Jigna Sampat

Dalip Singh Wasan asked:


Religion – a way of devotion

Time has come when all the people on this earth must decide that they shall be having their religion, but they shall not allow religion to enter in their day to day life when then are dealing with people from other religions. They shall be reciting religious books of their own religion and they shall be following all the religious ceremonies, but they shall see that they are not interfering in the religious affairs of others nor they shall try to establish that their religion and its principles are better than the principles of another religion. They shall ensure that their religion is not standing in their way when they are dealing with people of other religions.

If we read and try to understand we shall come to the conclusion that life principles laid down in all the religious books of the world are telling us the same things, though in different languages and in different styles. There is nothing different in any of the religions and that is the reason, all the religions have accepted that there is one and only one God and all the people on this earth are children of the same God and therefore, though in different countries and in different form, they all are members of one and same family. they are not stranger to each other nor any religion says that it is the best religion on the earth and therefore, all the people in different religions should merge in that religion.

Since we have born in a religion and we have been brought up as per norms of that religion, we are having a right to follow those norms and principles till we are alive, there should be none on this earth who should be allowed to stop us from following our own norms. But time has come when we should try to individualize these norms to us and we may read and recite religious books of our own and we may pray as per norms prescribed, but religion should not go beyond that stage. All are our own people and therefore, when we discriminate, hate, kill or stop or convert someone to our own religion, we are not serving our religion, but we are insulting our own religion and we are actually committing a crime, a sin or a misconduct. We should live in this world as members of one family and time has come when we shall have to allow family bonds i.e. marriages between people of different religions. We shall be developing relations beyond friendship and we shall have to see that others are not feeling unsafe when they are with people of another religion.

It is very strange when people are dividing on the basis of religion and it is further strange when countries are being established on the basis of religions. We should be sorry to note that one section of people turning terrorists and the other sets of people are turning rioters. Both are killing the people who are also members of the same family.

Time has come when we should keep our religion as our individual concern and we should start thinking that no religion is in danger and no religion is having supper power and the minorities are their slaves. All are equal and we should see that this equality is maintained. We are heading toward one country and ultimately the people of the3 world shall have to unite in one country and time shall come when the people shall be having one religion and that shall be a common religion ‘humanity’ and we all shall become members of one family. That is the final goal and once that goal is achieved, this world shall become Heaven and none shall long for Heaven beyond this world.

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Dalip Singh Wasan asked:


God and Religion have lost their role

Dalip Singh Wasan, Advocate.

If we go deep into the mind of this man on earth we come to the conclusion that this man on this earth has lost faith in God and he is following a religion in a formal way. Most of the religions and people in those religions have taken up their religions as political units and they have started to surpass the other religions. They are coming with new meanings of their texts and they are telling the people that their religions is telling something which is not available in texts of other religions. Similarly they are coming with stories which are in their mythologies and they are telling us that their prophets were more powerful than prophets in other religions.

In fact that this man has traveled centuries when he firstly declared that there is a God who had created this world, this universe and then this man on this earth. They gave all power to God and then they started worshiping and praying before that God. They had been on this path since centuries and we have seen that this man could not become religious nor he could completely had faith in God and left all his activities to God. We have seen that this man had been praying to God but he never left his own efforts. There had been prayers, but at the same time this man had been at work and we have noted that at most of the times this man had been believing in his own efforts and he was just having some help from the side of God. But he had been successful he never thanked God but had been boasting that he himself had been working hard and that is the reason, he could succeed.

The man had been believing in one of their religions on this earth and he had been hating the people in the other religions and it is on record that people in one religion had been trying to persuade others to join their religion and if they had been powerful they had been forcing conversion and it is also on record that the people who were not agreeing to convert were killed . It is also on record that that the religious places of one religions had been demolished and on those very places the rulers had been constructing religious places of their own religions, though no religious books allows such conversions and such demolitions. All these non-religious acts had been there which clearly means that this man had not been obeying the directions given to them by their prophets.

Today when the man has entered the age of science and technology, he has adopted a new way of life. If they are performing some religious ceremonies these are just formal and they try to establish that their religion is still alive. If we conduct a survey of police stations, the courts and the jails, we shall find people of all the religions and we shall find that they all had been committing crimes, sins and misconducts of the same type irrespective of their religions. When they people commit some crime, sin or misconduct they forget to which religion they belong. Similarly when they commit crimes, sins and misconducts, they forget that God is there and He shall be punishing them. It seems the people have got no real faith in God and in any religion because they had been violating all the norms set by God and by the religions and history is full of crimes, sins and misconducts. No religion and even God could not set this man right. Some wise people, some intellectuals and scholars had been writing down explanations of religious texts and some had been writing books on art of living and we have noted that instead of original texts, the people are liking these new books and new philosophy of life. They are trying to follow this new philosophy and they have started saying that old religions are making us fundamentalists and the present age does not like people who are fundamentalists. There is war between these two sets of people and one has turned terrorists and the other has turned rioter and they both are killing the people of the other wing. The whole world has become Kurkshetra and nobody on this earth is safe. No country is safe and that is the reason most of the time of the people is spent in attacking others and most of the time is spent in saving oneself. No body know that would be the next step of this man on this earth when he shall not be believing in God and in religion.

