prateekshac

I feel quite like a hypocrite living a religious life while at heart being a staunch atheist. Penning down this is perhaps a way to reduce my guilt.

I was born into a quasi religious family who; though were God fearing, were not religious. They believed in the existence of God as a creator; more for the lack of another theory, than anything else. However it was believed in our family that religion was nothing more than a set of man made organizations intended to bring some tangibility into the vague concept of God and to establish practices which would enable us to display faith in God in ways that would not come across as utterly obnoxious and insane to the surrounding community. To drive home that point, imagine there was no religion and people wanted to believe in God. How in the wide world would they express it? Would they all evolve different ways to express themselves? In which case, would it not look ridiculous to one person the weird ways in which his neighbor chose to express his affection for God, because after all any way you choose to acknowledge an invisible intangible being is unnatural and funny, much like how kids speak to their invisible friends and dolls. And being the social beings that we are, would we be able to live with this absence of consensus? Hence evolved religion.

In short, while it is impossible for someone who is religious to not believe in God, it is perfectly possible for someone who does believe in God to not be religious. And we belonged to the latter class.

Life was peaceful with no interference from religious differences while I was growing up, mainly because we lived many many miles away from most of our relatives; as a result of which we were never present at any of our pujas and rituals. On the other hand, we in fact lived amongst Christians, attended their masses and prayed to their God. I should mention at this point that I am technically a Hindu in that I was born to Hindu parents, in that my parents were born to HIndu parents, in that my grandparents were born to HIndu parents.. and so on. I often wonder where it all started. Which one of my ancestors, on one fine day, woke up and decided to be a Hindu. Well, getting back to my point, when I was growing up, if one had asked me which religion I belonged to, I had to say that I was as much Christian or Muslim or any other religion as I was Hindu. I spent the first two decades of my life in this state.

Then Science happened. Science is wonderful in that it strives to ask questions and provide explanations. It exercises your mind by making you think and reason rather than memorize and adopt. It encourages rational thinking and is not afraid of being questioned. When Science happened, it beat all the other ideologies in my life downright. And while doing so, it provided the most elegant and beautiful explanation to various questions I had had growing up as to who created us and how we all came into being. Science provided the answers that the theory of God could not.
When a child hangs a sock out on the eve of Christmas, and finds his much anticipated toy in it the next morning, one can reason it out in the following two ways. You can believe that a jolly old fat man in red with a white beard driving a cart drawn by rein deers flew in, picked from his sack the goodie that the kid had prayed for, and put it in there; OR you can believe that your pretty young dad in pajamas , possibly clean shaven, went to the store, bought it the previous night, wrapped it with love and put it in there. Up to the age of five or ten maybe, the first theory is highly fanciful; after which it increases in its ridiculousness quotient so rapidly that by the age of fifteen, if you still believe in Santa Claus, you will be harassed out of your wits by your peers.
If you spend even five mins thinking about the above example(maybe fifteen for the highly religious), it becomes impossible to deny that it sounds suspiciously similar to the God versus Science explanations we have for nature, and how we all came to be.

Getting back, it was fairly easy for me to be seduced by Science given that the God theory was getting weaker and weaker in my mind, owing to the fact that it had not an ounce of evidence to support, nor any reason why we should believe something that had no evidence to support it whatsoever. And quite rapidly I moved on to being an Atheist. I should at this point accept that there was a short period in time when I claimed to be agnostic for the fear of coming out into the open. I believed that it is simply easier to ignore the entire issue rather than go up against family members and friends with years and years of conditioning.

However, after I got married, a bunch of questions arose in my mind, which jolted me out of my comfortable position as an Agnostic. Given that my extended family was highly religious and performed every single puja without fail, these questions arose in my mind with higher frequencies. The most important of those questions was, What stand am I going to take with my child (if and when I have one) when he/she asks me what I think about the God that his grandparents and friends worship. Do I believe in it?

I know now that when my child asks me that, I will answer in the negative. I will say ” I do not believe in God dear. And I have a reason for it. The earth is flat. We breathe air. Sugar is sweet. Killing is Bad. There is no SantaClaus and there is not God.”

Yes you heard it right.

I wasn’t very aware of this intriguing custom until recently.
It is believed that Peepal tree, called Ashvattha in Sanskrit should be married off to the Neem tree, both of which are normally grown near each other. The significance of this marriage, though not specified in any holy scriptures,are stated differently by different people.

One version of the belief maintains that the fruit of the Neem tree represents the male; the leaf of Peepal stands for Yoni, the power of female; and the union of the two ( the fruit placed on the Peepal leaf ) depicts ‘Shivalinga’ which stands for ‘creation’ through sexual union.
It is said that people circle the trees, after this ceremony to get rid of their sins.

There are others who believe that attending such a wedding, can bless you with whatever you ask for. Many unmarried souls attend this holy marriage to ask for the obvious.
Many women tie red and yellow threads around the tree in the belief that they will be blessed with children.

In some northern states, people are also said to have married of Peepal trees with Banyan trees (Alada mara) with similiar intent.

Well, among all the interesting beliefs and rituals associated with trees, this is one.Yesterday, the long standing Peepal and Neem close to our house were married off. It was a two day long celebration and many attended the same.
I will end this post by wishing our Peepal and Neem a very happy married life, from all our readers..

Today I came across this really inspiring slide show on India. I have seen lots like that before. But this one somehow made quite an indelible impression. It wasn’t entirely accurate, as one of my colleagues put it. But it did the job. It got me thinking.

The first thing it did was to make me silently promise myself that I should read the Bhagwat Gita. I don’t know a single Christian youth who has not read the bible.
I don’t know a single Hindu youth who has read the Gita. Ofcourse, many manage to get hold of abridged versions … But apart from all that, its quite shameful that most young Indians have let go of their roots, quite comfortably. Infact that very same slide show had a mention of how many applicants for American H1-B visas, Indians accounted for.

I have seen innumerable other blog posts, forwards,video clips and other such articles of information, aimed at essentially awakening any such patriotic feelings that might by lying dormant in people, being furiously circulated through the most technologically advanced mediums of communication. But it rarely ever does anything more than inspire someone into writing a post like the one I’m writing. So what am I doing besides rambling?
Well for one ,I in my small way, will try and help the cause by not following the herd to the Americas and Australias of the world to improve their economy, after having leeched enough from our India.

And there are others , who are doing much more like the guys from IIT, Bombay that formed Lokparitran , a political party aimed at using education and technology to do something more than just earn fat paycheques.
Bless their souls.