The enigma of religion

  I always thought of religion as a set of rules to follow for one's mental and spiritual well-being..It doesn't matter which set one chooses to follow from the myriad options, as the ultimate goal is the same for all of them..

    I totally fail to understand how religion has become an overwhelming presence in every aspects of life..Especially when one's religion is just a random probability, that is beyond one's control..As far as I see we are in a certain religion because our parents were born in that religion.. Any attempt to choose one's religion is not accepted lightly..So, once you are born in a religion, you are imprisoned in it.. There are people who set rules for the general good for that category, assuming that what they think appropriate is applicable to everyone else.

    I sometimes wonder what they think the divine selection is like? Do the Supreme God creates human beings and roll a dice to see to which group the new life should be induced into? Or He/ She just puts the new life into a particular box in some divine order? Or are there separate Gods creating new lives for different religions, but follow the same sets of rules for creation so that their creations cannot be segregated if they are not wearing their religious symbols? I'm totally confused..

   Another paradox is that all the holy books talk about humanity and love in general, but those are the two things people don't bother to follow at all..May be it is people's obsession with categories that is making them believe that those rules are only applicable within their category..

   May be this obsession with categories is in-built in our species called homo sapiens..

In the same religion we make subcategories and start the rhetoric about how one's category is better than others..

We are hopeless miserable souls indeed.

Preetha Raj