Saturday, March 18, 2006

RELIGION

I had wanted to express my thoughts on this for quite sometime and a series of events have led to this post…
I believe that religion is behavioral, it lays down the norms a society or cult has to be live by. It gives a sense of belonging to the individual following it, people of similar thoughts and beliefs live together.
The God one prays to is a personal thing… I don’t know what is God, I don’t know if he has a name or is God the name. I don’t know if I can feel God or not, still I am not an atheist… I do believe in God or the forces that be.
Christianity says that man is a born sinner, Hindus believe that man’s actions make him a sinner he isn’t born a sinner. Every religion has its own beliefs and they are right in their own perspective keeping mind the need of the time when the religion came in to being. I feel Christianity is glorified because it is the religion followed in the more developed countries and hence is noticed more… though it is not the most widely followed religion. Islam on the other hand is a religion about which very less is known, though there might be loads of other religions I know nothing about, but I feel Islam is a very widely followed religion that is suffering from lack of proper knowledge of it.
Every religion has turned rigid, but one can’t see that rigidity till he or she is actually involved in the religion… all the religions are God based be it Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam. Christianity was one religion that traveled from the underdogs to the kings instead of the other way round as has been the trend… but if you believe in God all religions hold equal potential to get you closer to God, and all of them preach humanity. I don’t know any religion that doesn’t preach equality or which says that the other religion isn’t good enough. There is one force, call it by whatever name you want, you’d still be praying to that one power above you. I respect your beliefs and you respect mine, one can tell me or you that the religion we follow is lesser, how can it be, God can’t have competitors.
Sikhism seems to be a religion that does not have a Godly start, it was started by Guru Nanak and after him followed 9 more Gurus, and they were teachers and never claimed to be God. Jesus was God’s own child; Hinduism has scriptures by God… Geeta was said by Lord Krishna himself, and Quran was bestowed upon Muhammad by Allah. But Guru Granth Saheb, is a compilation of teachings of the 10 Gurus, it has preaching’s of saints like Meera and Kabeer in it too… to me it seems to be one of the most practical religious scriptures to live by.
To me every religion has it’s own pros and cons and I think I know every little to judge them, and I love hearing about every religion and it’s big and small customs and the stories attached to them… there’s a lot that can be learned from there, a lot that has been sadly overlooked over the years.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

LETTING GO

I had read somewhere that it takes more strength to let go than to hold on, now I have truly learnt how difficult and how important it is to let go. I have always said this, that no matter how close I am to someone there is absolutely no one without whom my life would stop… I’d be lonely for sometime and will always miss the person but life really doesn’t stop. I was wrong… life does stop even if only for a moment, it does. And if life doesn’t stop you do. We hold on to the memories so tightly that it fills our future dreams with just getting that particular thing back… we forget that without the present there is no past and no future. It takes so much courage to face the facts, like accepting that a loved one is dead and we’d never hear from them again.
We fight so many battles within ourselves and with every decision we win and lose at the same time. I guess it’s the same thing as learning to forgiving yourself. To know that it’s ok to make a mistake and that it is important to learn the lesson well and keep it for life…