About religion…

It was the rebellious teen in me that led me to question the existence of God and religion. Rebellious because as a family we were, and my parents still are, fervently religious. We visit temples frequently and have poojas performed from time to time.

It was in Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, that I first witnessed the ugly side of religion. The dying and the dead are brought to this ancient city in order to attain salvation. Consequently, it is a city of suffering and misery. Indeed death is a part of life, something all of us will eventually face. But the image of a dying man, lying almost naked on the street, one leg stretched upwards like rigor mortis had already set in, flies hovering about him, left me numb and has stayed with me after all these years. We passed him by like hundreds of others around us. We tried to ignore him, tried not to look at him. He might have attained the much-pursued salvation, but that could not change the fact that he had died and probably even lived in misery. Next, the attitude of the priests shocked me. They hustled us, screamed at us as we stood in the queue. They offered to help us jump the queue if we paid up a certain amount. We had gone looking for a spiritual experience and we left disturbed and shaken. My belief in religion and its goodness suffered a blow and put me on the path to question.

What is it that led men to form religion (including the ancient pagan ones)? Was it the fear of the unknown, of Nature, of those invisible powers that caused lightings and earthquakes and deluges? I have often wondered if religion has done more good to mankind than bad. It gave the society some rules to live by, but it also gave us wars and bloodshed that continue till date. At times, religion became the means to suppress women and a certain section of the society. It became the weapon of the rich, the educated and the powerful to be used against the poor, the illiterate and the powerless.

Not that I am against religion. It’s up to every individual to make his or her choice. But I sincerely wish that religion be kept out of our public lives. It’s a little to quixotic to say so but I hope religion ceases one day to be a dividing factor in our modern societies. I also believe that religion should not guide our actions and thoughts to such an extent that we lose our faculty of independent thinking. We should learn to question dogmas and let religion evolve with time because morals, values and concepts of good and bad change with time and religion should reflect those changes.

Gandhi used to say that there are as many religions as human beings. So probably it would be wrong to say I have no religion. Mine is that of questioning…