Saturday, February 28, 2009

KNOCK KNOCK.Whos That?GOD.God Who?


How often have we heard our parents and grand parents advise us the virtues of thinking good and emulate the same inorder to gratify the gods and reserve a seat in the bus to heaven.

We all grew up listening to fairy enchanting stories of multi ambidextrous gods or godesses who stamp evil with justice and goodness.A pattern has been imprinted to accept whatever is being served by our environment.External or Internal alike.

Society forms the external environment and sets the framework within which we are supposed to function and we have our parents,grand parents,teachers and others forming our internal environment.The gushing streams of beliefs from the latter seem to be more rigid that we are not encouraged to question.EVER!

No son you dont ask such a question.Never ask such a question.Dont talk rubbish.I am never going to hear all this from you again ok?Yea mamma..Yes paapa.But why?

WHY was never entertained.

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not included into their minds,they would remain so.

So true.

Well what is religion?

A group of people forming an association having sharing thoughts and beliefs and evolve some commonality.Churches were the first facebooks and orkuts that existed.However over a period of time as they say they transformed from a cabal to a influential coterie,power held firmly within few.ABSOLUTE power.COERCIVE power.and as they say power corrupts.They took on to become the torchbearers of each sect and then started the missionaries and their travails.(TIP OF THE DAY - Google Missionary Position)

With only one rule - no questions.Just blind acceptance.

I Believe,the only purpose that god and religion serve are to pass on a message in a form of a parable.Unfortunately it has also transited into pulverizing opposite ideals without giving a fair hearing.Unveiling the greatest innovation of all time.Religion.The process that starts from concoting terribly simple parables that require creativity and are segmented,targeted and positioned very precisely to each age group.Commercialized through scriptures and books.Here commercialisation is not pecuniary(Debatable as always) but a great market share of blind followers.Process of idolizing the natural forces into gods having human like shapes to make empathy possible among the followers was another beautiful creative spark.

Now I am not critical of the 99 % who believe in God.I dare not be.Because that goes against the principle of liberty and freedom of choice that atheism solicits but the fact of accepting everything as it was passed is something that is unnaceptable and is something like the chinese whisper.Bow your head,accept and pass on believing it to be true.Naa it doesnt work that way.It shouldnt!

Majority behold atheism as a revulsive, 'trying to be different' group.

Well.Myriad great  people who have influenced our lives have been atheists or let me be a little more bold and say Darers(Uh,is there a word like that?Well anyways you got what I want to say).Alert,I dont mean that conformists have been doing nothing.

All thinking men are atheists said Ernest Hemingway.Well I am not an enthusiast of generalisations but still atheism and genius do have some positive correlation for sure.Thomas Jefferson,Sigmund Freud,Benjamin Franklin,George Washington,Abraham Lincoln,Roosevelt,Karl Marx,Ayn Rand,Aristotle,Albert Einstein,Thomas Edison,Galeilio,Stephen Hawking and oodles of others among the distinguished lot.Well,wonder what they would have been known for if they had limited themselves by the society,the church and other religious institutions.Wonder where we would have been.

 

Lets have two famous quotes now.

 

Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

 

The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.— Ferdinand Magellan

 

However I think that people have been too tough on christianity as such because of its much more traceable roots.The church has become a generic to fallacy.

Religion is good if it is kept simple,infact thats a common rule.An open house to discuss common problems.

Personally,I am of the point of view that religion and god were created because of the human inclination to believe in hierarchy and the comforting factor that there is someone who is watching you all the time and will be there for you if you call him/her earnestly.This soothes the fear in the human mind.FEAR.The cardinal ominous antecedent on which all hopes and beliefs are built upon.Human mind has always gravitated towards safety and security.What better manifestations than God and Religion.

Todays world is circumscribed by expectations,competition and misery that it becomes all the more essential for people to blame it on circumstances and fate and thus resign to the fact that everything was according to the eternal plan.But then todays world has also made people ask as to why there is so much misery if the god stood for goodness.

''Brave New World'' sums it up aptly -

"chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and

neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You

can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices."

Hence the need to go through the path of least resistance.Hence the vice.

GOD BLESS YOU ALL!!

 

29 comments:

Sam said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sam said...

