Religion as a tool for socialisation

Recently, I had a good talk with a person who often comes to local temple, here in Southampton. He has already been retired from and spends almost every evening at temple. What I noticed about him was that, although he helps a priest a lot for arranging prayers and keeping temple clean and tidy, I never saw him praying to god and just sits around and chats with people.

I was enthusiastic about his opinions about god and wanted to know whether he believes in god or not. So, I asked him whether he believes in god or not. I was expecting negative answer. But, surprisingly, he told me that he does believe in god but doesn’t like to pray or bow his head to god that something typical devotees do. In order to explain this behaviour, he told me that he sees religion, at least Hinduism, as a tool for socialisation. We had a good talk and I grasped few of his views on religion believes.

At the time of when Hinduism was formed, according to him, people were depressed, only self oriented and society as a whole were near collapse. Clever people from that time met to discuss the situation and decided to act together by creating new thing, called a religion. They became Monks (Sadhus) and built temples all around the places. Their aim was to start people getting socialised again and in order to do that people have to travel around and meet new persons. Hence, those monks built temples at the top of mountains, in jungles, near rivers, etc so that when people visit those places for religion purpose they can also see the beauty of nature and learn new culture around those places.

If people understand this way of thinking and take this positively, it may help us again to build the society. Right now, societies, in India and in Britain and in some other parts of the world as well, are collapsing. I believe we are not spending enough time to get socialised anymore and seeing religion places as tools by monks for making money. But, a person doesn’t have to give any money to these places or he has to believe in god in order to go to church or temple. If a person doesn’t believe in god, even he should go to church or temple and try to interact with people, understand culture around religion places, take positive things from priests and give something back to the society either by some volunteering work or by sharing things with others in which he is good at.

Influence on us by people around us

As we grow old from child to an adult person, people around influence us. When a child is born, he/she doesn’t have any name, religion, identity, etc. That’s up to his/her parents to give all necessary identity and put him/her into the society. For a kid, most significant impact comes from parents. Kid learns good and bad things from parents very quickly. By knowing or unknowingly, parents influence enforce religion, believes, behaviours, habits, etc and as child doesn’t have enough power to understand or oppose, he/she will accept most of these things.

When we become old enough to understand, we generally learn new things from friends, teachers, relatives and brothers/sisters. If any of these persons have any bad habits like smoking, drugs, drinking, etc, there are chances of getting these into a person’s habits, too. Its only when we start getting understanding of life and start learning new things by ourselves we start influencing people around us.

It will depend on how strong that is. I have seen people who do not have any idea about real life situations and they have survived because of good friends and relatives around him/her. When this protection has been removed from the person, I have seen these people struggling a lot to cope up with everyday challenges.

I think person’s characteristic depends upon religion and/or philosophical believes. In Indian culture, generally, parents’ religion is imposed on child. Parents generally do not give any freedom to child to believe in different religion or follow his/her own philosophy based upon his/her own understanding. Most of the time, this believe pass-on goes undetected because by the time child has grown up, all those believes are also embedded into his/her mind. But when this doesn’t happen, family sees chaotic atmosphere in the relationships and even division in the family. Should we give more freedom to a child to choose his/her religion when he/she grew up and not that of what parents believes?

Curiosity

We, the people, had born with curiosity in our nature. Some of us have curiosity about technology, engineering, business, etc while others have more interests towards arts, history, life science etc with different level of it at each topic. Because of curiosity in our nature, we ask questions to ourselves and always try to find answers of those questions.

But what I have noticed in teenagers surrounding me that they are not that much inquisitive to normal day-to-day things. These youngsters are able to use mobile phones easily and spends hours on internet chatting with their friends, but they do not have any clue how normal things work. Or may be they do not have to worry about it?

Engineers and scientists of one generation ahead of us have created world around us in which we live today. This world is very simple to live in and hence sometimes people, including me, take most of things as granted. But, I still ask questions to people around me or to myself if I am not able to understand working pattern of simple things. This inquisitiveness is lacking in young generation. They haven’t got any clue how to replace a punctured tire in the bicycle, which bus to use in-order to go to town hall, how to replace a mains fuse, etc which are the things which I remember doing very easily even at my early teenage life.

I think its our partial fault that we not encouraging kids around us to learn new things. May be we do not want them to ask questions to us while we are relaxing in the weekend. But, in order to preserve our and next generations future, we have to do something right now.

The ultimate goal of biological science

One of the topics that is in discussion in general public is Stem Cell research. Recently, Glasgow, Scotland, based Institute has announced that they have received permission from Government to pursue their research into Stem Cell use them for stroke and blindness. This has caused some frustration among those who opposes this idea.

This is not a new research topic. Scientists are trying to find answers about complex human body structure and their ultimate aim is to create Cloned Human body which will have no genetics disorder. Are they trying to replace nature by technology?

Personally, I am a supporter of both the ideas when they are used separately. But, when we will combine those two to create a perfect body, which will have no diabetes, no cancer, no genetical irregularities, no complex physical problems, etc, we are going against the nature. With the help of Stem Cell research we will be able to help disabled people by giving them normal life. With the help of human cloning, we might be able to "generate" people in laboratories who can go to other planets in long space missions where normal human body may be subject to more difficulties than cloned body.

But, as this has happened before with other technologies, once we will achieve success in human cloning, we will lose control over who and when should use this technology. In my opinion, let general public decide whether they support these kinds of research and upto what level government should be involved over control of the technology.