Captures my increasing frustration with religions. There is no difference between a religious fundamentalist, and someone claiming to be moderate. As my friend puts it in this post, when you treat/perceive another person differently because he/she is from another religion, thats the end of it. Post below from The Indian Enlightenment One year ago my reaction to religion was one of amused tolerance. Figured that it didnt really make much difference whether a man believed the moon was made of cheese or not, as long as he wasnt a physics teacher or an ambitious procurement manager for a dairy firm. But the blindness of educated Indians to the murders in Gujarat changed my mind. I now think that religious bias has the ability to completely disable the thinking process of otherwise intelligent people such that they can rationalize practically any travesty of justice away. It diverts thinking resources away to pursuits and arguments that dont solve the real problems we face like poverty, violence, environmental degradation and the inevitable devastating droughts as the river feeding glaciers of the Himalayas dry up. We need to bring humanity together to solve these real problems. Not put them in perpetual ideological opposition to each other. I cant think of a worse crime than killing innocent children. Theres an Indian word that I personally find a little bit more powerful personally than innocence - masoomiyat. Theres no justification possible. And so the time has come to say things that will piss many people off. These extremists are not separate from our society. They have emerged from the moral context we have created as a society. They are not twisted distortions of our values. They are just magnifications of it. Deciding not to marry someone outside your own religion is a minor crime. A magnified version of that crime is murdering the innocent child of someone from a different religion. These may sound like crazy comparisons but its the magnitude that is the difference not the crime.. the crime is separation. The crime is division. The crime is segregation. The crime is turning a human into a representative of a tribe or religion. And when you turn a human into something lesser then the crime is, at the most fundamental level, one of dehumanization. These sorts of crimes can only be constructed on the edifice of religious and tribal divides. And both these constructs have shown themselves incapable of handling the challenges of a modern multi-ethnic, multi-religious global age. Religion itself must die and be replaced with Humanism. So that real problems can be solved. And so that the children can live.
Posted on: Thu, 08 May 2014 17:13:29 +0000
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