Disclaimer: This blog post deals with thoughts in abstract and attempts to explain and condense events spanning centuries into few words and therefore, by necessity, lots of details are left out. Regardless of how it sounds, this post is not apologetic because any apology would be meaningless.
This article attempts to explain actual ideas behind origin of religion and its needs and deals in abstraction. The whole thing is very simple and very complex, both, at the same time!
The blog is divided into five parts Preface, Human Society, Animals, Human-Animals, Religion and its needs.
1) PREFACE
THE CORE TRUTHS:
1) Every human is fully conscious within and is 100% complete within at the time of his/her birth and for rest of his/her entire life.
2) Every human consciously and/or subconsciously knows and feels the presence of a superior entity that is wholly embedded within himself/herself and the core message of every single prophet that walked on the earth is to redirect humans to look within.
3) At all waking moments of his/her life, every human is capable of listening to a voice. The "Inner" Voice sounds exactly like himself/herself but he/she consciously knows that it is not his/her own self doing the talking.
I, as author of this blog, perceive all of the above three statements as self-evident and as the CORE TRUTHs. You are completely free to disagree to me so long as you agree to treat them at least as an assumption for this post. Regardless of how you choose to look at it, it forms the basis for this entire blog post and is therefore mentioned right at the start. In an event that treating them as assumption is not possible for you, you may stop reading any further and avoid wasting your time.
2) THE HUMAN SOCIETY:
Entire human society, when viewed as a single organism with own consciousness and life force, by necessity of its own survival is "parasitic" in nature. The society, as an organism consumes everything that it can, including humans. By and large, everyone (including me) in the entire human society exploits and depends on hard labor of others.
Usage of word exploit is not to be construed in its very negative, very dark sinister sense. To exploit simply means to obtain benefit from an action of another, whether or not the doer is paid as per his demands or market rates. "exploit" provides more advantages and less disadvantages to its consumer relative to its doer. Such Exploitation is recursive in nature and its impact often spans thousands of kilometers and involves people who do not even know each other and are never likely to meet.
I use hard labor of X to enrich/sustain/survive/enjoy my life experience. Thus I exploit X. Y uses my hard labor to enrich/sustain/survive/enjoy his life. Thus Y exploits me.
The human society organism can also be visualized as a large pyramid. As one climbs higher on the pyramid, he has more and more resources that are available at his disposal to be exploited. Unlike the actual pyramid, there is no real pinnacle in human society and same person are existent on many pyramids on different levels at the same time.
Let us clarify this my taking an example of a humble cup of Indian Tea that retail in most villages and cities of India at about 7-10 rupees.
To prepare an average cup of Tea, one needs a Vessel, Sieve, Dried tea leaves, water, Cooking fuel, Means to produce fire, Sugar and Milk at bare minimum. Each and every ingredient listed above in making Tea is a Product with a market of its own
All of these resources are available almost effortlessly to majority of folks at door step without paying any regard to innumerable humans and animals that may have toiled, sweated for months & years (even died) to make produce/grow those resources.
If you delve deeper, you will also see that mechanisms to produce and deliver all of these depends on many minerals prominent of which is Iron.
Recursively charting the course and rough calculations on bar napkin reveals that for a simple act such as placing an average tea cup before any person involves hard labor of approximately 1000 other living breathing humans and animals and few thousand kilometers.
If each person wanting to drink tea were to procure all of the resources on his own sweat and on his own labor, he'd be more likely to give it up since it is exceedingly difficult.
The Human society, by its very organized structure, accomplishes such difficult task with such remarkable ease that most people never even realize it.
For a human to remain a part of human society, he must be willing to exploit and be exploited. He cannot choose to exploit only or choose to be exploited only.
3) ANIMALS
Biggest and worst victims at hands of human exploitation are animals because they are simplest to exploit and possess far greater physical strength than humans. Elephants, Donkeys, Horses, Bulls/Cows, Buffalo, Rabbits, Guinea Pigs, Snakes ... Neither timid nor wild animal on Earth is spared.
Currently, research is going on in full swing trying to figure out how to use cockroaches into human service!
When the animal's physical strength or ability to produce wanes, it is simply culled and it ends up as luxury food or cheap source of protein for humans. The mock sense of human self-righteousness in this context is so deep that we call culling of useless old animals as a humane treatment because we did not liberate them and let them starve!