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Dalip Singh Wasan asked:


Religions do not unite the people

Dalip Singh Wasan, Advocate.

It must be accepted that religions could not unite the people of the world. It must be accepted that this world has been divided on the basis of religions and on the administrative side this world is divided on the basis of countries. All these divisions had been wasting the time of the people and it must be on record that most of the wars and conflicts had been there because of establishment of different religions and because of establishment of different countries. Had there been one world and had there been one religion or no religion at all the people of this world could have avoided all these wars and all these conflicts and more time and energy could have been utilized for the welfare of this man and there were chances that more inventions and discoveries could have been made by this man. And had we traveled on the right direction for these centuries, this world would become Heaven we could have seen God with ***** eyes.

It must be accepted that all religions had been taking birth at different places and that had been the reason names of religions are different. We do not know much about the basic principles which were laid down at the first instance, but if today, we study the religious scriptures, we come to the conclusion that all the religions tell us the same things and there is no difference in principles of the religions. But the religions have divided the people and now we can recognize a person standing before us and we can tell to which religion this man belongs and what are his thoughts about us. We have different places of worship, different books, different thoughts, different haircut, different languages, different clothes and different way of saluting each other. And at the same time we are divided and we feel that the people in other religions are not taking any interest in our welfare. This is the tragedy with this man and now a stage has come where this man is not in a position to shed off all the religions and establish a common religion. There had been some works toward this direction, but none of the efforts could establish one religion.

The man is still going on and they are establishing different sub religions and they are successful. The people who have adopted this way to earn money, they are successful because it is very easy to collect people in these units and then snatch away money from them. People who have entered this profession are successful and have become known people and at the same time, they have collected huge amounts of money and are enjoying life like rich people and like powerful people.

At present the position is more dangerous because most of the major religions have established themselves and they are at war with each other simply because they are different. All the religions have started establishing themselves and they are constructing big buildings and are collecting all mythology around their religions. They have appointed scholars to dig out mythology and history concerning their religion and they are in competition with each other. People in one religion are telling us that they are the first in finding out real God and they are also saying that they are more powerful only because they belong to that particular religion and others are weak because they belong to another weak and false religion. People are trying to establish that people in their religion are the right persons and people in other religions are false, wrong and unreligious people.

So if the present trends go on, there are chances this world shall be divided into Muslims, Christians and Hindus and there are chances the next division of this world would be based on these three religions and there are chances that all the countries shall be merged religions-wise and there shall be three groups, three countries in the world and there are chances that there should be an upheaval as had happened when Hindustan was divided in 1947 into India and Pakistan in which 8,00,000 people had been killed and atleast 11,00,00,000 had been uprooted and migrated to unknown places. The wise people of the world should sit together and they should try to establish one religion which should be common to all and the present division on the basis of religions should go. Otherwise this world created by God shall turn Hell and we all shall suffer in it.

Amlan Roychowdhury asked:


                                            Religion And Fanaticism

26/11 Mumbai was under siege, some 20 odd young men brandishing AK 47 rifles went on a killing spree at a busy railway station, and five stars hotels killing hundreds. This incident brings back memories of the now infamous 9/11 where a handful of highly motivated, misguided souls took controls of aircrafts and banged into the World Trade Center destroying it completely and killing thousands. These incidents again make us realize how susceptible we are in the face of such terror activities, where a group of highly trained and motivated people inflict so much pain and agony to the innocents. The very fact that the actors who perpetrate these acts are ready to die makes them more dangerous, because the very fear of death, the ultimate fear, itself is absent from their psyche and hence they can go to any extent to inflict terror in the minds of people, or they can go to any extent to get the authorities to bend on their knees. The very pertinent example would be the Hijack of Indian Airlines Flight IC 864 to Afghanistan. Their ( Of the hijackers, who were mainly terrorist from Pakistan owing allegiance to Taliban ) demand from the then Indian Government was to get their 20 operatives released from various jails that they were put in and Indian Government had to give in to their pressures as lives of 265 innocent Indians were at stake. The Pilots of the United Airlines aircrafts very well knew that their lives will be snuffed in seconds when they saw the world trade center getting larger and larger in front of their wind screens. Their psychology was so strong that with the knowledge of their death in seconds they kept flying straight into World Trade Center.

