Humanity is confronted with and got entangled with eternal fear. Fear is the driving force towards all complexities that we have built upon ourselves and upon the society we live.Fear over self and and everyone.Fear against fellow beings who seem to be in conflict of interest with us.Fear of getting offended; fear against disasters and catostrophies of all kinds;fear against death; fear against after life punishments; fear against one"s sins;fear of call of conscience;fear of facing truth;fear of pursuing truth;reflections of all those confluence of fears taught in childhood;fear against hunger ; survival;tyranny and prospect of losing freedom in expression thought speech one"s own faith and action.
From cradle to grave fear fear and fear ;nothing else but fear dominates us!!
While the real need is to confront these fears and investigate them the misconceived notions behind them
their origin their meaning their impact their futility their destrutive potentiality their dangerous and corruptive consequences to personality and life of the individual and to the community at large.human mind is quite conviniently and ignorantly looking for the scapegoat mechanism which does not guarantee liberation from fear .The scapegoat is FAITH.
While fear is amenable to analysis faith unfortunately is not.Faith commands analytical mind to STOP at one point orders it to beleive.Right from Saint Thomas beleivers mix both mad faith and cosmological proof rational principles and natural laws selectively to prove their point!
But there is no mad faith involved in analysing consequences of fear.The remedy ,therefore to banish fear lies in banishing ignorance.When we turn pages of history, however. we find that instrument of faith has been invented to banish fear.Major fear of humanity (until 15 th century) is fear against super natural forces. (underlying theme of Malthus)Faith bestowed on certain dogma religion cult or nation not only gave comfort against fear but it also saved people from being threatened with charges of sedition ban arrest labelled as rebel exile and excommunication. Paradoxically the institutions that ensured faith among its members feared of their survival and hence the coercive methods were put in place.Fear ruled. Yours faithfully culture flourished.Pol Plot feared educated and even those who wore glasses!
Feare is behind every human trauma.Faith is inevitably product of fear. But the product has its inherent weaknesses. When fera reaches its epitome its own byproducts which are deep rooted suspicion jealousy
anger vengeance revenge take control.
Our deep insights are to be drawn to various manifestations of fear all of them cannot be sufficiently gone through inthis essay,and the great philosophers and psychologists have observed that change is bound to arrive in deep echelons of mind and then fear ceases to exist.
Faith without this deep and innovative sense of digression is a failed weapon in our hands. A gun without ammunition!
To illustrate: Look at the plight of Kashmiris! Who are in immense grief and suffering.Our sage like Pm who is described as a man of uncommon decency and humility by people of the world is not able to help them.
Because here fear rules (what are CBMs) and faith a failed weapon between two nations.Look at any human conflict present past and future. Look at Israeli Arab conflict.Fear rules and faith miserable. Episodes of Sept 11 and Mumbai!The strained relationship of Muslims with rest of the world is built upon the foundation of fear where faith has no place.Faith is no longer an effective instrument withj most uprights like Obama!
Faith has played no role absolutely no role in ensuring peace and harmony within one"s self families communities cult religion and nations.
For majority of us faith or even beleif in God is earthly convinience or practical necessity.Here ther is no need to tell about the faction that make their living out of faith.
Before i wind up these personal thoughts I share anguish of Scott Adams in God"s Debris."If you beleive a truck is coming toward you--you will jump out of the way. This is reality of beleif"
If you do nothing about it despite your beleif you are lying!Because it is never true beleif if on the one hand I say God exists but on the other hand always fearful jealous suspicious full of vengeance do nothing except sinning ,allow people around me dying in suffering and I still concentrate on hoarding.
Freedom from fear is humanity"s inherent goal.(It canbe adopted incidentally as Ninth Millennium Development Goal).
Coming bto faith. If faith by any chance canbe truthfully practised as it is being preached LET IT UNITE FAMILIES--UNITE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD!!!
LET ME SEE IT TO BELEIVE IT!!
After all Love thy neighbour is underlying theme of all religions.(they vary only in detail)
Finally Descartes:''Error is the result of IMBALANCE between understanding and my will"
This post seems to me to be a turning point, a culmination in your recent thoughts and writings on the virus of faith. I remember a slogan I saw on a t-shirt sometime ago "inhale faith, exhale fear"...it was an ad for some christian movement. Faith was an ingenious invention by man to help him counter the endless amount of fear and uncertainty that surrounded his daily life. And it worked like a charm during those days when there was no science to explain rain and thunder and nobody had hit upon the theory of evolution. So its amazing that such an outdated product that has clearly outrun its use continues to be relevant even today, when science has replaced fear and ignorance with knowledge. People are willing to give and take lives in its name. And I guess the reason for that is that we are still not free from fear, the other fears that you talked about continue to haunt us, now more than ever...
ReplyDeleteFaith could help unite, but unfortunately there are so many faiths, sub-faiths within a faith, individual interpretations inside of that. Finally each human being is so unique that it is difficult to absolutely unite in anything, let alone faith. You do see people of the same faith being united within their focussed groups. Faith is a tool just like any other if you want to use it and in the right way. Why faith.... we do not unite all together for anything at all for that matter. We do unite where there is common purpose such as in family life, employment, friends etc.. but it stops with specific agenda and even there, there is competition, disagreements, division. It all depends on how you want to use faith and what you want to achieve out of it.
ReplyDeleteFaith to me is a tragic fallacy of the ignorant; a self-belief mechanism, presumably therapeutic, inflicted upon the individual for preserving the deceiving ego. Faith, fear and guilt are strange bed mates that can traumatize a subject. This triumvirate has lethal power to hijack the vulnerable soul, sucking the innocent thing into a matrix of
ReplyDeleteperpetual pain. Seers and satans know this; the former attempts to throw light on this truth, the latter thrives on culturing it. Unfortunately, thinking minds are bulldozed by the dark preachers. Here is where we could play our parts, in whatever measure. At any given opportunity - we should sow in sense and compassion, so, that may at least, liberate a molecule of the mob from pathetic wilderness.