We teach our kids in school that "Cows give milk" sometimes without even realizing that word "give" is a very mild euphemism for actions that include impregnating cow by artificially injecting her with syrup
derived from a bull's semen every other month, depriving her calf of his share of milk, tying her legs,
muzzling her mouth with a cloth mesh, restricting her body movement by strategic placement of iron or cement poles and then forcibly extracting milk from her udder 10-20 mls per spray while she remains tied helplessly with all of her defenses are confined and rendered completely useless. After the milk extraction is done, little bit of oil is applied to the sore udders of a cow to clot any wounds that would be caused by repeated touching of human hands. Application of such oil is purely economical since it also renders cow milk-able again in few hours and avoid causing her to bleed.
Machines that do milk extraction in modern dairy are not much better from a cow's perspective even if they latch on entire udder simultaneously and finish extractions lot faster.
Animal exploitation is simple because mindset of all animals in the same species is mostly identical. If
you can figure out right amount of torture mixed with right of compassion required to have a very obedient animal, you can then reapply the same treatment to handle all of the other animals in that same species. Also, animals has to be trained only once in his lifetime.
Elephant, as a baby who used to struggle but had always failed to liberate himself from a rope that was tying his leg to small pole will stay put in one place as long as rope is put on his leg even if other end is not connected to any pole.
Horse, Bulls remain wild and untamed until their nose is pierced and a rope is passed through it. Once the wound heals and the animal is taught to respond to rope, it is set for life of servitude.
All the efforts of all the animals fulfills only 10% of needs of the Society. Other humans need
to be exploited and consumed by the Parasitic Society.
School kids are taught that "humans are social animals". Although both words "social" and "animal" are very important however more accurate statement would be that Society, as an single organism, views humans at par with animals for its exploitative potential.
However, unlike animals, Humans cannot be be trained once and exploited for rest of their natural life. Tools
that work easily with animals rarely work for long on humans. Ingenuity and innate sense of being free get into the way far too often. To complicate matters further, approach that would work for one set of humans will not work for others.
To force another human to toil for another, to make him enter into servitude is a daily task and does consume lot of energy and efforts of their masters too.
The society has attempted infinite number of tools to exploit other humans. Tools such as slavery, canes,
whips, death-threats, hunger, innumerable torture techniques all have a definitive purpose and usefulness at this level of abstraction. Poverty, famines, earth quakes and other natural disasters are also just another sources for fulfilling the Society's exploitative needs.
All of these tools are rarely this friction-free and lots of useful human energy gets wasted in administration and producing far little output as compared to animals.
5) Religion and its need:
The needs of the society are best met with the invention of religion. Religion, as a tool, meets society's needs of exploitation with least possible friction.
The foundations of religion are hinged upon two discoveries:
Discovery 1) That if a human is deprived of his sense of self-completeness (mentioned in the PREFACE above), he can be made obedient, predictable and exploitable.
Discovery 2) Humans who can be deprived of their sense of self-completeness can be made to rely on external entity and can be forced/cajoled/talked into paying no attention to his own inner voices.
For best results, the external entity needs to be abstract, unseen, unverifiable, remote and most importantly DEAD with a readily available replacement of a chosen representative.
Humans, out of his own longings for self-completeness, will be willing to pray to any external entity and obey
his commands even if it is against his own inner voice, his own inner conscience.
Regardless of which religion it is, the core aim is to generate a sense of incompleteness within humans. Innumerable beautiful statues are carved and placed outside for human eyes to feast upon. Invention of ritual for praying once in seven days OR praying five times a day amidst melodious hypnotic voices and sounds are just means to an end and to prevent a human from ever looking inwards.
At the levels of abstraction that I am dealing with in this blog post, Religion is simply a mechanism to provide a sense of identity to a group of humans and to get them to work with each other in co-operative manner and to reduce the wastage of their productive energies.
Religion, as a tool are so potent that Wars could be fought with people willing to die for some unseen merely heard of concept of God that exists outside him. It was a very powerful tool for all of the centuries.
Religion, is an contraption, invented to make humans feel that GOD is an entity that is outside his own self that he can only understand and achieve that by acting in some manner. This sense of incompleteness in turn attaches human being into the slavery.
Religion is a nose-ring for humans through which his actions or in-actions can be controlled.
Abrahamic Religions
Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) are very efficient from organizational and administrative point of view.They are efficient and easier to administer because they insistently promote idea of a singular GOD (or like entity) while doing away with all of the complications that can arise by having too many GOD like entities.
