“Reasonable” Religion

More often than not, there have been questions asked about religion, if god exist or not, if he exists, what exactly does the invisible supernatural power do, and more importantly, if the religion proposed by him/her is reasonable or not. So, I just thought of writing something which proves how much reasonable religion is. Being an Indian, I see mainly Hindus, Christians and Muslims around me. So, let us ponder a bit about the origins of these religions here, and see how reasonable they are.

Let me start with a disclaimer note here. People who feel offensive need not read this, as the contents are definitely going to be offensive. The below content is my view point (clubbed with some other statements which I got from internet). Some of the facts stated might be wrong, but those are the stories I heard when I grew up.

As most of us know, the story of Christians started with god creating man on the sixth day of the 7-day long process. After a while, he created woman from a part of his body. Reasonable indeed, creation of universe in 7 days, and woman from a part of man’s body. Now, comes the funnier part. These 2 nudists, took dietary advice from a talking snake, had sex, blamed the snake for the sex, leading god to curse the snake, so that it loses it legs (along with its vocabulary skills), explaining why it crawls now, just making the “hiss” sound. Charles Darwin must be stunned to see his theory of evolution travelling on a reverse gear!

Now, coming to the origin of Islam, one of the youngest religions. Some say, Islam took off from Christianity, and for them the above story might suffice. Some others believe that God forgave Adam and Eve, and sent them down from heaven to earth (may be to have more sex). Wow, that makes life interesting right, another place (so called “heaven”), other than earth to have sex! And according to the majority, God existed before Prophet Mohammed did, and prophet was just a literal translator of what the god said. So, god gave this book to the angel Gabriel, who travelled from heaven to earth (in the reverse direction), and gave this to Prophet Mohammed, who just noted down the points in Arabic. Quite reasonable!

Being brought up (not born, but brought up) as a Hindu, I have countless similar “reasonable” stories about Hinduism as well. However, I will focus on some of the important stories. In one scripture, you have this young girl who wanted to have a child at any cost. Imagine who all made this happen! First in the queue was none other than “Sun”. Yeah, what we call today as a star filled with Hydrogen and Helium apparently was not filled with the same gases those days. I hope you noticed it, Mr. Galilieo, Copernicus and Kepler! Now, the next members up in the queue to do the same “stuff” were “death”, “wind” and so on. There are other scriptures in which another god steps on a stone, turning it to a beautiful lady, another one where god disguises, comes to earth as fish, tortoise, a kid who stamps on an emperor to send him deep beneath the earth, and what not! Again, very very reasonable! 

Most of us in the present generation, when we grow old enough, do not believe these stories. However, most of us believe that god exists, and religions are good enough. But just think of what all happened because of the so called religion. Christian crusades, honor killing, human and animal sacrifices,  Spanish colonization of Latin America and slaughtering their tribes and tearing down temples to build churches, attempted annihilation of the Jews by Hitler, the war between Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, suicide bombings, circumcision of little boys, to state a few!

I will conclude with a statement which I saw in internet yesterday. Know “how to think” rather than “what to think”. For the same reason, I am stopping this here abruptly, go ahead and think!