If you take away God from people, they will make you their new God
Human beings have this markable skill of thinking. Bundled with the perfect storing structure of the human mind and ever-evolving ways to capture the thoughts (read: ideas), humans have come a long way from where they first started.
We think almost constantly. So many thoughts, singular in nature, sparking off from random directions. Some, we let go. Our mind, scientists say, even stores those thoughts that we had shown negligible attention towards in memory which can be reached out a bit differently than most conventional ways. But the sole attraction is the thoughts that get our attention. These get supplemented with additional layers of thoughts, much like one sentence after another in a paragraph. Collectively, this cluster of thoughts can reveal a picture more clearly. Simply put, thoughts are the basic code that runs our minds just like code runs machines. As the number of lines in the code increase, the result gets crisper. Similarly, when we take a thought and keep focusing on it, what we essentially do it layer on top of that thought numerous other thoughts we got while focusing, ensuring the resultant cluster of these thoughts depict a clear picture of what the first thought we paid attention to was trying to conceive.
This shows how we individually (or in teams) use thoughts to draw pictures. Now the next step is conveying these pictures to someone else. For this, we design another tool: language. We use words to express our thoughts.
Developing language and using it has benefits inside and outside our minds. Inside, we now use the language as a tool to think. It gets easier, for language lets us mark so many things in thoughts that we previously couldn’t. this basic marking structure language provides help us categorize elements of our thought(s) better and use them better. It also restricts, as the scope of the language suddenly now becomes a pseudo-scope of your imagination. I say pseudo because it can be easily broken past. But with continuous dependency on language as a tool to categorize the elements and the thoughts, we suddenly feel dependent on the language in a way that we feel lost trying to store those thoughts. However, this is a topic for some other time: how language limits thoughts. Let me know, readers if you wish me to write about it.
Coming back, we begin using this language as a tool to not only sort thoughts inside better, but also to communicate them to others. From there on, teams can be built to share a common vision, and miracles can be made true as we have seen in the past.
However, through thoughts, a man identified facts and perspectives. Facts are fundamental laws that exist. For example, don’t jump from a tall building or you’ll get hurt due to gravity: fact. However, facts are often used without a defined scope, mainly due to the scope being obvious. But when out of context, it must be defined. Like you can’t say “don’t fall from a tall building or you’ll get hurt” to someone in space where there is no gravity (maybe no building too!). So, the scope here is gravity being on earth not in space.
Facts were quickly made into fundamental laws. Scopes were well defined. These laws quickly went on to serve their purpose: serve as the base for thoughts of humans to enable them to develop new things. Much like the foundation of bricks to a building, these laws served as a foundation for how humans perceived world nature. On this foundation, humans ventured out to gain new thoughts which resulted in innovations.
The second part that needed to be communicated was perceptions. This was the tricky part. Perceptions weren’t facts. They were opinions. They were like what you see from an angle. As soon as the angle is changed, perceptions changed. But for their angle, they held solid relevance. Perceptions require the smartness of the reader to evaluate before showing acceptance, for perceptions aren’t fundamental like facts.
If you need to come up with the best plan right now for something all by yourself, what would you do? Won’t you sit down, maybe with a piece of paper & pen or a whiteboard or something, start thinking about the solution and trying to put it to paper? After having a preliminary solution, won’t you simply revisit it, bombard it with negative questions to test how much it holds? If yes, then don’t you then change certain things about the solution if parts of it crumble to some questions?
Also, if after five years of implementing the solution, I ask you if you can go back and make it better now, won’t you say yes? And won’t you be able to improve it, owing to better resources and better you?
Now think about religious books. Any religion; they are all the same. Religion was a perception, not a fact. Like perceptions, it was noted down in forms of written material. Books. Passed on to generations. Much like religion was progressed in the form of books onto generations, other perceptions were too. Like sexuality. But the journey of religion has been different from any other perception books carry.
Homosexuality was termed as bad, unnatural. For generations, people believed this. They wrote books about it. Coming generations kept reading them and testing them. Then came a time when it was revealed it was unnatural to think homosexuality was unnatural. It was changed in the books. Now generations consume content that speaks about how this perception developed over generations through the spoken and written word. That’s how it reached the point where today it is much clearer and more defined and hence in stunted societal rule, more acceptable.
However, the same didn’t happen with religion. Men named the literature containing perceptions as ‘religious books written by/from God himself’ and thus they were to be followed not questioned. Quickly a parallel-group emerged who were cleverer. They said, ‘men will question, so let them question till a limit while showcasing that as evidence of our resilience and acceptance of the change. This will keep them divided between themselves between believers of different perceptions as the religion grows.’
Thousands of years later, we see what is going on. The literature made as a cradle of information meant to be challenged to make it evolve and become stronger was left crippled due to over-protection. We do not accept dictatorship in lines drawn on maps named as ‘countries’ but very well embrace the same done over continents by religions.
Religion is that crippled child who was so overprotected, it could never evolve to be strong enough to sustain life in its absolute collective forms. Now it is fragmented. Each human having a microscopic bit of it which that humans would use to customize what he feels is his religion and will follow that.
Carefully Carefree 