Monday, June 1, 2009

When in Rome ...screw God !!!

There are two things that have happened since I came to Germany ...One I have watched youtube too much and I have been to Rome.

Two disconnected things that some how fell together when I was on the Plane back from Rome.

An introduction is due. The youtube videos I had been lapping up were the religious ones ..sometimes pleading..sometimes threatening and sometimes outright funny. Infact I have always benn amused by such religious videos. I can spend hours infront of Quran TV or Sanskar TV ....because nothing amuses me more than religion. I am highly entertained by serious people getting so damn serious about something so hillarious.

Anyway how does this relate to Rome? After all Rome is home of Vatican...the seat of the Church. I will come to that , but first a short history of Roman empire. Roman empire was the glory of Europe for 1000 years...shortly it rose for 5oo yrs..peaked for 200 and fell gradually for 300 years... ! All this from 500 BC to 500 AD. Big deal! Quite a big deal indeed !

What actually intrigued me was that all the grand monuments ..achievments in engineering...arts were made during the Rise and Peak time ...at a time when there was supposed to be utter chaos. There were a thousand convinient pagan Gods , the emporor was a God and so were his homosexual lovers, even favorite servants became Gods if the emperor so pleased. There were Games , debaucherry, sex, drugs ..and rock n roll(ok..i got carried away).
In short it was an utterly "sinfull" and "materialistic" place...with no God , no purity and no salvation. Yes it was ....utterly debauched. Yet yet yet..this group of "barbaric" people somehow built aqueducts...around 6000 miles of paved highways, the colloseum and invented advanced engineering. Infact this god-less time coincided with the peak of the empire ...till about 200 AD.

Yes there were lost battles ..killed emperors etc but Roma was the America of its day.

And then Constantine the Roman Emperor ushered in Christianity in 300 AD and within 300 short years Rome lost not only its empire but was relegated to dustbins of history ..till another Godless time began in Renaissance with Da Vinci.

This strangely got me thinking about the corelation between religion and Progress ....I started comparing organised religions rise and rise of civilisational power.
What I found is actually simple and may be too simplistic ..but there is a NEGATIVE corelation.
Example..Egypt(islamic), Mesopotamia(islamic),Rome(christian) etc....!
And the regions which remined largely untouched by falling fortunes were godless ones like China,Russia or people who didnt care like India, IndoChina,Srilanka..(I say Indians are deeply spiritual but non religious..frankly I feel its a culture than a religion. I am thinking hard of an Indian who died solely for his religion..yes the Sikh gurus but few else, compare it with Christian/islamic deaths)

Wherever organised religion took roots ..it ate away at everything . It was as if it fossilised an active culture into passive worship of few "selected" individuals ..who were the middlemen of God/s. No scienc, no culture..only faith.

Why?
Why is religion so corrosive?And why is it so attractive?

I feel that the reasons for both these answers are

1. Religion makes you happy as it tells you in some tiwsted way that you are not responsible for your actions. Yes , God has created you. You did not have a say. Whatever you do or say is Gods will so in a way since you are his product ..u do not owe anything to ur own decisions.

2. Religion gives and indeed promotes a non-questioning mind. Its a strange case where one feels comfortable with easy but wrong(empirical) answers. This is a very powerful incentive because thinking and doubting is hard work..very hard work.

That makes me feel happy in a way for India . Because as a country we are actually becoming more like consumerist and debauched Rome. We are losing our God and maybe concentrating on too many.
Maybe like a few others I see hope for the second rise of our civilisation. Without Gods grace!

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