Imagine the two human species that preceded the homo sapiens: homo habilis and homo erectus who lived 1.5 million or so years ago. Without any plausible scientific bases, but with the capacity for rational thinking, they were confronted with the elements of nature: fire, wind, air, and water. During the day, they looked – up at the sky, and saw the searing sun, and in the stillness of the night, the moon illumined the earth. Put yourself in their shoes, and you realize the awe and wonder our ancestors must have felt. As one writer puts it, they experienced what we call tremendum et facinans. Extreme fear and fascination.
Owing to man’s rational capacity, there must be order to an otherwise chaotic environment. Bereft without any scientific explanations, the first men that walked on earth had woven tales about the sun, moon, fire, water, air, and earth. Owing to the reasoning power, man has to explain the reason why these elements exist, and if they cannot fathom , they have to embrace these elements as supra-natural; and thus, superstitions about these elements evolved into paganism – sun, moon, earth, fire, wind, worship. Yes, religious rituals evolved around a stone, a river, a mountain, and even animals.
The earliest religious stirring is paganism – a raw, almost reflex reaction to the mysterious earth the early men faced. The mind cannot have without explanation. Chaos is intolerable. There must be order and harmony of human existence, from the material to the spiritual. Beliefs were held, and myths were told, delineating the powers of the gods and how the mortal should relate to them.
Religions however went beyond nature-worship. In the western world, the three main branches – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – have posited a Supreme Being who is the alpha and the omega of the human race. In the east, Hinduism and Buddhism from which many groupings evolved, posited that human being has his supra-natural aspect that is imprisoned in the flesh. To reveal man’s divine nature, he has to unhinge from the karmic principle, to escape from the wheel of re-incarnation to attain nirvana, a state of total bliss.
Of the religions, it is the western groups that have defined the bloody history of the human race. While the pre-historic men embraced religious worship to give order to an otherwise mysterious nature, the modern western religions have created chaos and disorder, by the never-ending forays into another religion. Religions as we now experience, have evolved from a tool of explaining the mystery to a tool of subjugation and annihilation.
Tell me of major wars, and you will see that the cause celebre of the same is rooted in religion. Judaism is the ancient of the three western religions. Yet we recorded its clash with the early pagan Egypt. Christianity saw the expansion of territories by the sign of the cross and the sword. Islam later on, avenged and even exceeded the adventures of the Crusaders. The war on terror right now , it is too, rooted on religion.
Why should man kill in the name of Jesus, or Allah, or Yahweh? Is it because we can now explain nature and de-mystified the pagan idols that we now project the superiority of our respective God by killing one another? Yet the irony is that the God of the west is professed as compassionate, the source of the ultimate love for humanity; and redemption can only be had by following the God.
There goes the clincher – there is only one road to human salvation. The compassionate God has admonished His flock to evangelize, to convert the gentiles and pagans and the infidels. The road to salvation must be shared. But must we kill a person who does not want to take the road we have taken?
But why the brouhaha? A man has yet to rise from the dead and tell the living that he has seen the road to salvation. The road we the living are talking about are mere glimpses of our faith. In a sense, the modern religious are still pagans. Enveloped in the modern mind is still the mystery of whether man has an afterlife. And in order to explain this, we embrace the concept of human salvation through a religion. But how sure are you that your road is the real one? Or are you even sure you have an afterlife?
Granting that your religion is the road to salvation, then your path necessarily excludes other religions. The rest of humanity then would be damned in hell. If your God is truly compassionate, then what kind of love that abandons the rest of humanity to damnation? Even if you combine the Christians , Jews, and Muslims, the number is still insignificant compared to the billions of Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and non-believers. Does it mean they will not find salvation? To reason that you have a compassionate God that leads you to the only road to salvation necessarily contradicts the true nature of your God. The whole argument collapses and so do the reason why you have to subjugate and kill to convert people into your fold.
Now tell me, why do you have to kill in the name of your God that you profess to be compassionate?
Our pre-historic ancestors worshipped in order to give them relief to the mysteries they have encountered with nature. They projected supra-beings to help them understand, in the absence of scientific explanations of things they saw and experienced. The spirit world was a tool for their meaningful existence of earth. But the modern man has made the spirit-world the end all and be all of human existence. Religion has ceased to be a tool; human existence instead has become a tool of religious practices that see the wastage of human lives. We have forfeited our present existence in favor of the afterlife which we have but only glimpses of our faith.
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read the current news (courtesy of my friend Millie)
Threats Force Egyptian Convert to Hide
Saturday, August 11, 2007 2:58 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By MAGGIE MICHAEL Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — An Egyptian Muslim who converted to Christianity and then took the unprecedented step of seeking official recognition for the change said he has gone into hiding following death threats.
Mohammed Hegazy, who sparked controversy when pictures of him posing with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in newspapers, was shunned by his family and threatened by an Islamist cleric vowing to seek his execution as an apostate.
“I know there are fatwas (religious edicts) to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country,” the 25-year-old Hegazy told The Associated Press from his hideout Thursday.
Hegazy made a public splash when he took the unusual step of going to court to change his religion on his national ID card. His first lawyer filed the case, but then quit after the uproar; his second is still considering whether it’s worth pursuing.
Hegazy said he received telephoned death threats before he went into hiding in an apartment with his wife, a Muslim who took the name Katarina when she converted to Christianity several years ago. She is four months pregnant.
He said he wants to change the religion on his ID for two reasons: to set a precedent for other converts and to ensure his child can openly be raised Christian. He wants his child to get a Christian name, birth certificate and eventually marry in a church. That would be impossible if Hegazy’s official religion is Muslim, because a child is registered in the religion of the father.
There is no Egyptian law against converting from Islam to Christianity, but in this case tradition takes precedent. Under a widespread interpretation of Islamic law, converting from Islam is apostasy and punishable by death — though killings are rare and the state has never ordered or carried out an execution on those grounds.
