Now high tech superstitions

Now high tech superstitions

  Fifty years ago there was a small Temple of Ganesha – known as Ganpatiin a small village of India. It came by chance, when one farmer found that the shape of the stone was similar to some deity and he put that stone near a tree on his route to his farmland and while passing through the tree, occasionally, he started showing his faith and respect to that idol shaped stone. The incident went out to other people, not by television or not on social websites or viral  in social media but by mouth to mouth publically, and then, the small idol spot turned to a temple as a big worship place and a centre of faith with dozens of shops and hotels surrounding it.

 Thousands of devotees daily come to this temple to offer sweets and money and employees are recruited to count the currency coming as offering. The money which lands in the temple is tax free income. And such incidents discriminate the truth from other things like faith and respect as it seems that two different worlds are cohabiting together in the same hearts of people where the first world is made by the Nature and the other world of faith made by the imaginations of man himself.

There is no logic and reason for creating such a big temple as certainly faith do not required reasoning, “Imaginations is not explanation, fantasy is not knowledge” M N Roy in materialism, page 52. The matter reported here is not superstition but a symbol of faith and worship, where no logic or reasoning is really required. “Every powerful emotion has its own myth making tendency, this myth making faculty is often allied with cruelty” Said Bertrand Russell. As faith is an attitude of belief in something in the absence of evidence and therefore faith cannot be a source of knowledge.

This story has no logic simply faith which spread to others without any hardship. “Then, man was born with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few briefed moments of life before death’s inexorable decree” Dr. Faustus, This small story of a small village of India is not a story of a single small village of this big country of thousands of villages but it is a story of mostly every fifth village of this land.

Such like stories are common in the country where the religion is rooted on the soil of Vedas in which there was no idol worship recommended and prescribed in any way but emphasized strictly on karma (action) and law of Nature. These are the stories of the society where profounder of Hindu religion, Shankar made clear that true liberation, not salvation, is only be recognizing true nature of self and coming out from the Maya (manifestation of self) . “The self is hidden in all beings and does not shine forth, but it is seen by subtle seers through their sharp and subtle intellect. A wise man should keep them within self which is knowledge.

He should keep knowledge within the self which is great and he should keep this greatness within the self which is the quiet. Rise, awake! Having obtained your boons understand them, the sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over, difficult is the path to the self, the wise tell it” Yama, the god of death, addressing Nachiketa, a young boy in, Katha Upnisad. The philosophy started in India with the only key word of ‘know they self’ knowing your self is the knowledge which turns as touchstone and provide liberation to the soul from this life of misery, the main theme of Hindu  philosophy on which the religion came out and known as ‘sanatan Dharma’.

 There is no example of any sought that made us believe that Vedic people had any type of temples and offerings to the gods, “The culture that built no temples but worshipped nature sprits with simple sacrificial rites” Aryan rule in India by Havell. The Hindu religion started with the pure philosophical thoughts and raised questions to know the absolute and reality first hand rather than worshiping without applying any reason, “There was then neither what is nor what not (truth) is. There was neither sky nor the heaven which is beyond what covered? Where was it, and in whose shelter? Was the water the deep abyss in which it lay? There was no death hence was there nothing immortal. There was no light and even distinction between day and night.

That one breathed by itself without breath, other than it there has been nothing. Darkness there was, in the beginning all this was a sea, without light, the germ that lay covered by the husk, that one was born by the power of heat (Tapas). Love overcomes it in the beginning which was the seed springing from mind; poets having searched in their heart and found by wisdom the bond of what is in what is not. Their ray which was stretch across was it below or was it above? There were seeds, because there was power, self power below and will above, who then knows, who has declared it here, from whence was born this creation, the gods came latter than this creation who then know whence it arose. He from whom the creation arose whether he made it or didn’t make it the highest seer in the highest heaven, he for sooth knows or does even he not know,” Nasadiya Hymans RVx 81 2 to 4.

This Hyman is known as the seed of Hindu religion in which it directly stated the condition of gods that they had not created the world and neither ϯϮ they are responsible of creating creature. Even the supreme power sitting in the highest heaven is aware of this creation is doubted. That which made it clear about the creation in this codified lyric, a base of Hindu philosophy is that power of heat is recognized for the creation of living things (Talking similar to science).

India has developed with great pace in last fifty years and so the religion and so the superstitions and so the science and technology, making lives of the people of this vast sub-continent smooth and better. Almost every villager is having mobile phone and almost every youth is having a bike or automobile. Now more soft drinks are available in small and remote villages than a cup of milk. Technology reached to the grassroots of this country faster than the reasoning and logic moves in society.

The growing disbelief in the gods of natural religion has destroyed the old standard of morality. Worshiping any god is not superstition and worshiping and offering prayers is also not illogical as faith does not accept reasoning but following symbolism of religion without rationality, certainly leads to absurdity. Because India is the land where philosophy germinated for thousands of years and provided logic and reasoning for the balance life and certainly where religion was similar to deeds and moral and knowledge. Again, Christopher Hitchens in, God is not great on page 184 states, “The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case. Very well, they seem to say, we cease to insist on the Exodus (say), or the virgin birth or even the resurrection, or the “night flight” from Mecca to Jerusalem. But where would people be without faith? Would they not abandon themselves to every kind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G K Chesterton once famously said that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but anything?”

And Christopher explained that it nonetheless helped teach the children the difference between right and wrong, “In other words, to believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.” There are also such amazing cases that in the Pali district of Rajasthan in India, there is a temple of motorcycle which helped the driver to register a case in police station after his death in an accident. The driver died on the road but the motorcycle went without driver, leaving the perishing body on road and registered the FIR. And there are temples of actors and actresses in Southern part of India where daily prayers are offered. There is an also a temple of an electric pole who saved a villager from getting the current. And there are temples and temples in this country where faith flourish more than cultivation in fields.

“The greatest part of men is such as preferring their own private good before all things, even that good which is sensual before whatsoever is most divine; and for that the labour of doing good together with the pleasure arising from the contrary, doth make men for the most part slower to the one and prober to the other. Than that duty prescribed them by law can prevail sufficiently with them therefore unto laws that men do make for the benefit of men it hath, Seemed always needful to add rewards and punishments.” Second Treatise of Government 1-10-6.