Unfortunately majority of such terrorist activities are perpetrated by the religious fanatics of Islam. Such tendencies are not limited to Islam alone but it is seen mostly in the abhramic religion ie Islam Christianity and Judaism. I urge my readers not to misunderstand me as I revere all religion as no religion in the world tells its followers to go and kill in the name of religion. In its essence and origin, Islam is a religion of mercy and peace, of kindness and tolerance, and of knowledge and enlightenment; it is not a religion of violence, fanaticism and ignorance.

What happens is that because of a miniscule group of misguided souls the entire religion and the followers of it suffers. The pain that a innocent Muslim goes through when their religion becomes the center stage of any terrorist activity is very evident in the following article written by a Muslim devout in Khalij Times. I reproduce that letter verbatim for my readers.

“Khaleej Times: No Time to Hide for Muslims by Aijaz Zaka Syed (View from Dubai )

  Every time innocents are targeted in the name of Islam around the world, one can’t face one’s non-Muslim friends and colleagues.  I feel like burying myself in the ground.  Growing up in a religious family, one never thought one would see the day when being a Muslim could be a source of shame.

A distraught friend who has devoted her life to speaking and fighting on behalf of Arabs and Muslims wrote in yesterday saying “I’ve had it with the Arabs and Muslims and Islamic militancy. Forgive me but I am throwing in the towel.”

I couldn’t write back to her but understood her pain…  She grew up in Mumbai and is understandably upset.

My friend went on to say: “The Muslims and Islam have a problem and only they can solve it.  If they do not, the whole world will turn against them.”

Can you blame the world if it’s turning against Muslims? What do you expect when not a single day passes without the name of our faith being dragged through the mud by fellow believers around the world?

Is this what Islam and the noble Prophet teach and stand for?

It’s all very well for us to say Islam has nothing to do with extremism and terrorism.  We can go on deluding ourselves these psychopaths do not represent us.

However, the world finds it hard to accept this line of argument because it sees the extremists increasingly assert themselves and take the centre-stage while the mainstream Islam remains silent.” 

 Religion seems to offer a particularly fertile matrix, in which fanaticism can grow, is religious belief itself the cause of fanaticism? Or is religion simply one of many catalysts that can transform desperation into extremism? We might find the answers in the teachings of the Founders of the world’s major religious systems. What do they say about fanaticism and religious zeal? Did they espouse it or promote it? And if not, where does it come from?

Some particularly sharp insights may be found in the Bahá’í Writings. Bahá’u'lláh clearly condemned fanaticism of all kinds. In a statement that seems to foreshadow our times, He wrote:

Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench. The Hand of Divine power can, alone, deliver mankind from this desolating affliction.

(Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 13

Religion itself breeds fanatics. If the teachings of the Manifestations of God had been followed, fanaticism would never have taken root within the religions they established. We can say this because fanaticism and hatred are so clearly contrary to their explicit teachings. It uses religion as a tool to further aims that have nothing to do with true religion. If we use a hammer to open a jar, we’re going to destroy the jar. Hammers are not meant for opening jars, and they are powerful enough tools to do considerable damage when misused. Religion is one of the most potent forces known to humanity. Misused, it is capable of doing correspondingly great damage.

Why do the fanatics succeed? The answer lies in a short story. A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, Owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he

said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were

too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the ***** were a

bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen.

Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and

the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up

in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories. The essence of this story is simple. The terrorists are very small in number but they are very cohesive. Their negative attitude is cohesive as well. Therefore they can inflict so much pain. The good and peace loving people are much much larger in number but are not cohesive at all and hence their positivity and goodness does not percolate down the society. The fanatics are so cohesive that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are

gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of **** victims and

homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to

become ******* bombers. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians , Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, Indians including Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

Each religion brings out its own doctrines and insists upon them as being the only true ones. And not only does it do that, but also it thinks that he who does not believe in them must go to some horrible place. Some will even draw the sword to compel others to believe as they do. This is not through wickedness, but through a particular disease of human brain called fanaticism. They are very sincere, these fanatics, the most sincere of human beings; but they are quite as irresponsible as other lunatics in the world. This disease of fanaticism is one of the most dangerous of all diseases. All the wickedness of human nature is roused by it. Anger is stirred up, nerves are high strung, and human being becomes like tigers.”

Thus faith turns into fanaticism. The communal frenzy erupts and religious wars are fought with ensuing mass destruction and chaos. There is no doubt that more blood is shed on religious wars and persecution than on any other cause. But this is no fault of an individual. It is the evolutionary weakness. It is not a crafty design of one individual, or one particular religion. Our inability to convert faith into the knowledge of direct perception (of the truths as preached by the religious seers) is responsible for this. The mammal in us is still strong; we have as yet failed to evolve as complete human beings.

