What we must defeat

Suspension of rational thinking, whether it is based on what we are told happened 1,400 years ago or 2,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago puts us in a vulnerable state. When one’s own thinking process stops, as it does for any radical fundamentalist, then we become ripe for our minds being taken over by others. What are the right behaviors and how one’s life must be led, then get hijacked by the crafty and wily with an agenda. Everyone else but us, seems to have an agenda, a blade to grind, don’t you think? If trapped we end up just becoming mouthpieces of the crafty. Their thoughts are parroted by our mouths day after day while our brain lies in suspended animation.

We all have that strain of vulnerability in us. Thinking is hard. Rational thinking even harder. 

The ones that want to control us, first overwhelm us by building imposing physical structures, then dress up in imposing costumes to convince us that the best place for thinking to happen is within the walls of those buildings, by the people who have donned those cartoonish garbs. Kings used this ability of pressing a pause button on the thinking faculty of masses. Dictators do it via larger than life billboards and massive parades carrying their portraits. Dictatorships pretending to be movements of the people aka communist regimes do it with threats of violence. But the most exemplary examples of this art of the possible is our dear religious leaders. They do it in each town and village…same principal applied at grassroots, leading all the way up to the biggest “houses of worship” in the world.

What’s wrong with grand ornate houses of worship you ask. Don’t we want to pay homage to our creator in the grandest way possible.  What is wrong with the praising the lord almighty to high heavens, literally.

Nothing is wrong with that. Absolutely nothing, in many cases nevertheless. Others perhaps need further evaluation. 

You see, thinking has this curious downside of forcing us to ask questions. Questions need convincing answers. If the answers are not convincing the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Hence there are faiths that force edicts down the throat of the believers, catching them young and creating neat little pens of electric fences beyond which questions are prohibited. In those circumstances the houses of worship are a propaganda tool. In those circumstances the grand ornate houses of worship are a political tool to subdue others.

The reason is that when curious human beings have stopped asking probing pertinent questions about the nature of reality and our relationship with it and therefore have stopped investigating, they have stopped evolving and have stopped contributing to evolution of human thought and progress. In fact they will always try to take you back to when it all began and all truth was revealed. Because thats where their thinking lies frozen.

We all know this Instinctively. Question is, have you, dear reader, suspended your ability to think, on the basis of what you have been told happened 1,400 years ago or 2,000 years ago or five or 10,000 years ago. If you have, you as a person are not evolving and therefore are ripe for the picking by an able thinker. You sir may be sliding down a dark alley.

I write this piece so we can defeat this strain in us. I write to encourage all of us to ask questions. The more radical the questions that are asked, the less radical the society that we live in will become.

The reason is that faiths and cultures that have encouraged the most outrageous of questions seem to have done well. Indians did that for thousands of years creating one of the greatest civilizations that the world has ever seen. Is god real, can we perceive Him/Her in some direct way, beyond that which is being told to us by the man in funny costume. Does the world even need to have a creator? If so then who created the creator? Many asked whether the Sun goes round the earth or the other way round. Others asked whether the best way for governing a people was thorough kings or whether democracy made better sense. Some have asked if there is God then why there is so much strife? Why are children coming straight out of heaven born with deadly diseases? Is there heaven and hell or like Ghalib said, dil ke khush rakhne ko ghalib ye khayal achcha hai? Is life really governed by the lines on our hands? You get the drift.

The whole scientific world is based on asking questions. About us and the Universe and gravity and cells and DNA and molecules and on and on and on. Those that draw us back to some revelation that they read about, and clamp down our questions are radical fundamentalists, that thwart their own progress and evolution as well as that of the society. That strain of thinking must be defeated. It is not the size of the beard or the size and color of the robe that makes anybody a Radical Fundamentalist. It is the state of deep freeze that their mind is at. We see those people around us. Big questions is, are you one of them or becoming one of them.

So, do judge people by their behaviors and doctrines by their ability to give freedom to ask foundational questions. Questions are not impertinent. They spell progress and evolution of us as a species, and more importantly of you as a person.