Perpetually Perplexed

I was feeling little bit adventurous. Instead of just visiting stack overflow and developers website for my daily doubts in android, I used google. This time to ask Google ajja about religion. I just asked why religion. There were hundred of pages from both sides. Telling me why religion is good for us and why it is bad for us. Like all of us, I only selected some pages who supported my already biased viewpoint. viz why religion does more harm than good. Can you guess the first page with that argument? Beleifnet! And then there were others.  I wondered why are there no religious texts where God convinces the bad person or rather a person doing bad deeds to become a better person, thus ending evil. Why should it always be that God will punish the bad people by death sentence? According to religion, the remote control of all our actions and feelings lies with HIM. Why does he not nip these bad plans in the bud rather than starting a war later? Our children when youn...

I think the problem with us is that we pray to God in a language we do not understand. Does he understand. He must. Or else he may take the help of Google translate. See, all our holy books - we have so many of them, are written in Sanskrit. How many of us can read these books and understand these. To make matters worse many of these are in verse. When our knowledge of Sanskrit does not get beyond gachchati gachchataha gachchanti, how can we read and understand these shlokas? We can not. So we do not read. And tell our swamijis and gurus to tell the gist of the holy books to us. They do tell us. But they tell their own interpretations. In some religions - their scriptures are translated into their own languages. Any one can read and understand. But do we have Vedas in Kannada? Or Hindi? Apparently we do. So says google baba. But google devotees and religious devotees are two different sets who do not intersect. So to come back to the problem. We have too many religious books (ju...

I was reading about how sufi shrines are being attacked by some wahhabi muslims in Sind. Their objection is these praying to dead people is the practice borrowed by Hinduism. That made me wonder. All these prophets preached against idol worship. Budhdha, Jesus etc. But what is the result? Instead of idol of God, Christians worship idol of Mary, Jesus, Cross. The reason could be because when we want to pray, it is difficult to pray to a God without any attributes. But tell us that, God has blue color, a peacock feather in his hair, a flute in his mouth and a chakra in his hand, we happily see such a God and pray to him. We can not imagine "niraakara" brahma. So if some one tells us do not pray to idol of God, we take some other symbol and pray to it. Am I trying to defend idol worship of Hinduism? But Hindus do not think so. Because for them I am the godless atheist!

I happened to see a scene from the film "Angels and Demons". A priest was telling a scientist "I know son. Religion is flawed. Religion is flawed because we are flawed". But I beg to differ with his view point here. There are so many other reasons - almost infinite reasons, why religion is flawed. But you don't want my reasons. Because you know that more than an atheist, I am an anti religious person. Almost. My opinion is, religion, politics, science, technology, books all these are tools we have invented ourselves for our convenience. They are supposed to help us, help us along with other things in making us more intelligent, more understanding, more compassionate and better human beings. If they are not doing it, throw them away. Do I hear many sacred (?) books, TVs, LCD, LED, TVs, ipads, ipods , smart(?) phones, laptops crashing to million pieces? Wishful thinking!!

We Indians, specifically Hindus are well known for our broadmindedness and religious tolerance. Have you heard otherwise? Well, the intolerant ones are misguided people. Ignore them. Let us see the reason behind this. We are polytheistic. Every morning, we pray to many gods, by showing arathi to many idols. I have 5 of them in our puja room. And I sing (I think I am singing, but neighbors don't ) hymns (of course in Sanskrit) of at least 10 gods every morning. Why not two more? Along with Shree Ganeshaya namaha, Shree Vishnuve namaha etc, I can easily add Shree Kristuve namaha and Shree mahammadaya namaha. Not so difficult, see. And not only that. Each of us will our own mane devaru (house god??) and grama devatha (village god??) etc. And we accept another person whose mane devaru is not Ganapathi but Venkatramana. So we can accept people whose God is Jesus or some other. We should and we had been, all these years. Until recently, when Ram, the new form of intolerant Ram came ...

