert. Instead of focusing on what I don’t know, I will focus on what I know, which is pretty little.

It can push us to better ourselves, to endure great suffering and still have immense hope, to forgive our adversaries when we shouldn’t, to help people when we need the help more ourselves, to love when hate is more than justified.

On the flip side, it can cause us to hate each other, because it is the nature of religions to believe in different deities, each deity with his own rules and way of life that his subjects are supposed to follow.

Religion comes in different denominations, each having its own way of doing things – and that’s where the ugliness of religion creeps in. When there are two gods with different doctrines, which one reigns supreme over the other? In the event that two people have to partake a responsibility and they believe in different deities, which god’s doctrines will overshadow the other’s?

Take for instance, Christianity and Islam, each believes that its god is the one true God. To simplify, there can only be one god, because the two religions have different doctrines, and so it suffices to say that there is no way for those doctrines to have been crafted by the same god. Let’s abandon that line of thought for a second.

There are hundreds if not thousands of religions out there, each with its own doctrines, distinct from the next. They all have some similarities though, the major one being that they believe in the afterlife. Each of them has its conditions and guidelines for its believers to enter that elusive afterlife, which is understandable. Sigmund Freud said that any religion that intends to be successful has to offer its believers some kind of incentive, and the afterlife is as best as incentives go. The thought of eternal life elevates us to the levels of the gods, so it makes sense.

Now imagine this: we all die, buried according to the guidelines stipulated by our distinct religions, and then we ascend to meet our Supreme Being. Will we be judged by the same god, or different gods will judge their followers? We also can’t entertain the idea of several gods, because then all the theories of creation come crumbling down to a billion tiny pieces, because who is to argue that all the gods with different doctrines would come into agreement on how to shape the rivers, how to create men and women?

By now you must be starting to see how complex it is, but you can decide to make it easier for yourself by arguing that your religion is the one true religion – a pure waste of your intelligence. We have to ask questions, the rights ones, in order to get the right answers – even though with questions of this magnitude we never really get the answers, we simply make circles.

With religion, we have to ask ourselves why is it that humans from the beginning of time have never lacked a Supreme Being to worship. Sure, Christianity and Islam and Buddhism may seem like the new dawn in religion, but they were only widespread a few hundred years ago. Before that, humans still worshipped different gods, in different ways, in different places. I don’t know about you but what I induce or deduce from that is that we create religion for ourselves because it is a necessity, not a luxury.

We are animals to the core. Consider people who have lost sense with morality – the illusion of right and wrong. Think serial killers, murderers, and politicians (they had to be on this list). A serial killer will kill hundreds or even thousands if he was left to his own devices. A politician will send innocent young men to a war they have no idea about and he will milk his country dry just for his own gain. A murderer will kill a friend, a lover, just because the other party threatened something that he thought he owned. Isn’t that barbarism? A lion will kill another lion and won’t bother hiding the carcass, it will kill an antelope without feeling a shred of guilt. It will also fall by the claws of a stronger opponent, and no punishment will befall that opponent. Why? Because to it, everything is a survival play.

But we are different. Our brains are larger, and so our perception of reality is also different. We created religion for ourselves because it was the right thing to do. I assume we started by installing the strongest of all of us but that proved to be quite inconsistent, because however strong one is today, he won’t be the same after ten years. I also presume that others who were as strong as him started getting rebellious because they knew if push came to shove, they were just as killable as the rest of them. We needed something permanent, something that can’t be easily challenged by every Dick and Harry. We needed two other elements to accompany that new invention of ours: fear and self-preservation (as Thomas Hobbes claims). Look at it this way in the case of Christianity. We follow God’s rules because we are afraid of eternal punishment, otherwise known as Hell. That’s fear. We go to church religiously, visit the sick, help the needy, not because we want to but because a reward awaits us, otherwise known as Heaven or because we know it pays to be in God’s good graces. That’s self-preservation. That said, religion was born, although as time went by and the wisest of the people came to understand the essence of religion, they polished and streamlined it to serve us better.

So, at this point, something called conscience is born. Plato said that punishment follows hard upon the sin, but another thinker called Hesiod corrects that by saying that punishment is born at the same instant as the sin. The moment you plant a seed of sin, you also plant a seed of punishment, and they grow at the same time. Just as we take pleasure in committing sin, something else is born – we are displeased by it, torturing ourselves with painful thoughts. That is our conscience. Where does conscience come from, you ask? Whenever we listen to people telling us what is wrong and what is right, our conscience is born. Our subconscious knows what is wrong and what is right, the quality or the distinction of the two being different depending on how we have been raised, our religion, and so forth.

I understand that there is a sea of information out there about religion, many great thinkers have wrote about the topic because of our affinity for it. I have no idea if what I have written up to this point makes any sense, and I wouldn’t blame myself if it didn’t. Religion is as mysterious as asking me if I know for certain where I came from – I won’t give you a straight answer, and if I do, then you’ll know that I am a fool.

Religion is the foundation of society, it is a pillar for everything that we do. It keeps our animal side in check, threatening it, suppressing it, discouraging it from coming out. I don’t believe that the world will end, but if it ever does, it will be probably because we would have abandoned religion altogether, or because one religion turned on the other, sweeping it off the face of the planet.

And don’t be fooled by the casual manner in which I talk about religion. Men and women have lost their lives from the time the idea of religion was planted into the world. Some lost their lives through sacrifices to appease some supreme being, some lost their lives because they refused to accept a certain religion, and others lost theirs through the wars between religions which were quite plenty. We should take this moment to at least applaud our democracy because we are allowed to believe whatever we want without any consequences – the only consequence being our own conscience. In the past, no god punished those who defied him, no, the punishments were our own doing. If I forced you to worship my god and you refused, I would rally enough people and we would strike you down, and we would sleep so well that night because we would believe that we have catapulted ourselves to our god’s good graces. The elephant in the room – that we have taken another human life won’t bother us one bit. Then there is the issue of martyrs, but I don’t have to bother you with that since you are well acquainted with that fact.

All the laws of the universe that we made for ourselves have most of their foundations on religion. In a way, governments were made as a copycat of the supreme beings we read on the holy books – it takes care of its citizens, punishes the law breakers, decides who gets what and who doesn’t, its citizens beg it for things without any guarantee that they will ever get it, stays silent when its citizens are suffering, one would argue that it has lost faith in its citizens, it has the most to gain and nothing to lose because nothing or nobody will ever hold it accountable. Just like God, isn’t it? Of course there are some differences, after all I said governments try to mimic God, I didn’t claim they are successful. Governments are installed by the people through the illusion of democracy, but God installed himself, and there are no changes of regimes. Perhaps that’s where his greatness stems from.

Think of religion the way you see fit. It all depends on how you have been raised, the exposure you have had the pleasure of having, and the schools of thought that you have entertained over the years. The important thing is that you never stop asking questions, because it is better to ask the right questions and get no answers than to ask the wrong questions and get the right answers for those questions.