India is a secular country certainly! But sometime people get carried away in the religious sentiments and became enemy of their fellow citizens. More than 50,000 religious riots-that had happened since independence—are testimony to that.
image source: i.imgur.com/qe4GgKw.jpg
We are religiously conscious in a very negative way; we defend our religion by attacking other’s religion. We protect our religion by killing fellow human beings. There was a Christian Rally in Shillong on the 24th February 1999. Why not this rally was called in the name of humanity rather than restrict it to only Christians? Why cannot we all get together and say, let us condemn the atrocity or the crime committed against a human being. Let us even forget that he was an Australian. Mr. Staines was a human being first…. But no, we have to marginalize and compartmentalize ourselves and then only do we feel secure and protected.
Let us cross all man-made boundaries and reach out to the whole world and to the Humanity at large. And have love in our hearts… love that crosses all barriers of cast, cultures, religion, and even species. Which has no bias, no prejudice and has a sense of deep understanding for fellow creatures? A great thinker says, “If there is no understanding there is great sorrow. And if the mind does no penetrate beyond its own barriers than there is misery. “This is what our society is facing today. We have become so communalists, so incarcerated by the boundaries created by our own minds that we seem to be forgetting the real essence and ethos of a religion. And we are all facing brunt of this communal and restrictive society that has created pockets of island of humanity, grouping within themselves and spreading fondness for their own kind, while animosity and repulsion for others.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Religion is a personal belief and a private matter and should be kept within the confines of our home. It is not something to be exhibited or to be made a show of. It is a communion between self and God and a sacred matter. How does it really matter how do we pray to our God? What matters, is how much love we have in our hearts and how honest we are in our prayers.
Love a state, when you are at peace with what you see, feel or express. A state of being when you expect everything around you, in its own importance, with no conflict, when you accept beauty and ugliness, the way it is…naturally. When there is mental spiritual and physical acceptance of nature in all its totalities in an expansive way. And a state of being when you do not see everything in terms of gain, profit or advantage but when our accept things for what it is, rather than, what it gives you.
A 60-year-old Muslim named Abdul Rashid Ismail Sheikh is an unofficial priest of a Hindu Ganesha Temple. Such is the love in his heart that he transcended all boundaries of religions to pray to God. And he says, “I don’t have any complaints. I know what I am doing and I know that it is right. The greatest religion is that of Humanity.” He has not denounced his faith but continues to be a Muslim. While he is also accepted as a Hindu priest. Such great men may go into oblivion in history. But, the love that he may have created and pervaded into the world in his 60 years of life on this planet will have a more profound effect on the people around him, than all the Hindu, Christian, Muslim priests put together who propagate only their religion and not love. Who cannot cross the boundaries created buy their own minds, and restricts themselves to a particular sect or religion. They don’t grow, they don’t flower, they smother and stifle their own minds by restrictive thinking never inquiring, habituated and mechanical…and somewhere along the way the essence, the spirit and the soul of love for humanity is lost… And the remains… a charred body of Mr. Staines and his innocent children!