Insightful. Impressed man!
\m/ RESPECT.

All I'd like to say here is gods are nothing but a fragment of our fears garnished with a whole lot of imagination.

Aparna (Life Takes) said...

i'm an agnostic to be precise

but it is good to believe that there is a higher power to which people fear so that justice stays grounded.

Anonymous said...

I strongly beleive that being a good person is the best religion one can follow.

pooja said...

Must say that You have presented the idea very well,..Without a bias.
Most of us wouldn’t take the pain to think beyond what has been passed onto us…as u said its more easy to accept things as they as rather than become a non-conformist .
We choose our truths based on convenience most times…
This attitude has today made religion and God an un healthy commercialized concept….wish we all were atheists rather than being so obsessed with god … and the world would have been a better place to live in.

Sid Dhar said...

I will second what cutestangel said... If you are good,you don't need God.
I believe, the higher power people talk about was invented so that unruly and bad guys could be controlled. It was a sort of deterrence to the mess that people created back then.
If u read the holy scriptures, behind every word, there is a hidden meaning, which tries to make us follow the right path.

A very nicely written post. Keep it up.

ArUn raFi said...

seems only atheists r readin my blog..none s contradicting!!
@ aparna
agnosticism is not an answer..u either r here or there..but then again evryone s entitled to believe in whatever he/she wants.
@cutest angel
best religion one can follow is listening to oneself.
@ pooja
havin only atheists is too idealistic.u and i know tht its nt possible.bt somewhere having conformists and religion has created a certain sort of abrasion that has led to positive ramifications.other wise some great philosophers wouldnt have written anythin if everyone were atheist..
but yeah truly agree to the fact tht
''This attitude has today made religion and God an un healthy commercialized concept''
@sidharth
''If u read the holy scriptures, behind every word, there is a hidden meaning, which tries to make us follow the right path.''
yeah true..there are a lot of meaning tht has to be unearthed from these books..but somewhere deep inside a lot of truth has been fabricated to an irrecoverable extent also..but yeah its like two sides concept..

Anonymous said...

In the process of loving god we forget to love ourselves. The moment we start loving man gods will face a absolute joblessness.
The idea of gods and religion spreads more hatred than any other mass movement, ideological/otherwise.

If we were to count the number of deaths caused by religious wars I believe they'll outnumber the number of deaths caused by first and second world war put together.

The primary problem is the difficulty in acceptance of the idea that man is a savage, and in the process of taming him we resort to abstract ideas of religion.

That a kid is born as an atheist is a rather hollow claim. For unless, his fears are eliminated and eyes opened to the spirit of free inquiry, his fears will force him to kneel and worship some fear. Consider early men, they were atheists much like our babies, but when they couldn't explain how lightning struck, they started worshiping lightning and rain, when they couldn't explain conception they started worshiping women.

What is required is a two pronged social change wherein idea of love of man is coupled with the spirit of inquiry.

And that it is because of Gods we have philosophy is again a hollow claim,
Eliminating Gods does not eliminate philosophical problems, it eliminates religious/theological problems.
~ Albert Camus
Moreover metaphysical/pataphysical questions and answers do not lead us anywhere, we merely run around in circle after circle, without reaching a conclusion, the best example are the likes of Aparna here, agnostics, 2000or more years questioning about God, it hasn't lead us anywhere, we're still at square one!
Cheers
Idiot at Large

Adisha said...

I really liked the content, as am always interested in hearing what atheists have to say. :)

Myself, having lost faith once and then found it again in a different form, am kinda neutral now.

One point though. Hope you don't mind. I wish you'd spaced out your paragraphs a bit more and worked on the appearance of the blog. It seems Kinda haphazard now, and it's really trying on the eye to read with the different fonts, colors and no proper spacing between content.

The appearance doesn't do justice to the content which is incredible !!!

Keep it up

Cheers,
adisha

ArUn raFi said...

@ adisha
hey thanks a lot fr ur suggestion..i dont know wat happened..ws perfect till the time i posted..the it all went hay wire..
thanks a lot fr pointing tht out specifically..will change tht..

aninda said...

hey nice work...loved the whole tht process

Dan* said...

