godmen | Confessions of a Disquisitive Writer

Ridicule of religion

August 1, 2013 3 Comments

Why is it that when Charles Darwin, the genius who changed the world with his discovery of the concept of evolution, is made into a cartoon by attaching his head to the body of a monkey and when jokes are made and repeated by people in religious authority, nobody from the scientific community or science “followers” gets angry or violent or even remotely offended? But at the same time, utter anything against a religious figure, such as even a self-proclaimed godman, and you can be sure that people are going to get deeply offended, become violent, damage public property and even kill other people.

I think the difference here is what your belief system teaches you. Publicly, religion says it teaches tolerance and that without this tolerance the world wouldn’t survive. But privately, what it really teaches is to tolerate people only as long as they do exactly what you would like them doing and stray no further. Since birth, people are taught to revere their religious beliefs, which they don’t even understand properly, and blindly follow everything that is told to them.

For instance, if any other person proclaims himself to be highly religious or a godman, then everything he says must be taken as words of perfect wisdom. It doesn’t matter who these godmen are, how many times their acts of con are exposed (as in the case of Sathya Sai Baba), how low their educational and intellectual levels are (such as ISKCON’s Srila Prabhupad). The moment you mention examples of their ignorance, religious people get deeply offended and shut their ears but their dedication to such ungodly people continues despite what you say.

But have you ever heard a scientist or an atheist pelting a single stone towards any of these con-men despite their horrendous world-views?

You know why?

Because education gives you the maturity to ignore when people deserve your ignorance and pit evidence of all sides against each other and dismiss that which cannot hold its ground. No need to get angry if the same godman as above is making a fool out of themselves by saying that the “…moon is above, 200,000 yojanas above the sun… Above the sun. How they’ll go? [laughter] They are going to the wrong… bluffing only. I am repeatedly saying, they have never gone, simply bluff.”

Well, I only take offense to one thing in the above dialog. And that is that the laughter belongs to the listener and not the speaker.

And I challenge any religious followers to tell me I am wrong in laughing at the ignorance of such statements and the people who make them.

Filed under Atheism, Pseudoscience, Religion Tagged with atheism, Belief, faith, fraud, godmen, ISKCON, prabhupada, pseudoscience, Religion, sathya sai baba

Insulting Nirbhaya; Insulting Women

January 7, 2013 5 Comments

Today, another frivolous insult has been hurled at the dead daughter of India, Nirbhaya, who was brutally gang-raped on 16th December 2012 in New Delhi. Today, the man in the limelight is an uneducated, unscientific but prominent self-proclaimed godman called Asaram Bapu.

This man has had the audacity to claim that the 23-year-old was herself equally responsible for what happened to her. Why? Because he thinks she should have “begged to the rapists to spare her,” and “should have immediately accepted them as brothers” so that the brotherly spirit in the men was invoked and they would have spared her.

Have you ever heard anything as outrageous as this remark? Who is this man? What are his credentials? Is he a psychologist? Is he a social scientist? None. He is just another fraud who calls himself a godman and just happens to enjoy the unquestioning following of a section of believers of Hinduism. Otherwise, he is nothing.

Which brings me to the main point that compelled me to write this post in the first place. Here is an example of how religious people take their beliefs so seriously that they do not bother who they follow. For believers, having faith in EVERYTHING is a virtue. Questioning ANYTHING is a sin. So, for decades, this man claims to provide moral guidance to thousands who flock to his satsangs (religious gatherings) leaving their homes at the drop of a hat. People follow him, and many others like him, blindly and dreaming of salvation and of achieving God. But why is it that in order to achieve God, man needs to become intellectually blind? Why do the masses not question the moral standards of who they follow?

Today, this man has exposed his dirty standard of his thinking and I am sure a large number of people must have opened their eyes to this. But I think this will only get worse in the future because the most reliable way to really fool innocent people into following you is to flaunt the religion card. People don’t care whether someone is educated enough or not, literate enough or not, has any morals or not. They just care if that someone invokes religion enough.

So, it doesn’t matter if you have to insult a dead girl, so long as you use religion to cover it up. After all, don’t all religions already treat women as objects of man’s desire only? Do I even need to give any examples at all? So, how can we expect anything moral from people who claim to be living lives of devotion, abstinence and forbearance but when you really look at them you find they travel in the most expensive and luxurious cars, have the richest ashrams and temples in their “trusts” and the same ashrams become the source of most horrific crimes, like the murders of numerous children that came as revelations out of the ashrams of the same godman as mentioned above.

If we really care for the spirit of Nirbhaya, what we need is change, not only of laws and administrations, but also of standards of our own conduct in our lives relating not only to what we do to others, but also who we follow.

For the good of society, our country and specially, our women, who have the right to just as much independence as men, we must recognize and follow, against all odds, our own inner moral compass.