Religions and religious leaders are very powerful. They are very good in changing the opinion of the people and convincing people. (Look at the way the poor writers were sent packing from JLF. Felt really ashamed of calling myself an Indian) Don't you think they can and should use it to help mankind? One field where they can help is controlling is religious fundamentalism. Like we teach our children that it is wrong to fight with other children. Argue but no hurting each other. Look at another analogy here. We may have lot of differences with our neighbors. We may not like the way they walk, they eat or even they breathe. But what do we do? We laugh at them when we are sure they can not hear us. But when we meet them face to face, we do not show any of these feelings. We bring out our best how are you's and talk about other stuff. We do this because we want to be good neighbors. If we can be good neighbors, we can even be good religious people, isn't it? We don't...

I did not know this concept of "mane devaru" until we shifted to a town called Haliyal. We had a friend pillu. Of course he was very short and used to be always in our house and used to call mom jayavra taayi (jaya's mother). Once he told my uncle that their god is Mangesh and asked  uncle who is his god. Uncle replied our god is kudresh. (manga in kannada is monkey and kudre is horse ) .      But even funnier things were happening in Haliyal. During ramadan times our friends used to tell that such and such person was sick. So he had prayed and got better. So he will be carrying - hold your breath - alla devaru on his head in this festival. So this person would surely carry the god during ramadan procession. And some others both Hindus and Muslims would walk on burning coal during this time . I don't think they would have never thought they were doing something for communal harmony. And the furniture price was economical there. So our grand mother who ha...

I am proud to be Hindu. Well I am confused atheist. Sometimes I do not believe in God. Some times I will be hurriedly saying namah shivaya namah shivaya. Some other times I laugh at others for their orthodoxy, But anyway I have a firm belief that " God might be there. He might even be good. But he should not be framed in ANY RELIGION.". Then why do I suddenly say, that I am proud to be Hindu. Did pro rss people succeed in convincing me about the goodness of their ideology? No. That is not the case. See, Hindu religion is good because, it is open. Open as in Linux operating system. Anybody can read it, modify it, distribute it. Comment it. Still be alive without being sentenced to death by. (Remember Rushdie). You have the holy books. You interpret it according to your ways. You follow the religion according to your mode. My neighbor may go to temple everyday and stand in the queue for Sankashti. I may never go to temple saying that god is in my heart. (At least he is ...

I started the day with an argument. What is new about that. Nothing. Well, let me rephrase it. As usual me and my spouse started the day with an argument - over love jihad. He complained - you were telling that in Mangalore they attack youngsters it they talk to a muslim boy or girl, now see what has been happening!! I answered I doubt its truthfulness and also for me this is not an important issue at all. I do not have any religion. So religion is immaterial to me. Converting a girl to muslim in the name of Religion is better than attacking them, or beating them etc according to me. Really, whether to believe in god, I am doubtful about. But religion, a big no no. May be religion is a protocol to interact with God . But the amount of violence and hatred which are its side effects are terrible. Come on, discard that protocol. think of some thing new which will bring the best in man. Nowadays  religion is becoming a way of bringing up and sanctifying all the hatred buried in hu...

Today I argued with my family members - husband and parents about why I hate Modi. Two days back I wanted to talk in my office function about religious hatred. But did not. And now I came across a blogger Indian Homemaker who has explained why she hates BJP. Like her , even I clearly remember the days when there was no religious divide in small towns, no religious violence in southern states. So don't you see who is responsible for this divide and rule. These people gained enough votes with hate propaganda against muslims. Now they have started against christians. If they believe that conversion is crime, crime enough to burn the churches and people, then what about the conversion of party these politicians do with no other motive than sticking to power. Why don't these hindutva brigade burn the politicians who have converted to BJP recently. India is a secular country. Every citizen has a right to practice any religion he wishes or not to practice any religion at all. Who are...