Deliverance and Damnation

My friend showed me an interesting brochure which a Christian ‘promoter’ had given him a few days back. Reading through it and listening to the story he relates to me I can’t help but feel disgusted at the notion underlying the basic tenets of certain people. I guess it all has to do with some serious manufactured belief culturing within an area of faux idealism.

It seems many of these religious promoters are under the impression that one can only be saved if one is ‘subscribed’ to a certain religion and the downfall of many others will be their lack to do so. In regards to this man which my friend related to me, he was promoting his idealistic Baptist Church to the masses and informing those that he meets that the only way to true salvation lies in believing in Jesus Christ, i.e. being a member of his congregation.

Being a Catholic myself, I feel utterly disgusted at what some people would tell the masses about religion and salvation or whatever awaits you after you die.
To say that one can only be allowed into heaven if he were Christian would be abnegating everyone from every other religion thus contradicting the most valuable tenet in the teaching of Jesus himself, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’.

Why then are these religious ‘warriors’ belittling a man of another religion and applying arguably forced assimilation upon someone else to accept their religion? And not only so much as Christians, the recent uprising in Islamic radicalism have seen some of these zealots apply this force to the world. Many times we have encountered things or phrases like “We will give you one option, either every one of you convert or we will behead this man/bomb the hell out of you”.

It’s sad sometimes that things like beheadings are done in the name of God, bombings are done for ones religion and murder is committed with a heavenly afterlife in mind. Looking into this matter you can’t help but see that the very essence of the matter is the ‘afterlife’.

Every idiot out there is insecure; people are only bothered about how they are going to be positioned or where they are going to be positioned when they’re dead. Funny thing is no one ever has the knowledge or the foresight to look beyond death yet everyone wants a secure one. Our idea of death has solely been based upon religious doctrines, prophesies, supposed dogmas and a fictional product of man’s imagination. The actual and precise depiction of the afterlife itself has never been equated yet we worry so much about it. (You could argue that someone like Dante may have experienced it but what it to say he was not having hallucinations or induced with mind numbing/altering drugs.)

Returning to my earlier point of the Christian man, he says that reaching Heaven is only possible through the Christian faith. In that sense, a Jewish or a Muslim can be safely assumed to never reach it. What a waste indeed if a Jewish man traveled to Calcutta to feed the poor, and then to war-torn Darfur to provide shelter for the homeless kids and then to Vietnam to curb increasing pedophilia be sent to Hell after he dies. What a waste indeed. While a Christian man who has committed genocide because he thought the world would be a better place without homosexuals is being sent to heaven or what off idiots who kill more than 4000 innocent people by smashing a plane into two towers be granted a place in heaven and be considered a martyr in the eyes of the masses.

Such a matter or statement not only lacks any logical and cohesive explanation but is morally and ethically unsound.

I think it’s about time people stopped promoting their religion and instead started placing their energy and time on their individual lives. This isn’t a question about beliefs or who goes to heaven, this is a question that depends solely on an individuals moral values and rationality. It’s time people stopped making false accusations on another man’s religion and started realizing that good can only come through a collective consensus amongst members of society.

The world is not going to be any different whether you believe in Jesus or Buddha, what instead should be focused on is adequate construction of social norms. Norms that reject racism, that sets bigotry and hatred aside, norms that concur with truth, honesty, freedom and love. I personally think there’s no harm in actually taking the time to learn about another’s religion, no religion can educate a person about all values, so it’s only right that we all take the necessary steps to educate ourselves on the pertinent values favored by various other religions. For example, the perception on temptation is far more detailed and intricate in the teachings of Buddha than in any other religion as well as the disposition on human suffering is detailed very vividly in the book of Iyov in the Torah (Judaism). To add to this, no religion ever proposes negative or ill doings to be done on another man.

So wouldn’t peace and harmony be more attainable if we actually learnt to appreciate the cultural, social and religious evolution of these people instead of abnegating their very existence and placing force upon them to look at things how we perceive things to be.

With regards to the importance people pay to the afterlife, I think you must be a fool to start planning for the afterlife when you still haven’t sorted your present state out. Why must we go on thinking and securing ourselves for a position we know nothing about when it ought to be our duty as living breathing creatures of this world to look into the issues that matter most?

There’s 20 million people with AIDS around the world, people needing desperate help, 4 million children die every year in Africa from starvation, there are hidden genocides taking place around the world, there is evil corporate scheming (pollution/money laundering) taking place right under our noses. To me these are the things that matter most, instead of signing a document to be a Christian, people should be signing a petition or a cheque to help save lives and ensure a better future for the generations to come.

Death is not to be worried about now, it is life that needs action. Death should only be looked at as being a reward, a reward for leading a wholesome and altruistic life.

In my context, given the opportunity to be an atheist, help a blind man cross a street and devote myself to helping abandoned kids and rape victims only to be destined to go to Hell, I think I would rather go to Hell knowing that while I was alive I made a difference for someone.

To quote Serj Tankian who wrote:

“The world lives life according to death, Rather than death in accordance to life”


* The photograph above features Cardiff Buddhist Centre and St. Peter's Church next to it. Co-existing for a better existence.