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The Origin of Religions.
Animals have no religions and intelligence is the dividing line between the two species. Religions are a product of the thinking faculty of man. The Origin of Religions tries to visualise what actually might have happened in this spiritual area ages back but does not stop at that. It presents a macro view of major world religions touching issues like their relevance or role. Curiosity about the Creator started making inroads into human mind as soon as intelligence sprouted in it. Early man thought various elements and forces of nature as instruments of awe that he tried to propitiate as gods. When he felt that there was some mysterious power managing things from behind the scenes, he took the final step from gods to God. The credit for discovering Him conceptually goes to Judaism and Hinduism. Possibly the Hebrew God Yahweh and Aryan Om were born in man’s consciousness around the same time. Jews thought of Yahweh as a sort of regional God, whereas Hindus visualised Him as the Universal God who belonged to everybody in equal measure. Jerusalem and the lands around have cradled three great Semitic religions of the World — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Bible of the Jews (The Old Testament) is a sacred scripture for the Christians. The New Testament and Koran are peculiar to the Christians and Muslims alone. Judaism does not recognise the New Testament though Christians accept the Old Testament as a part of their Bible. The exclusive approach of the Jews has deprived them of the glory that was theirs for the asking. The ferocious crusades of the cross and the crescent followed. It must go to the credit of Hinduism that it has been much less jealous about its dogma. Budhism and Jainism were born with quite some rebellious content in their ideologies. Yet their heresies were viewed with equanimity and defeated by owning them as a part of Hindu faith. Karkra sees Sikhism as a faith of hope and cheer, radiating a message that is simple, reducing mountains of philosophies and rituals to a mole hill. Among the faith profiles of the Far-East, the book offers a glimpse of ideologies of Confucius and Lao Tzu. The author laments the propensity of common man to believe that his religion is superior to that of others and resultant ambition of converting others to his own. Religious conversions through force, fraud or allurements rather than genuine change of heart cannot be justified. Nobody has a right to push any faith down the unwilling throat. The relationship between the seer and the scientist demarcates the territories of religion and science. It has been analysed in the light of developments in diverse fields such as digitising the brain, replicating consciousness, creation of synthetic cell, injection of computer generated artificial DNA into bacterial cells and past-life regression therapy. As a result of these, a vast swathe of religious turf has passed on to science. Yet religion has and will retain a lot of space to operate. The mystic spell of religion has a magnetism which can hardly be ignored. The world would have been a drier place, if not totally unlivable, without religion. The discovery of God is thus the best thing that has happened to mankind. However the tendency of religion to close doors on freshness of outlook and adding communal dimension to it creates problems. People forget that universal God cannot be a captive God. Paranoid believers are behind most of the violence perpetrated in His name. A vengeful man tries to visualise God in his own little image, resulting in intolerance, cruelty and
bigotry. Karkara’s balance sheet points out that religion has a safe future.
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