Beyond redemption

The war of and over religions has spilled into cyberspace. The Internet hosts some 2.8 billion pages of “god”, 487 million pages of “religion”.

The war of and over religions has spilled into cyberspace. The Internet hosts some 2.8 billion pages of “god”, 487 million pages of “religion”. You get evangelists, you browse through individual seekers, you meet religious organisations. With so many sites, you might think that finally man is expressing his inmost Truth, sharing his intimate Journey as he evolves to godhood.

Quite the contrary. The Internet has become yet another arena for inter-religious warfare, a race, a lobbying point. As crude, as unsophisticated as any other propagandist group attempting to influence policy or minds. One group of websites claims that Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion; that “in the last five years, the number of mosques in this country (the US) has increased from 843 to about 1,300”. Another group says that this is untrue and attempts to lower its dignity by highlighting its dominance in “the third world where birth rate is high”, and where “Muslims are killed if they convert to Christianity”.

Who cares? Not you, not I, not that road-raged driver, not the new recruit in the next cabin…no one whom you know. I find this race the reflection of a crude group of minds. It’s not The Da Vinci Code that needs to be banned; it’s religion itself. For more excesses have happened in its name than for any other (ig)noble cause. What began as a parallel social structure to help the mortal man find his soul, has been taken over by the very people who devised other organisations to pull power away from the masses, make them feel weak and in need of being governed. In the case of religion, the artificially created need is to belong to this sect or that, be a follower of this guru or that using faith as currency. Trapped in this socio-religious structure, the free man becomes a slave who is unable to discover the power, the vastness, of his own divinity.

Over millennia, religion has been given enough chances to prove its utility. Having fought over this god (point of view) or that (another point of view), it’s time to finally decide what’s holy, sacred or to be revered. Religion as a vehicle for spiritual growth broke down the day it was created. All these battles and their no-gain results have conclusively demonstrated that if there’s something beyond redemption it is this putrefying organisation of religion itself.

gautam.chikermane@expressindia.com

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