Religion

NOTA BENE: If you are reading this, read it to the end. A little knowledge is dangerous :-) I am deeply indebted to Harish for his thoughtful insights, guidance and source material in my quest.

Ram once remarked , "Hinduism is a free religions. There are no obligatory rituals. Infact, its a generic code of life. Islam and Christianity on the other hand give importance on umpteen rituals, the church/mosque and the priests.. why so ?"

A few days back, I was back in office after Iftar (break-fast ?;-)) and browsing without any directions, what so ever. I happened to visit a site called www.free-minds.org. The article I read was Theft . Its about the so called punishment of 'chop his hands, if he is a thief'. In 15 minutes flat, I realized , the horror of Interpretation. Whilst the Quran means 'Cut his resources, and make him work to repay the stolen property', todays Islamic governments blindly follow 'Chop his hands!'. A little more research and I found out that most of the rituals followed today are baseless and never mentioned in the Code Book of Islam!..

1) Prayer, its format, its timings .. (5 times ? Arabic - NO!!)
2) Punishment for theft (cut his hand ? - NO!!)
3) Punishment for adultery (stone to death - blasphemous!!)
4) Dress code (black veil ? - Never .. )
and many more ... What i realized was that every little thing which had poked my consciousness when i did them was a man made rule .

How did these rules come into existence ? By a clever technique called Hadith or Sunna, which is supposedly the life of the prophet. Start reading any hadith .. anyone would be immediately filled with doubt .. (Mr X friend of Y, the follower of Z, heard from Mr A, that he saw Mr B telling to Mr C, that Mr C saw the prophet ...) See the lineage ?! This is because such rules never existed during the time of the prophet and was thought up the Religious leaders almost 7 generations after his death ! What a mind job ?! People follow it blindly today without any questions ....

Any story of unbelievable acts / magic / warewolves ... or special effects are human additions, be it to the Quran/Hadith , the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita ...

Then I came to know about something , which struck me like thunder. It is widely believed that there is only one version of Quran and that God himself has vowed to protect it. Are there actually two versions - Hafz and Warsh ? with minor changes in letters ,words .. There are also other versions like Tashkant Quran.
The Bottom line is .. there are different versions of all religious books, they are only aimed at making the world a better place, but making people do the right thing. ie as long as you dont cause any hardships to your fellow beings and live in harmony with nature! The rest is Man created propaganda about GOD , Heaven , hell and all.

Heaven is a concept which i was very confused about from the very beginning. If i have everything i want, would i be happy ? How do we define happiness without sorrow ? Quote from MATRIX

AGENT SMITH
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.

If you argue that my state of being in heaven would be quite different from what i am now, how do i then relate my present being to that state ? I mean how would i remember or recognize my previous state in this worldly world ? Interesting , Quantum Physics seems to have a much better definition of heaven. I have mentioned this at the end of this blog.

I think that Islam and Christianity have been affected by a common plague - The glorification of their messengers (jesus/mohammed) and power of attorney for the church/mosque/priests! Just like what the protagonist in STIGMATA writes on the wall in hebrew , and further speaks out when possessed.
Frankie [in the Italian voice of Paolo Alameida, a dead priest]: The messenger is not important.
This message has been repeated over the ages ! The messenger is not important , the message is !! Religions are , but for peaceful coexistance . Its not for glorification of messengers, priests, rituals or god himself!

One dialogue from the Matrix makes most sense -
MORPHEUS:
You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

And I have experienced this personally. Any questions on rituals ... they debate for some time saying Quran is a book of signs and need further human explanation !
While Quran says its complete, clear and simple !
and then they give up, saying .. "I am not the all knowing, i follow what my forefathers did!", Which exactly is rebuked by the Quran -
And if they are told to follow what God has granted, they say ‘nonetheless we follow what we found our forefathers on’ What if their forefathers do not understand a thing and are not guided (2:170)
They are so hopelessly dependant on the system that they will fight to protect it!