At this juncture, it is very important to point out that the idea of singular GOD is in direct contrast with what is self-evident in the nature and its abundance around us. We have infinite number of trees, birds, fruits, flowers, stars and so on.
Because of its core essence being a singular GOD, allegiance to this, as a belief, is of utmost importance. To make this palatable to a skeptic, it is endorsed with a statement that heaven exists for believers and hell for non-believers.
This is also why Conversions into any of the Abrahamic faith are rituals are a very vital necessity and of so much importance that they are worthy of being rewarded.
Lets consider Islam as an example. Islam has absolutely minimal formalities for solemnization of marriage. But, when it comes to conversion ceremony of anyone into Islam, the Proselyting Maulvi will insist that he commit such act that would be sufficiently insulting to his former religion. Depending on who the converter is, the acts prescribed may be eating of meat or kicking or breaking some thing.
If you spend few moments to meditate on what Conversion into any abrahamic religion actually means and implies, you will realize that a conversion is more of a declaration of what one chooses not to believe than what one choose to believe.
Non-Abrahamic Religions
This approach is in stark contrast to Indian and non-abrahamic and pagan religions where absolutely nothing is ever singular. I can choose to worship Sun or choose to worship Moon. All natural entities I can see are worthy recipients of someone's worship. By and large, there is nothing that is in singular. Every thing is in plural. Even plural is in plurals!
It is often said that the word "Hindu" had not existed before arrival of outsiders to India. It is also said that "Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life". As one studies it deeper and meditate on it, one will realize that word Hindu was associated with word religion only in as an after-thought.
Word Hinduism is at best a knee-jerk reactions of those attempting to explain something that they know that they can never fully explain. A Hindu person can candidly admit that he barely understands his religion and still is very comfortable with his lack of understanding.
Indian religion, by contrast do organize humans but organize them into innumerable small and overlapping groups.
As a staunch Shaivate, I can freely curse all things Vishnu and still remain Hindu and I may still end up in some divine equivalent of heaven: ShivLok.
I can be a bhakt of Shri Ram and be his avid admirer for his stance on monogamy and therefore hate the fact Shri Krishna had 16,000 wives but even then I can happily accept the statements that both Shri Ram and Shri Krishna were incarnations of Vishnu. In either situations, I may end up in Vishnu-Lok or GoLoka.
I can be a die-hard Hanuman-bhakt and hold celibacy as my life-long ideal and still can handle the statements that Hanuman is incarnation of Shiv who was willing to act as servant to Shri Ram who in his another incarnation supported both polygamy and polyandry.
Hindu can refer to Gautam Buddha and Shri Krishna as incarnations of Shri Vishnu even when the core of their teachings do not match with each other.
Hindus can not only tolerate but even applaud a Muslim praying before Ganpati even if other Muslims would want to chop such Ganpati worshipping Muslim down.
Whether I will go to some version of heaven or some version of hell has nothing to do with what I believe!
Whether I am heaven-bound or hell-bound is fully dependent on my actions
Even in stories of Ravan and Hiranyakashipu who materially harassed and fought incarnations of Vishnu were deemed worthy of being entitled to heaven. "How can this be even allowed?" is not a question that would spring to a Hindu mind.
An absolutely horrible sinner who harassed everyone he came across to in his life will go to heaven if he manages to utter word "Ram" with his last dying breath.
Hinduism can accommodate Char-dham, Dvadas jyotirlings, innumerable Shakti-peeths and many big and small holy places atop every climbable mountain! We can deal with stories of war so large that body parts of person could fall all over the country.
Naturally, when there is no central point, there is nothing to convert to and nothing to convert from. So, therefore, there are absolutely no prescribed provisions for conversion into
Conclusions and Current SCENARIO
While religion, as a tool for organization of society was great in past, it has had its share of draw backs and administratively better models such as secular philosophy and monetary systems have since been invented that fulfill the needs of society with lot lesser amount of friction
At this juncture, in a country like India, it is lot easier to transition an Abrahamic religion into a secular model but Hinduism is very hard to displace.
Unfortunately, every one of the apparent strength of Hinduism is also its hidden weakness. Anyone with deceptive intent can easily become a Sadhu, pull some cheap tricks and cheat other innocent devotees. Anyone can preach anything and make statements that are not even present. It is very common to find a one page pamphlet titled "Gita Saar" often containing assertion and statements that are nowhere to be found in Gita.
Persons like Gandhi can refer to Bhagvad Gita for being source of ideas of non-violence from it.
