Licking the God's Boots

What is a religion? This is a very ticklish question. I know that I should think of better things to do, or find a job since I’m particularly on the breadline now (ha-ha), or manage my disorganized schedules, or finish my readings, or whatever aside than thinking about the answer of the question that has been a debate among people for so long, but I’ve decided to muse on it a bit.

Well, I think about so many possible answers for that question, an answer that would make sense in order to complete the puzzle why the word ‘religion’ is indeed one of the most bloody words ever in the history of mankind, so many possible answers came up to my head, so many cause-effect relation possibilities, round and round and round and round, so many that I begun to feel nausea, then I decided that it’s time to stop before bad things started to happen…(well… I have this stupid habit of getting really really nauseatingly cheesy when I’m feeling a bit stressful or frustrated, and when that happened I usually wrote some cheesy poems, or pick-up lines, or ‘pantun’ for Ruli, and really… you don’t wanna know… it’s awfully cheesy you want to kill yourselves when you hear it… so no no… I don’t want that to happen, enough torture for that poor guy, so I decided to pause a bit from my thinking)

But as I let myself to continue to think about it, I found that the fittest piece that would possibly complete the whole puzzle is actually the simplest one, I think religion is a system of belief, or sets of principles, which involves god as the creator and the judge, with groups of society as his worshipper. And there’s exactly where all the problems started.

So here, in religion, god is viewed not only as the creator of the universe, but also as the judge of all the deeds that have done by his worshipper. As the judge, he gives and determines rewards and punishments for the people. Rewards come in the form of heaven, and punishments come in the form of hell. Well… at least that is the concept in Islam, Christian and Jews. In Hinduism I think the concept of reward comes in the form of moshka, the liberation from the chain of birth, death and rebirth while the concept of punishment comes when the soul bond to the karma is born over the condition that is not so pleasant because of the unfaithfulness to the god, or the bad deeds that that person has done in his or her previous life (or maybe I’m wrong… please do correct if I’m wrong…) well, this whole concept of samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth in Hinduism, is controlled by god, therefore here god is also viewed as the judge.
Buddhism is a bit different though, I’ve checked some resources and I found out that in Buddhism there is no actual god. The Buddhists believe that human mistakes and human doom are linked in a relentless chain of cause and effect. So all the bad deeds that you’ve done may cause you a bad fate in your future, pretty logical I guess. Therefore, in order not to have bad fate, you have to do good things in your life (again… of course my understanding and knowledge is sooo… very limited so please do correct me if I’m mistaken about this)
I don’t know much about other religions, like for instance Confucianism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, or Sikhism, or maybe Neopaganism, or others… (you guys might wanna help me about the infos though…). But from what I see, the religions, which have the most followers, usually believe in god as the creator and the judge, and I think this is where all the problems begun.

That concept, where god is viewed as the creator as well as the judge, makes god as the absolute factor who has the absolute rights to decide whether one particular person would be granted reward or punishment. The reward, of course would be given to one who has been really faithful in following all the principles of the religion, one who has been really obedient and devoted to god. Therefore, in order to attain the reward, those religious worshippers would try to be as faithful and as devoted in worshipping the god and obeying all the principles. This could be a good thing, I guess, because basically and of course, ideally, all religions teach good values and virtuousness. However, it is evident that the more strongly adherents of a particular religion believe in its precepts or principles, the more fiercely do they react to those with different beliefs. –sigh–

So last week, I went to Gramedia. Chicklits and teenlits along with those blissfully happy AGJs were all over the bookstore so I kinda looked around to find a place that wasn’t too crowded. The religion and philosophy section looked quiet enough, so I decided to browse around there. Randomly I went to the Islam section first, and I found that some of the books displayed there were books with title like “Homoseksualitas? Ih… Takut!”, or “Bahaya Darwinisme”, or something like that… I kinda forget the rest of the titles of the book there… I thought… alright, why does these books need to be full of hatred and enmities… I mean… it’s like they see other people’s beliefs with their own personal standards, and impose their standards upon it. When those other believers do not walk hand in hand with the standard that they have, they reject those other beliefs and see them as thread. And why does it so, because these people, these religious people, are so faithfully and strongly believe in their own percepts, their own principles of religion, that they see other beliefs as something that are wrong and inappropriate. And why do they become so faithfully devoted to those principles? Because they see god as the absolute judge who has the absolute right to determine whether they will be given the rewards or the punishments, and as a result of this viewpoint, they want to try to be as faithful as they can so they could have the biggest possibility in attaining the reward that their gods have promised them.
At exactly the same day, when I was still at Gramedia, Ruli called me and told me that some terrorists had bombed London, over 50 innocents people died because of the explosion. When I went home, the news said that not so long after the explosion, there was a report that Al Qaeda officially stated that the bomb was intentionally fired off by them.
And like two days ago, there’s this news that those stupid worthless FPI had destroyed the Ahmadiyah’s site because they think that the Ahmadiyah is ‘sesat’ and dangerous. What despised me more was that because I saw them, with their glorious sorban and gamis and whatever attributes they wear in the name of Islam, looked really proud when they threw stones, destroyed the gates and hurt those Ahmadiyah people…

I think it’s sickening. Well… if god is really the judge, then probably those stupid so-called faithful and religious people are nothing but those little toadies who are trying so hard to lick the god’s boots. That’s if god ever has boots at all. If he does not have one, what’s the point of licking something that does not exist?

-sisie-