Man and Religion

I wrote a small poem beginning with a query ‘if God made Man or Man made God’. The poem goes on to quip that Man indeed made God because there are so many forms of God today, causing endless troubles in the name of religion to the creator himself, the Man. Why is man so religious and why are there many religious wars and skirmishes? When I ponder deeply on the evolution of God and the associated religions to where we are today, I think it all started when Man started wondering about the superiority of devastating natural forces and bigger wild animals. Realizing his limitations, he simply accepted their supremacy and deified them. In the process, he started performing certain rituals in order to pacify them and to invoke their blessings for survival. All these rituals and beliefs were codified and passed on to his generations to come in the name of religion. This basic form of religion can be found to be still alive in some of the tribal people who are yet to come out of survival mode and who have not yet been corrupted by the modern man.

Once Man settled down by means of agriculture and domestication, he could subdue most of the wild animals but not the natural forces. Hence natural forces continued to find a place in his concept of God. The intelligence in Man also grew in this period to a greater extent that he started questioning the supremacy of the natural forces and if there is further a superior force to reckon, which actually controlled everything. Though the most intelligent realized that God is formless and he is one (Monotheism), the ordinary could not conduct their day to day life without some form of God. Man found it difficult to worship God without a symbol and thus even the realized individuals themselves became objects of worship and thus subjects of conflicts. In all religions, it has been a practice to deify some people who lead exemplary lives showing a direction to the common man’s life and in whom the ordinary mortal found Godliness.

There are many religions that originated at different places and at different times but interestingly all the major religions of the world are monotheistic. Each religion started drawing a lineage of Saints, emanating from the God himself and culminating with a “Saint” whom they believed to be the last messiah of their faith. Most of the religions spread on the basis of violence, suppression and elimination of other faiths though a few others grew by tactically embracing smaller faiths along with their gods and demigods in to their fold. In this process they transformed to be polytheistic (though ideologically remaining monotheistic) and thus grew too comprehensive and complex to understand.

With the advent of modern Science, all the religions need a strong correction in terms of their beliefs and practices! While religion has to be considered as a means to realize God, the end, the irony is that man is more obsessed with the means, the differences and hence all the unrest. What Man has failed to understand is that while there have been numerous instances of demolition of places of worship, massacres in the name of religion and many other atrocities done by him in the name of religion, God never seems to have actually appeared and stopped him. Is it not weird? It is high time man starts re-thinking about his understanding on religion and God! We have enough things to worry about our survival and let us keep atleast Religion out of it!