The Business of Fear

We’ve all been to a “holy” place be it a mandir, a masjid, a gurudwara or a church and we’ve all seen and maybe on many occasions turned a blind eye to what actually goes on there. How many times have we come across priests literally harassing the “devotees” and in the end taking money out of them in the name of “god”? I guess everyone has been through that. The word “god” is used to instill fear in people’s hearts and use that fear to ultimately dupe them or make them do stuff . If we try to look around we’ll find that the number of “godmen” in this world is astounding and the amount of popularity and wealth (and influence) that they command is unparalleled. A rational mind should at this point sit back and question why that is the case? Why are strange practices, strange traditions made to look out as a way out of all the worldly troubles? What mystique is attached to it? And at that point maybe one should sit back and ask the question, if there is a god then would he want me to be this way? Why wouldn’t he make it…for the lack of a better word “simple”? Then the biggest question, if there is a god why did he create so many different religions, and if he did why were they created at different periods of time and not at the same one because what it led to was one person belonging to a religion creating a new different one. And the cycle has gone on and what it has led to is the world getting divided, first in the name of religion, then the further segregation in the name of “castes” and what we ultimately have is a world which is divided to such an extent that one religion can’t marry the other religion, one caste can’t marry the other caste, people of one religion hate the people of the other religion . Let’s face it,the biggest and the oldest conflict in the world(Jerusalem) is still because of religion and nothing else. Is that what god would want? Create chaos on his own in his own name?Make people fight each other in his name? Instilling fear in their hearts and making them do strange things, strange sacrifices? Constraining them to marry people on the basis of which home they took birth in? Is that what a god would want? That begs the question, does god really exist? Does he? Is man a creation of god or is god a creation of man, created to instill fear into the hearts of the people (wasn’t that how the first known God in the history of mankind ,the sun god,came into being? Because he was feared?)and used as a mode to answer the unanswerable. Humans fear what they can’t control or understand,they can’t control the future and in many cases they can’t control what happens to them,in the same way they couldn’t explain what went on in the world around them and that is where god came into the picture. He was(and still is) the answer to the unanswerable. Doing this makes them feel secured .It’s the human tendency and there’s no way out of this. If there is then it is by questioning, questioning whether it makes any sense what they’re doing, whether in any which way it is in fact the right thing to do. If giving money to a transsexual beggar is more righteous than to a handicapped?(why not give it to both or neither?) If marrying or not marrying someone because he’s not from “your caste/religion” is the right thing to do or a right way to live? If wearing a certain kind of clothes gets you closer to god and the other makes you offend him?(aren’t clothes supposed to be superficial anyways?) . If we question and look for answers we might just find how wrong the practices that we follow have been. From whatever I can fathom religion has been nothing but a money minting machine which has used god and the fear that comes with it as the tool to exploit man and resulted in the world we see today. It is true science is not able to answer each and every thing that happens in the world right now but you don’t need science to question the logic of religion, you just need the ability to let go of the fear and question what goes around in the world. The day we do that is the day we get rid of this, but will we? That’s a completely different story. So, to answer the biggest question, does god exist? Maybe he does maybe he doesn’t, we can’t be sure either ways but religion probably is not the way to really reach out to him is probably not one of his best creations.