Regedit stands for Registry Editor.
Firewall has nothing to do with it will work !

ok i made the post easier now. check
Change Title Of Windows Media Player

Adisha said...

Hi,

Just came by chance to see if you'd deleted my comment ;) :)) and was elated by what I saw.

Looking awesome now !!! :)

Keep writing ...

Cheers,
adisha

ArUn raFi said...

@dope
"That a kid is born as an atheist is a rather hollow claim."

it is a proven fact tht children are the most creative ones..infact more than 80 % of creativity is lost in the next few years..because they have lesser inhibitions,infact none at all and are not biased and are insanely curious..
so wen i say tht all children are atheists and would be so if religion wasnt inculcated i mean tht the questioning and curiosity is cut off slowly like akin chinese torture..
and the lack of curiosity lead them to believe tht FEAR can be overcome only by pleasing the source and hence the cults..lightning,trees,hills and mountains among many..

@ adisha
thanks a lot adisha..

Anonymous said...

Rafi Sahab we don't live in a utopian world, like you pointed out, and if I interpreted you correct, curiosity is killed at a tender age and fear allowed to grow, and hence we worship our fears.
That was what I meant when I said children aren;t atheists, our world cannot afford to have em and therefore they inevitably become theists.
The argument of children being atheists looses significance thus, because we're talking of the society and they are a part of it.
And change your theme, it doesn't do justice to your writing and above all its a torture for eyes, strange contrasts.

ArUn raFi said...

@ dope
i guess u agree to the fact tht we arent encouraged to question..if we were we would have had a much open way of thinking..and tht is especially prevalent in our indian society where we are not supposed to question what was passed on to us..sacrosanct..
infact budhism challenges that if science proves any budhist concepts wrong they will change accordingly..
now wen i say tht children are atheists..we need to see in a much broader frame..i mean tht they do not take anything as it is..and tht is what we need to encourage..the spirit of questioning and not taking it in an offensive manner tht discourages the curosity in them..

Vinayak said...

nice blog

Anonymous said...

I believe that was what I said in my first comment, that we ought to encourage a spirit of free inquiry. Glad that you agree with me!

Unknown said...

well Nice Idea Dude....
very well written
Keep up the good work.

Cheers
kunal

Anonymous said...

"Be good, do good" all religion points out the basic good things u need to do as a human .. rest is all build up !!

ArUn raFi said...

@ dope
hey..now no word plays..my basic idea of sayin tht children are born atheists leads to the idea of encouragement of questioning and nt takin anythin fr granted..thts it..
and u were nt satisfied with tht line..
now if u say tht thts wat u also meant in the first response then whr s th need of questioning th statemnt itself eh?

PhilO♥ said...

Hey!
Lovely post. Really interesting.
Nice blog :)

NeoDharmar said...

I'm out of words to say just how well you've expressed your idea. Not all would do this with such ease.

It might be that God wanted me not to post this comment. I got my comp switched off on its own when I was typing this comment. :O. The people should accept the faith they want to follow of their own accord and if that's forced upon them, it's just not the way right faith's got to be. I'm impressed with your idea. May God bless you.. lol


Cheers,
Gopsay

Srini said...

nice post...keep rocking..

PhilO♥ said...

Nah Nah. Its just that I don't really know what to comment. i mean, someone does not like it or something like that, you know! :) so, dont mind it !
Thanks for viewing my blog :D
You Rock Dude!! ♪♫♪♫

Anonymous said...

good one rafi!
but again how much ever we discuss this,no one is sure bout the truth!i mean ,like many believe in god and many believe there is no such thing as god! everyone have their own beliefs, and guess no one can prove if there is an higher power which exists ..likewise we cant say there is nothin like tht..
the best way to go about in life is to be good nd do good!!
neways a gr8 post!
this is some topic which we can go on talking about without an end to it!!
cheers mate!!

ArUn raFi said...

@karthi
hey thanks a ton fr dropping by.
yeah we can go on and on about this topic but the crux of the problem is nt atheism and conformism bt the lack of encouragement to the spirit of inquiry.

Anonymous said...

yea true!!

sourav said...

thanks for suggesting me to read this post.for me my god is time and hardwork.no one can challenge it. yay atheism rocks.

www.absurd-stories.blogspot.com