When a person embodies values like spiritual wisdom, purity of heart, qualities of universal love and altruism, we call him a saint or a sage. Sometimes such a person contributes to the welfare of humanity in such a great measure that he is referred to as God -the founder of a religion. Such examples are Sri Krishna, Jesus Christ, Lord Buddha, Mahavir, Guru Nanak, Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and many more. The list is unending; we encounter such great souls in every religion of every continent and in every era.  These great souls have intuitive knowledge of oneness of human race. Their intuition is based on their experience or realization and conforms to rationality and reason. They speak from the experience of realization of Divinity acquired after transcending the limitations of body-mind complex. They have the direct knowledge of Reality. Millions of followers of these saints intellectually and emotionally grasp their message of love and compassion; but cannot claim to have experienced these values as direct knowledge. They believe in what the saints say.

None of the saints or their religion preaches hatred and killing. Every religion preach that humankind is a single family and the earth its common homeland. There is no place for fanaticism or the fanatics.

Dalip Singh Wasan asked:


One God one Religion

Dalip Singh Wasan, Advocate.

All the people in this world accept that there is one and only one God and we all are the children of the same one God and therefore, we are not different, but members of one and same family. This admissions is just formal because where-ever we go we find the people divided in religions, in castes, in economic groups, in sub castes and in countries and at the same time we find that the people are not one but they think differently, they eat differently, they speak differently and they wear on clothes differently just to establish that they are not one with all, but they are different people. And the whole history of this mankind is written with the ink of blood of this man. At each stage of history of this mankind they had been at war with each other and they had been killing the people just to establish that their religion is better and is more stronger, their country is great and more powerful and we had noted in history that there had been forced conversions and people of one religion had been demolishing religious places of other religions and similarly they had been destroying religious books of other religions. One set of people had been trying to establish that they were great and the people from the other side had been declaring that the people killed were great martyrs. Though no religion approved all these killings, yet there had been killings and therefore, we should accept that this man could not understand the real meaning of religion and he just befooling others that he is a religious person. We have noted that people of one religion are trying to wear such clothes and cutting their hairs in such a style that they should distinguish themselves separately and should not mix with others. And hence this family of God could not remain one house or home, but it is now divided into different countries, different religions, different castes, different economic groups and the like and all are trying to establish that they are better or the best from the others.

So the concept of one God one religion is no more in operation and we must accept that the stage on which this mankind has reached, it would not allow the people to establish one religion for all the people i.e. a common religion nor we shall be having a common economic standard for all on this world. People who are stronger shall be looting the people who are weak and therefore, one set of people shall be turning rich and the other set of people shall be reduced to poverty. This division of this mankind into two economic groups is more dangerous because this division shall further separate one group from the other. The rich group shall be established their own colonies and the people from the weaker sections shall be constrained to establish their separate colonies and the whole social life shall be divided amongst rich and poor. This mankind shall be having further divisions on these economic groups i.e. the rich shall be having some grades and similarly the poor shall also be having sections on the same lines as the people are divided on the basis of religions, castes and then sub castes. There seems no stage at which stage the people shall be becoming one and one only. The division of this mankind shall go further and there seems no end to this division and that is the reason they shall be dividing God in different parts. The concept of one God is gone because it is on books and in real and practical life, this man has already divided God into different parts and even God Himself shall not be able to unite Himself into one. We have seen this division since centuries and had there been a powerful God, He could have united Himself into one. But it is not so. There are divisions and now these divisions are becoming permanent and we must accept that there shall be another world war between the two religions and one religion shall try to finish the people of the other religion. Let us see who wins this war, but the war is very near and everybody in these both the religions is trying to become stronger so that they could establish their victory.

If God is one and one only, then God should come down and establish one religion throughout this world and the division on the basis of different religions, castes, sub castes and countries should stop and this mankind should be turned into one family and only then the wish of God shall be fulfilled. The man shall get more time to discover and invent and this earth of us shall turn a Heaven and we shall not be praying for another Heaven after our death. But God is not accepting our prayer and the division of this mankind is still going on and we do not know the end of this division. There is nothing in the hands of this mankind because all efforts made update have failed and none could join all the religions into one religion. Till these religions and sub religions are there, even God shall not be able to establish Himself into one. God has already divided into parts and that is the reason God has become weaker. Even God Himself is not giving the right direction to this man. The man is going astray and is turning this earth into a real Hell. God must stop this man because God never wished that this earth should be a living Hell and all the people on this earth should turn Devils or followers of the Devil.

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