I was travelling with one of my chinese friend to pondicherry. He is an quality systems auditor and lives in suzhou. I took him first to the manakula vinayagar kovil, he was wondering at the temple’s architecture, especially the idol of vinayagar amazed him (elephant head and human body). Obviously, in the temple he has seen other gods also (murugar, sivan, parvathy, Vishnu etc) and asked me about them. I explained him about the God’s Family Tree as he demanded. After that he thought for a long time and asked me a question which I couldn’t instantly answer “why you people have so many gods and which god is the best”. Then I took him to Sir Aurbindo Ashram and then to Chruch of the Sacret Heart of Jesus and few other places.
While returning back from pondicherry we were discussing about the man, his beliefs and its manifestation. We tried to understand the origin of religion, who created religion, which was the first god on earth, how deism has spread through out the world. Indians predate Hinduism, Egyptians predate Judaism, Muslim predate Islam, Christians predate Christianity and so on. Still some researchers argue that animism is the oldest form of religion.
Though the humanity is evolved from animals, human has got a unique feeling, emotions, cognitive process and behavioural pattern. One of his unique talent is imagination and visualization, using that he created god and religion. You would’ve witnessed that all gods will reflect the physique, food habits and culture of particular set of people he belongs to.
“Anxiety relief ” is the basic attitude of human, he always try to seek solution (in any form) to relieve himself from the anxiety. The ancient human were wondered about the different things happening with in and around him. The birth/death, ageing, change of season cycles, daily motion of the sun and stars etc. He couldn’t able find the right answer for it and developed anxiety because of it. Finally he came to a conclusion that there is some power controlling the entire world and named it as God. May be it is because of incapability to imagine something beyond god.
Importantly human doesn’t have 100% faith in himself in facing his day to day challenges in this world of uncertainty. The lack of belief in himself created worry and anxiety within him to get rid of that, he transferred his responsibility to an superhuman or supernatural power which could save him from all his worriers and failures. The act of transferring his responsibility to the super natural power gave him a great psychological relief. That’s why man takes credit for all his successes and blames god for all his failures.
I think man is very much aware of the concept that “nothing comes for free”. He would’ve got a kind of guilty feeling of accepting huge benefits freely from god. It also scared him that god may get angry on him because of the lack of ROI (return on investment). So he created rituals and developed SOP (stand operating procedures) for executing those rituals. He found an astounding mechanism to keep the god happy,i.e.sacrifice. The sacrifices are of two types one is sadistic, killing other animals such as roosters, lambs, calfs and other human beings, the other type is machoistic (self suffering) fasting, giving hair, fire walk, piercing rituals,etc.
Those rituals had begun in a harmless manner and manifested in to dangerous and violent sacrifices. The amount of sacrifices is directly proportional to one’s guilty feeling to that of the amout of his expectations from god. Gradually he addicted to it , man, god and rituals became inseparable. You will be wondering why a follower of a particular religion is not accepting the other religion. Since human is has developed all his faith in his own god, its very tough for him to deny, it would create him lot of anxiety and pain, so he will never listen to anything which to try to preach against his belief.Freud called it as defence mechanism. We deny many things in our real life instantly without proper investigation, if some one tell us that our son or daughter is a drug addict is a smoker/drunkard, immediately we reply “no I wont believe” but the real meaning is “no I don’t want to believe” because I cant bear the truth. The similar psychology applies in religious beliefs also.
Apart from all of that the good thing about religion and god is that it gives lot of confidence to human being for their growth and prosperity. The ability of risk taking, facing challenges, coping up with failures, bravery, altruism and many other good habits of human beings were mainly fostered by the religious beliefs. The religions serve a psychological medicine for most of human’s problems and gives positive attitude to go ahead with the life. The problem occurs only the when the man treats the religion as his possession and kill the other religion human being to protect his ego. The worst part is man got addicted more to the imaginary world, procedures and rituals which he created for god than the god itself. Religions were always good for the one who follows it with out losing his consciousness.
