I’ve nursed this idea of having a BLOG for a veeeery loooong time. Everytime something happens in my areas of interest, I feel the urge to pen down my thoughts. The only reason I did not do so (until now) is because I felt I could not summon the discipline to write on a regular basis.
But something has snapped…. The massacares in Mumbai have made a deep cut within me which has triggered me to write – even if it turns out that I cannot keep up this fervor for too long.
I have long held that religion is a corrupt and intellectually defunct practice. The fact that almost every religion makes fantastical claims about our origin and our destiny without a shred of supporting evidence is reason enough to deride it. But when it not only permits but actually mandates mindless bloodshed on this scale, I feel not only derisive but downright contemptuous towards it.
I feel particularly incensed when I hear the old line trotted out that “Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by the extremists who prey upon the misguided”.
BULLSHIT!
Religion is generally not in the peace business and Islam in particular has the least credibility in the peace-department. Islam is specifically about submission, subjugation and surrender of individual freedom, individual dignity and indeed individuality itself. The whole doctrine rests on the subordination of the self to the will of Allah And what is Allah’s will? That you lead your life according to the dictates of a semi-literate bedouin who “recited” his (plagiarized) “revelations” 1400 years ago which were compiled into a book-form decades after he died.
This is the source of wisdom – nay morality – for a billion of our fellow-humans. That, it claims to be immutable, irrevocable and final word of GOD says a lot about the abject shallowness of GOD itself (or is it Himself)?
So long as we entertain (and thus grant legitimacy to) the notion that being devout is somehow a morally superior trait, we will continue reap the rotten fruits of our idiocy. So long as we shy away from confronting the core-problem by conjuring vapid distinctions between religion and religosity, we will be at the receiving end of religion and religosity.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Islam, Religion
