The girl was less than ten years old when they held her against a bed naked, and cut off her clitoris with a blade. She squalled and screamed while she bled her terrible pain however failing to understand why that happened to her. It’s called genital mutilation and is carried out in about 29 countries in Africa, in some parts of Asia and the Middle East. This infibulation is done as an act for pure feminity and 125 million girls are said to be living with the detrimental consequences. The abstraction is that genital mutilation reduces a woman’s sexual desire to have extramarital sex thereby preserving a girl’s virginity for marriage. And if this does still not sicken you enough, most of the girls undergo genital mutilation before the age of five.
No culture openly subscribes to it yet evidence states it’s done in the name of religion.
Religion. The most powerful dominion that governs you, fascinates you, hypnotizes and enslaves you. Religion is a world order that dictates an order of living notwithstanding one’s idiosyncratic ideas or preferences. It’s a hypothesis that is followed by the ignorant and by the intellectual at the same time. Religion they say, demonstrates the fundamental truth of human existence. If it does, why do we have so many religions? I am in a state of hysterical skepticism. 8 out of 10 people in this world today have subscribed to a religion. I am perhaps the ninth.
Does the idea of religion have anything to do with god? God is an imaginative moral authority and religion is the system that revolves around it. However, there is a fine distinction between the two nevertheless confused as one. The things we prefer to do in a particular way are done in the name of religion and these very things are equated to someone’s idea of god. The Hindus believe in a polytheistic idea, which I would call a spiritual democracy, where you get the freedom to choose your own god. The religion stays the same here. On the contrary Christians and Muslims are monotheistic. They only believe in the idea of a single god.
My only trouble with following a-religion is that it influences me in some way. It instills a fear in me. Fear of the right and the wrong, fear of committing anything by instinct or getting involved into anything by nature. The disharmony of my emotions, my expressions don’t unite because of a preconceived idea that someone is watching me. They say religion inculcates values in you. To me, it instills a fear, ignorance and intolerance. So much irrationality between human beings that bleed the same. So much is the chaos of dogmas and doctrines that the only thing, which leaves me with no cognitive dissonance, is being a sceptic. And the irony, non-believer in religion is said to be the non-believer in god.
It is funny to imagine god in a form and yet call him amorphous. It is funny to find god only in some place and yet call him omnipresent. It is hysterical how the subjective idea of god that stirs individual sentiments, disapproves the equivalent perception of the other’s god. This distinct dissimilarity rages hostility and today’s world is an affirmation to what they call, one man’s morality is another man’s bigotry.
I am disappointed and resentful of the choices people have made in their lives. The credence people have given to obscure gods over legitimate presence of humankind baffles me. It disturbs me when at times science too is disempowered before faith. We the humankind doesn’t want to believe in ghosts but we want to believe in darkness. This is what I want to say.
In March 2008, an 11-year old girl died of diabetes in the Wisconsin, United States. The parents of the girl regarded God’s healing superior than medical assistance for her curable diabetic ailment. The little girl was unwell for over a month and her sickness gradually worsened as she died, and her parents prayed with a bible for God to heal her. It was reported that even after Madeline’s death, her parents prayed over her body waiting for her resurrection.
The October 2005 earthquake in Islamabad witnessed a death toll of about 75000. Hundreds of schoolgirls were crushed under the rumbles of the fallen constructions. However, of those girls who survived death, but were caught under the debris were denied help by the Islamic religious clerics. The justification was that it was better to have left them to die than to commit the horrible sin of being touched by unacquainted men.
Do people even realize what they are doing under the shadows of some supernatural entity? I have been a follower, have sat in temples and looked at the image of god that looks at you. But the people around me said the god looks at them too and everyone claimed so. Then I realised it was the way I looked at god made me feel that he reciprocated. It was me and not him who acknowledged that. Which meant, I calculated the math to summarise my god. When there is a famine and people die, they say it is all at god’s will. What kind of a creator is he who is so capricious and imprudent of his own creation? What kind of a god is he who is so indifferent and cruel to the hungry dying children of this world? What kind of a god is he who makes those suffer who are already impotent to live this dreaded life? If it’s about retribution, then why he doesn’t punish the one? Why those die in horror who have devoted their lives to god himself?
This inconsistency isn’t an act of god. It is you. How many excuses does mankind need to stand-alone with humanity without fear of taking responsibility?
