Stop being humanly religious and instead
be religiously human.
Religion, at best, is the path, not the
destination. If religion could have helped us find God, all of us, you, me,
everyone, should have met God and got Her autograph. Why is it that only few
have seen God, fewer have experienced God, only a miniscule have KNOWN God and
maybe, just a handful, know that THEY ARE God? That’s because, a large mass of
humanity is religious, while a minority is spiritual.
To be sure all religions, and there are
over 300 of them globally, champion God-realization. And promise the path to
God. Not that they are wrong. But we, the followers, have become so obsessed
with the path, not even the journey mind you, that we have come to imagine that
being religious IS knowing God. To be religious is to be dogmatic, persistently
ritualistic, about a faith. The only faith worth being religious about is being
human. Most of humanity, however, while obsessing over religion, has completely
forgotten what it means to be human. Take the case of Republican Jon Huntsman,
who once was in the race for the Amercian Presidential nomination. A
principal__political, not principled__charge against him was that he was
raising two adopted daughters from other religions: one a Chinese Buddhist and
the other an Indian Hindu. Does it really matter? The color of our skin and the
nature of a faith that has been__like our birth__thrust upon us, without our
asking for it, without choice to us, is not who we are. We are all human.
Period. And we are not divided by race, nationality, faith and such as we
imagine it to be. We are all one. Period. All of us have the same 5.5 liters of
blood. And it is all red in color. All of us breathe the same Life source. What
I exhale you breathe. And what you exhale I breathe. When I can breathe in what
you breathe out, and live, why can’t I raise a child that happens to have
embraced the same faith as you? If I can, why can’t Jon Huntsman? Huntsman and
his wife have seven children, including Gracie Mei, 15, who was abandoned at a
Chinese vegetable market at two months of age, and Asha Bharati, now 9, who was
left to die on an Indian village dirt road the day she was born. A hands-on
dad, Huntsman speaks to Mei in Chinese and is encouraging little Asha to learn
about and appreciate her Indian culture and Hinduism. Had Huntsman got his
party’s nomination and gone on to win the race to the White House, America
would sure have shown the world what it means to be human__not just a Democrat
or Republican.
Take also the case of a lady who is seeking
an alliance for her daughter ‘within the same faith’, despite hating, from the
bottom of her heart, the inhuman rituals of her faith that are perpetrated on
girl children__a crude form of female circumcision__because she ‘does not know
how people outside her faith are’. What would you call people who claim to be
upholders of a faith that indulges in an act of violence against girls, and
that too innocent children? We could call them terrorists. Terrorism and
terrorists don’t belong to one religion. Anyone who kills humanity, kills Life,
in physical or spiritual form, is a terrorist. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992),
American sci-fi author, puts it so aptly: “If I were not an atheist, I would
believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality
of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an
honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God,
God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.”
So true. Let me hasten to clarify that I am
neither for atheism nor against religion. I am pleading for us all to just be
human. And it begins with each one of us. We don’t have to adopt abandoned
children, if we don’t want to, to do this. We don’t have to stop practicing our
individual faiths to do this. We just have to stop clinging on to anything that
divides us__race, nationality, color or religion. Instead, let’s celebrate
being human. And let’s do that without fail, every moment of our lives, from
here on__religiously! Believe me, that’s
when you will find, just as I have, God!
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