“Religion is the opium of the masses” believed Karl Marx. I agree with him on this more than anything. People need stuffs like such to derive sense out of their meaningless life. I see no plausible explanation for why else man created God, if not out of this selfishness. But then as if it was not enough he started celebrating God, in order to fill his empty life with occasion to cheer about. And the more deprived a society was the more it turned towards this establishment called God.
Except for the Greeks I see no society who held theology on rational terms. Greeks idea of religion was a way of seeking elucidation for the inexplicable phenomenon around, with having men as the centre of creation. Be it Hercules, Aphrodite, Apollo, Atlas, Poseidon, Venus in each of their Godly figure you will see a human being. All the other civilizations have done the reverse. In them mysticism have overtaken rationality. Egyptian shaped their supernatural being in lofty monuments and natural phenomenon, Muslims worshiped the shapeless God, and Hindus outsmarted everyone by outstretching their imagination far too than simply excess.
We people just love crowd, be it of humans or of deities we just love them. When I look back to my old city Varanasi I find there was an incessant struggle between God and Man. In fact it was a city where the population of God challenged that of Humans. The more the numbers of Gods we created the more were our moments of celebration. You will hardly find a Godless week in our calendar.
Today too is one such day. In fact it is one of the tallest among such days, called deepawali. Most people all around with their fake smiles are at their phoniest best, cheerfully wishing each other success. I too received many such phony greetings full of promising prosperity and reciprocated them back too in same gesture. But such days of celebration are the saddest in the life of an atheist like me. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of being a nonbeliever. You just don’t feel the joy in all this; neither can you even pretend to be joyful properly. So at the end you feel too isolated and out of place as if you just don’t belong there.
I was never this down throughout this year as today. Tried calling few close friends, some too old some new and promising, yet just couldn’t speak my mind to any. Instead of what I intended to share, I just repeated those phony wishing and ended. All this is just taking over me. I wish if i could hide somewhere out of this. But man is a social animal anyway. No matter how bad I am at it, I too have to play my part. The guy Holden Caulfield, from catcher in the rye, was awfully right when he said “Don’t ever tell anyone anything. If you do you start missing everyone.” Holden, if only I had met you earlier to committing this mistake.
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