Muni Tarun sagar once said that the house should be destroyed after a hundred years of its construction and then should be rebuilt. In the same way, religions should be destroyed after one thousand years. Because of a long duration of time, many junks might have made their way to the religion. So, it would be near impossibility to set all the things right. The actual meaning and intention of the religion would have lost long ago. So, the process of cleaning the unwanted aspects should always be on.
Any religion should be open to criticism. Because that’s the main thing which helps to look deep about certain aspects and clean them if needed and also helps in reaffirming the faith in the good aspects of the religion. But a few religions consider themselves to be perfect and beyond evaluation or criticism. Worse than that, they intimidate the people who criticize it and create a kind of phobia.
Hinduism which is perhaps the oldest religion of the world has faced the same. Owing to the long-presence of it, it picked up junk and some aspects of it became intolerable. Though it had some very beautiful things that no other religions had, the junk had piled up so much that it began to mask the great aspects of the religion. So, the reformers came for the rescue. They could see the problem. Many of them criticized and brought many reforms. But due to its enormity and vastness, still many junks has remained. But, one appreciable fact is that Hinduism is open to criticism. No acts were considered as blasphemous acts even though many acts were nothing less.
Christianity also gives a fair amount of freedom in criticizing the religion and for the reforms. But as Christianity is a highly organized religion, it is not as easy as Hinduism to criticize and evaluate. Organization of religion has its own weaknesses and strength. But, with its limitations, Christianity has come a long way and it has given scope for criticism and evaluation.
But the religion which hasn’t opened up at all is the religion of Islam. The very word Islam means ‘to surrender’. It’s a beautiful thing to surrender to something. Unless you are truly humble, it is impossible to surrender to something completely. But as mentioned before, no religion is perfect. Every religion has its own piece of scrap which has to be cleaned up from time to time. If the scraps are not cleaned, the scraps become more and cover the entire religion and the religion appears as a joke.
Islam has hardly gone through reforms over the years. It is as medieval as it was in the 7th century. There is not much difference between Aurangazeb and Osama Bin Laden. Both might belong to completely different eras but the point to be noted is that both were motivated by the same ideology. Obviously, there should be something wrong in some part of the religion. If someone questions that, instead of brooding over the reasons, the very act of questioning is considered blasphemous and the person who questions it is persecuted or worse, killed. So, none dares to question and all want to be politically correct.
Subramaniam Swamy (President of Janatha Party and former minister) had written an article about Islamic terror and the ways to wipe it. Though there were some extreme points in it, he had raised some valid issues. I had posted the article on my Facebook profile. Irfan, one of my college mates in my post graduation got offended by the article and he began to throw some personal slurs at me and also started his line of defense defending his religion and tried to portray his religion as the religion of peace(had he said piece, I would have readily agreed!). The person was so blind that he was not even ready to acknowledge the well-established fact of the Islamic terror. Then Naveen, one of my college mates in my graduation joined this guy and they continued to defend their argument.
Then the rhetoric began: ‘Terrorism has no religions’, ‘You can’t attribute terrorism to one single religion’, ‘Terrorism has a socio-economic-political cause than religious ones’. It was a typical Indian situation: One guy from the minority, to defend him a pseudo-secular intellectual and one hopeless moron against them. My hope to drive home some points to them remained hope till the end because one person had mortgaged his intelligence to his religion and the other one to some ideology and pseudo-secularism. So, the arguments yielded no results. But, the next morning I was surprised to see that my name was promptly removed from his friend’s list. I was bewildered at the level of narrow-mindedness!!
To do a cover-up job for a problem is not the way to encounter a problem at all. To solve any problem, one has to acknowledge the existence of the problem first. If someone is the denial mode and act as if the problem doesn’t exist, the existence of the problem is undeterred and it can only exacerbate over a period of time.
Any religion should be open to criticism. Because that’s the main thing which helps to look deep about certain aspects and clean them if needed and also helps in reaffirming the faith in the good aspects of the religion. But a few religions consider themselves to be perfect and beyond evaluation or criticism. Worse than that, they intimidate the people who criticize it and create a kind of phobia.
Hinduism which is perhaps the oldest religion of the world has faced the same. Owing to the long-presence of it, it picked up junk and some aspects of it became intolerable. Though it had some very beautiful things that no other religions had, the junk had piled up so much that it began to mask the great aspects of the religion. So, the reformers came for the rescue. They could see the problem. Many of them criticized and brought many reforms. But due to its enormity and vastness, still many junks has remained. But, one appreciable fact is that Hinduism is open to criticism. No acts were considered as blasphemous acts even though many acts were nothing less.
Christianity also gives a fair amount of freedom in criticizing the religion and for the reforms. But as Christianity is a highly organized religion, it is not as easy as Hinduism to criticize and evaluate. Organization of religion has its own weaknesses and strength. But, with its limitations, Christianity has come a long way and it has given scope for criticism and evaluation.
But the religion which hasn’t opened up at all is the religion of Islam. The very word Islam means ‘to surrender’. It’s a beautiful thing to surrender to something. Unless you are truly humble, it is impossible to surrender to something completely. But as mentioned before, no religion is perfect. Every religion has its own piece of scrap which has to be cleaned up from time to time. If the scraps are not cleaned, the scraps become more and cover the entire religion and the religion appears as a joke.
Islam has hardly gone through reforms over the years. It is as medieval as it was in the 7th century. There is not much difference between Aurangazeb and Osama Bin Laden. Both might belong to completely different eras but the point to be noted is that both were motivated by the same ideology. Obviously, there should be something wrong in some part of the religion. If someone questions that, instead of brooding over the reasons, the very act of questioning is considered blasphemous and the person who questions it is persecuted or worse, killed. So, none dares to question and all want to be politically correct.
Subramaniam Swamy (President of Janatha Party and former minister) had written an article about Islamic terror and the ways to wipe it. Though there were some extreme points in it, he had raised some valid issues. I had posted the article on my Facebook profile. Irfan, one of my college mates in my post graduation got offended by the article and he began to throw some personal slurs at me and also started his line of defense defending his religion and tried to portray his religion as the religion of peace(had he said piece, I would have readily agreed!). The person was so blind that he was not even ready to acknowledge the well-established fact of the Islamic terror. Then Naveen, one of my college mates in my graduation joined this guy and they continued to defend their argument.
Then the rhetoric began: ‘Terrorism has no religions’, ‘You can’t attribute terrorism to one single religion’, ‘Terrorism has a socio-economic-political cause than religious ones’. It was a typical Indian situation: One guy from the minority, to defend him a pseudo-secular intellectual and one hopeless moron against them. My hope to drive home some points to them remained hope till the end because one person had mortgaged his intelligence to his religion and the other one to some ideology and pseudo-secularism. So, the arguments yielded no results. But, the next morning I was surprised to see that my name was promptly removed from his friend’s list. I was bewildered at the level of narrow-mindedness!!
To do a cover-up job for a problem is not the way to encounter a problem at all. To solve any problem, one has to acknowledge the existence of the problem first. If someone is the denial mode and act as if the problem doesn’t exist, the existence of the problem is undeterred and it can only exacerbate over a period of time.
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