Sunday, December 17, 2006

What We Mean By 'Religion'?

Many people would swear in the names of their most treasured possessions about 'it'; some will fight the world for the sake of 'it'; others will embrace departure from so called mundane world to follow 'it': yeah, you guessed it right, I am talking about 'religion'. Religion, has perhaps been the most temporally persistent enigma of human civilization since the past five thousand years.
It is a strange coincidence that all the societal rules and customs made few thousand years back had very sensible causes behind their inception. Probably, religion, defined as a set of rules, customs and beliefs that a segment of a populace follows, arose from a way to make people still continue believing in themselves and in the things around them, when education, especially science was not a way to explain each and every happenning round the globe.
But this is unfortunate that the good motive to define and reach a set of rules as a religion for the better interest of mankind, did not last long. As the human civilization grew, so did grow man's greed for status and power. The scene remains true even today when while one set of people tries to exploit others in the name of religion, the other set knowingly or unknowingly prefers to get exploited or love to dwell in some fool's paradise.
I disbelieve in this concept of religion or perception of a set of defined rules which are set by some human-identified 'God' or a set of stone idols. To me, religion sticks to a set of defined rules, but those rules are the ones which are dictated by the 'self'. The sole philosophy of all the religions of thw world is how to find the true 'self' in oneself. And leaving aside the accessory rules and customs of those religions, I completely agree with them. And I believe the road to discovering the true self in ourselves is to know our set fo defined rules in life. And that 'constitutes' his or her individual 'religion'.
With a cohesive society disintegrating towards being more individualistic, and where we say "... room for ourselves" and "... live and let live", the notion of 'personified religion' sounds to me the best option towards a more 'logical' living and as an insight to the greater meaning of our lives.

1 comment:

Nikesh Rathi said...

Yup ... I agree.

But move towards 'personified' religion might be too idealistic, given that most of the changes are resisted, especially in field of religion and social customs (which I believe are off shoot of the 'accessories' part of religion) where barring few places, it is often encouraged to be somewhat orthodox-ish and to maintain the status quo.

But with changing times, can hope for it !