The Bible, the Quran and the Gita if not more, talk about everything in this world but solutions for the cruelty against the children of this world, about human trafficking, about drugs that destroy lives, about the rapes of women, about slavery, about genocide, about the ethnic cleansing. Where do we as mortal being looks for answers? In religion?
I disagree that morality is derived by religion. Adam and Eve didn’t kill the snake. They ate the apple.
Give people the choice to choose a religion, with an option to not choose one. If religious order were not conferred upon a child until he reached an age where he can reason it, we would be living in a completely different world. People wouldn’t have identified one another by the religion in names but would have greeted the fellow being in them alone and talked unequivocally about poverty, epidemics, female foeticide, racism and global warming in the same breath.
Religion enslaves us. Our faith surrenders the potency to think. It is as good as a surrender of reason. We hold immense pride of being human beings with a capacity to think and then we jeopardise that ability in the name of faith. We fail to comprehend what we are doing is to give away our core need to believe, to surrender our cynicism and our reason to something not known to mankind ever. What kind of intelligent beings are we?
In August 2008, a Catholic nun was burnt alive in Orissa by a group of Hindu fundamentalist who stormed in an orphanage she run. Another nun working there was gang raped by this extremist group and all of this was in reaction to the assassination of a radical Hindu leader.
Every war in this world or in your backyard is politically motivated. But yes, we used religion to do that. Why? Tell me one good deed a pandit can do and the one who doesn’t believe in god cannot. Tell me one good deed a maulavi can do and a humanist cannot. If both the ideologies can do the good part, I think humanists win. Because somewhere deep within, they did at free will and not in the fear of someone.
I have questioned myself; I have seeked an argument and disputation for its sake. I have suspected my motives and all that exudes towards god to reach this end of the tunnel. And I have only seen humanity to prevail alone. Show me one incident where an atheist started a riot.
When you go to sleep tonight, ask yourself if you are living a free live undisturbed and uninfluenced by your religious orthodoxy. Ask yourself if all this abhorrence and resentment towards a different name is justified. Ask yourself if you erase the history of animosity caused by your human irrational ancestors; isn’t everything inviting you to experience diversity of life?
Every religion exhibits some irrationality. The question isn’t if Islam is a religion of peace. The question is if its adjective, the Islamic is? The problem is that the religious scholars know everything from the text, but the irony is they know nothing from the context. Don’t standardize anything. Don’t stereotype one. No fact is ever absolute in its course. When a bomb explodes in a crowd, even the Muslims die.
On June 15, 2014 a radical mob of 200-armed men raided a woman’s home. Her house was ripped open from ceiling fans and tube lights; from sinks to photographed memories of her father, everything was desecrated. I don’t want you to assume what religion this mob belonged to. However, to your incredulity, the victim was a 68-year old Muslim living in Sri Lanka, and the radical extremist group was Buddhist, of the Bodhi Bala Sena or more familiar as the Buddhist Power Force who are said to be provoking sectarian hatred in Sri Lanka. Is this derived from the teachings of Buddha?
Like how we want the civil code of conduct to change with time, it is important we too let go off the theological fallacies. If the scripture says one thing and your sense of rationality says something else then how about we keep the scriptures aside. Not one has seen god or toured paradise. But each has witnessed humanity and has been moved by it at some instance. I am not asking you to be facile. I am simply asking you to give your being a chance. I am not asking you to keep the temples empty. The gods need people to stay alive in them. Faith is powerful when power fails. But keep this faith within you. Don’t impose it onto another.
I am not writing this because I don’t believe in god. I am not writing this because I don’t follow a faith. I am not writing this to bring a change. Just don’t surrender to something supernatural that is naturally not letting you evolve as a natural being. I am not against religion. But I have an aversion towards the rigid religious. Also it’s imperative to understand that I don’t argue that religion hasn’t done any good. But it’s a misfortune that religion has been the major cause of this world’s barbarity, conflicts, political instability, poverty and indifference. Prophet Mohammad said that saving the life of one man is equal to saving the life of all mankind. It is time people read the scriptures as a guide towards cohesive progression. Because we human beings have inhabited, evolved and prospered in each other’s shelter. The beauty of our existence prevails in this solidarity. And it’s in the greatest interest of mankind that we abide by it.
Do yourself this favour. Un-Religion.
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