Religion & Rationality: The Great Divide

It is said that man first started believing in “a higher power” when he came out of his cave and saw storms, and lightning, and hail, and other actions of the weather, and how these changes were completely random and affected him healthwise and otherwise, with him having no control over them. Our rationality, sensibility and reasoning have been skewed from ancient times, and common sense has never been common, as too many examples in world history prove. One fine example of blind belief in an idea is the belief of certain South American tribes that the sun appearing on the earth was a miracle that needed sacrifice on a daily basis to keep going. Their elaborate rituals of sun worship, and equally elaborate and gory sacrifices show how blind faith kills all sense of understanding of the nature of reality. The belief in a higher power made people see everyday life as something that should be filled with irrational acts, powerful spectacles, omens, symbols, and interpretations, instead of accepting their lives with what it really was, and trying to make it better. People started attributing their successes to a higher power, and their failures to themselves, and invented the notion of this being a punishment bestowed on them by the perceived higher power for some deed that was widely accepted as below human conduct. Self-analysis has always been part of our nature, and is partly bred by fear of the unknown, for we are forever bracing ourselves to meet the future, but belief without any real basis makes us invent rules and norms that have no basis themselves, and then follow these rules and norms, again for no proven reason. But the sad truth is, the multitude wins. Ten thousand people having the wrong idea gather together, agree with each other’s notions, and then set out to convert every non-believer in their ideas to copies of themselves. Blindness of perception is seen in the fact that people don’t really see these other people whom they’re converting, nor care about their lives or their happiness or sorrows, but only about their beliefs. They say we’re all bound by our beliefs. It’s more likely that we’ve bound ourselves against progressive thinking with the bonds of ancient ideas and views that are considered de rigueur for a blameless, clean society. However, all this is a community act, with individuals forever in doubt about what they believe, but trying to force a patina of faith into themselves by following the ‘path’ laid down by their holy books, their preachers and other religious teachers, their parents, and all other figures of authority that they’d pay attention to.

A way to understand things anew is to stop believing, to perform the actions that are not considered “proper” as per your religion’s views, with a clear understanding of the consequences of these actions. Religion is supposed to be a guide to leading our lives, but our lives are guided by our instincts and not by rules written down by people thousands of years ago. Yet people attribute their sense of ‘meaning in life’ to the teachings laid down in these works, and propagated by these authorities. In an age when everyone *should* be disillusioned as soon as possible, in order to really understand the world and succeed in it, people want to follow a “moral path” that is supposed to lead them to an afterlife that is so much more important that one need not pay too much attention to one’s present reality, only meditate on God and one’s passage to heaven, and wait for death. This negates the whole idea of existence and survival, and makes us one with plants, vegetables, and other inanimate life forms that have no active life, and only grow internally and die. The material world is not necessarily pleasant to live in, but each one of us has been bestowed with enough perception to find a place in it, and grow in it. But rather than expand our conscious, we’d limit it by interpreting every experience in religious and spiritual frame, and ascribing a degree of guilt and personal redemption to everything.