Why I will not start a religion

If I do start a religion, I will base it on humane values, justice, fairness, kindness, and faith. Why? Because every religion we have is based on those same high principles.

The reason it doesn’t work is because most people lack imagination.

Let us assume I did start a religion. I decree that my followers must help each other selflessly and be kind to all people in general. I pronounce all men and women equal. I forbid violence and make it a point to underline this.

That should take care of everything, I think. Then I live my life and die when my time is up.

Time passes. Society changes. Language grows richer. Aliens make first contact with us. They start living amongst us.

This is when a devoted follower of mine loses it. He brings it to everyone’s notice that I said men and women (he jabs his finger at the words and does a wild dance to emphasise his point) and never made any mention of any other creature. He concludes that aliens are evil and he is allowed to kill them in my name.

Many laugh him off. Many lap it up because they were bored of their lives anyway. They want to punish someone for it instead of making an attempt to improve things.

So they form a club and call it defenders of the faith or something. Upon those who oppose their dumbness, they make accusations of blasphemy, quoting my divine origins (I was born in a government hospital in Cuttack, you dumbfucks!).

So there. I don’t think I will start a religion. I can’t stand the idea of perfectly sane people cursing me to hell centuries from now just because their neighbours have no imagination.

Open letter to the Hindu fundamentalist

In my home state of Orissa, in the last few weeks, Christians have been threatened, attacked, raped and murdered by people calling themselves Hindu. I want this to be an open letter to those murderers and criminals.

Let me get this straight. You are honourable members of the Hindu faith who feel violated by Christian intruders' attempts to turn honest and god-fearing Hindus (such as yourself) to their faith. That's it, right?

May I ask you which tenets of Hinduism ask you to maim, murder, and humiliate unarmed people in order to defend the faith you so claim to love? Where in all of those oft-quoted religious texts does violence against the unarmed find mention as one of your weapons?

Are you sure it is your religion that is making you do this? Are you sure you are not doing this because you are a gutless, illiterate, psychopathic criminal? Are you sure you are not doing this because you enjoy the killing and the raping? Or maybe you know all this and still choose to blame it on your religion. Religions don't talk back, do they?

You decide to go do some manhunting. You find there is no way you can do all that and still have claim to residence in civilised society. So you rev up the rhetoric and call forth other criminals like yourself. You hide behind political organisations and religious bodies and do your killing conveniently. Anyone who opposes you automatically becomes a faithless traitor (or to use a more fashionable phrase, a 'pseudo-secularist').

Here comes another crucial part of your motivation. You just want to hurt. You are angry at a lot of things in your life. But not enough to fight. So you carefully choose people who can't fight back. Going out and out criminal will cause you to go against the law. You don't want that. Joining the army includes considerable risk to life and limb. So that is out of the question as well. Why not take it out on the helpless and the weak? If someone raises their voice, you can always play the 'defender of faith' card, right?

That, right there, is your little game.

Tell you what... I am done with you. From what I have read, Hinduism is hard to define. We don't worship one god, nor many. We don't abhor violence, neither do we embrace it. But if it comes right down to the dirty matter of choosing sides, you can count me out of your little criminal club.

You and I are not the same. If you are a Hindu, I am not. I wish I could claim Hinduism as my own private little garden, but then I would have to breathe the same air as you scum. I would rather remain faithless then have anything to do with you.

What is God?

God is a word. This word is used to imply a concept. This concept states that there is a force higher and greater than all mortal consciousness and all individual elements of nature.

According to various accounts, this force is said to be the origin of things. It is also said to possess the power to reward, punish, and judge actions of those that it has created.

I believe reality is not objective. The world is different things to different people. Hence, trying to grasp the God concept using traditional logic is futile.

God, to me, is you.

I am a mind. There is a part of me called the sub-conscious. You have it too. All our sub-conscious minds put together make a super-conscious mind. That is God to me.

The super-conscious mind is not conscious in a way we would understand. But it lives anyway. It is the sum total of all of us. The only way we can access it is through each other.