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Friday, March 13, 2015

Politics and Religion. Bias, Beliefs and Bans

In every issue there are unanswered general attitudinal problems.

It is high time that BJP delinks itself from the fanatic fringes of RSS brigade otherwise it will prove as costly and as destructive as for Congress hanging  on to the apron strings Nehru family  or the left lingering in its 16th century slogans.

Brevity is neither my forte nor my favorite form. So here goes my reply.

Most politicians and religious leaders of all hues and parties are soaked in superficiality, showmanship, sycophancy and pander to pseudo and parochial populist schemes. They are churned out of some such socio-cultural bias or ideological and organizational compulsions. Such people always resort to executing wrong priorities under pressure and execute them without the necessary diplomacy, delicacy and hypocrisy of a seasoned missionary.

So nothing comes forth from them only froth.

The populace which hoisted them into power and position laps up the bubbles of this froth. It is vicious circle where certain imagined identity is ideologically acquired and most people are vulnerable victims to this unconscious vicious circle. Once they are into it they suffer from identity crisis. This is how both politics and religions exercise  command and control over many. 

One creates beliefs while the other policies and  both are euphemisms to block individuals from rational thinking.

They fail to differentiate between the chaff and grain; they mistake the symbols for substance; some scratch the surface of the symbols and claim it as great and new interpretation like Devadutt   Patnaik does and it is interesting to read because he unravels the bridge between the symbols and substance with lot of erudition and solid academic reference work but too much of labored interpretations.

Anyone who grasps even an iota of the great nectar of substance/intrinsic value would stop dabbling in any debates or discussion and if at all they do it would only be enlightening like the philosophical probing of Ramana Maharishi, JK, Swami Vivekananda, Bertrand Russell, Sri Aurobindu etc.

Coming to the specific issue of ban on beef here based on these above observations it is not at all surprising that some politicians act very foolishly at times and it sets people into debates for and against.

It is a common malady of human species as a whole to misinterpret scriptures and misuse them out of context or beyond their contextual validity [we all must remember that religious scriptures too have an expiry date] abuse, misuse ideological inhibitions and insinuations. But it becomes a social problem when such misinterpretations are enforced on others.

I am a vegetarian I have never tasted even omelet and mostly avoid even cakes. I have a spontaneous genetic rejection towards anything that is not vegetarian. However, I am not a pure vegetarian, no one on earth is. We all swallow our saliva which is not vegetarian. Whenever we open our mouth or breath we inhale many microbes…

If going by the commonly misunderstood notions of vegetarianism, if the whole world turns vegetarians then the fish will breed so much that  sea water will submerge most of the coastal land.
What are going to do to those who are habituated to eat beef? What are you going to do to those who made their livelihood by selling beef? Where will you house those bulls which were hitherto consumed by so many? Do you have shelters for them?

What is violence? Who is to decide it? Killing and war has been very well justified in our scriptures in specific contexts. Most developments of the world have taken place out of violence and its manifestations.

Some gems on violence and non-violence from Jiddu Krsihnamurti

“We human beings are what we have been for millions of years — colossally greedy, envious, aggressive, jealous, anxious and despairing, with occasional flashes of joy and affection. We are a strange mixture of hate, fear and gentleness; we are both violence and peace.”
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. Freedom From the Known. 1969.

“Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence. When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you know why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
– Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, pp 51-52

Many more here :

On war and killing

Over emphasis, for wrong reasons, on our past glory and quoting our scriptures to either justify anything and everything or patting ourselves

The problem of having to deal with an enemy within

The need to move ahead


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