Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Religion

Times Now today featured a conversation with one of the activists at a rally in Hyderabad ... his message was clear - Religion is the root cause of all evil in the world and the whole establishment has to be cleansed of religious beliefs. Once this is done, peace will prevail and we will all live happily thereafter.

I feel blaming religion for all the problems has become a serious trend these days. However, I know for a fact that religion teaches a lot more than that. The purpose of religion is not to give people reasons to murder each other. It is unfortunate that some people are inspired to commit heinous crimes using religion as their base, but the fault lies in the particular person and not the religion. We need to recognize this. Even if we eliminate all the religions in the world, we will still find reasons to kill each other - race, linguistic differences, whatever.

We should take a moment to look at the positive impacts that religion has. Above all, religion gives people a major incentive to lead a good and moral life. Without it, there is little penalty for being immoral and cruel.

I am looking forward to the day when we as a human race evolve beyond violence.

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