If tomorrow you were to awake into a dystopian world where a cataclysmic governmental decree stating that all religion was to be abolished and that anyone who was caught practicing or preaching religion from the ancient books or worshipping idols would be publically chastised or put to a violent death, what would you do? Would your faith overwhelm your logic to force you into creating small secret sects to worship the Great Gods fidgeting anxiously in their pantheons awaiting your prayers? Or would you take to the streets with your oh so meaningful placards and chants in an attempt to shake the core conscience of a business minded government? Perhaps you would listen and obey the letter of the law and go cold turkey on the drug they say religion is?
On the other hand, what if you awoke once upon a dear day to hear the high priests or each religion peacefully but persistently preaching for all mankind to stop following and taking part in politics? What would you do in all your transitory wisdom? Would you listen to the reverends and gurus and imams and just quit your political principles and philosophise on problems purporting to more purposeful perspectives? Or would you rebel? Would you challenge the churches and temples and mosques to fight for your right to impose your opinions and attempt to govern the masses like money minded madmen?
What I suppose I’m trying to say is that both religion and politics breed fanaticism in pools of power play. Religion plays its card of blind faith while politics promises a blind lady justice and before we know it, it’s the blind leading the blind into the brutal arena of society where one gladiatorial political party fights another and where one religious dogma attempts to undermine another.
I’m no expert on the matter but I feel that the fundamental elements of religion and politics have become lost to many. Religion is not what you were born into. It isn’t the beliefs you were brought up with or the theology that holy books hold. Religion isn’t something you’re only meant to turn to when you’re desperate or in need or diseased and dying. It shouldn’t be about what society or community determine you should do. What it should be is the belief in following an innate feeling of oneness with a force that’s older and wiser than you. For God’s sake, it doesn’t even have to be labelled. See what I did there? No? Okay.
Politics too. The entire purpose of politics is to build an empire where society can thrive in attempting to create generations of utopianism. Politics is the villainous language of governments that places us under hypnotic spells where we become enemies out of nothingness and we’re drawn into the world of bribes and the bourgeois. We fight and kill and rape and pillage and ravage lands with war and commit genocide and burn the planet and the synonymous stench of death seeps into the breath of politics. Portly politicians provide promises aplenty in poisonous tongues and we’re coerced into listening not because we’re gullible but because we’re desperate to believe in something and that the world can be a better place. But then we get caught up in trivial arguments and the community of humanity is thrown aside for the society of community.
And we remain answerless. So these are just a few words on religion and politics. Not that contemporary applications of either deserve these many.
Of course, these are just the opinions of a humble, hopeless traveller. But until the atheists and anarchists rule supreme, let’s just be nice to each other, shall we?
spoken like a man with a vision and a humble heart. and are the blind really blind? or are we?
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