HUMANITY: OUR FIRST RELIGION - Sharlene Lobo

 

 

 

HUMANITY - OUR FIRST RELIGION

Rabindranath Tagore in his Gitanjali quotes, “Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?” Friends, if God is light, then why do we fight for darkness? Truly I say to you, ‘Humanity and Love are above all religions!

God made humans

And stamped him with supremacy.

We became supreme

But fell in human values.

 

As I contemplate over this topic, I’m reminded of my grandfather’s words, he used to say, “I walk in the darkness and sense the rising dust kicked up by the swagger of a creature following me. It cloaks me with a robe of conceit and disdain and shows me a path. I walk and walk until I reach a battlefield. I put on an armour of hate and carry a sword of cruelty. It instructs me to fight. Fight if you want to live, fight if you want to be heard, fight if you want to be right, fight if you want to win and reign supreme. And the brawl begins. There’s noise, there’s chaos, wailing and sobbing. Fire and smoke and violence. And in the horizon dimmed by rising smoke and spraying blood I turn behind to see that creature and indeed it was the shadow of religion."

Folks, this is not fiction, it is the story of life; the story of lament; the story of every warrior lured by anarchists; the story of every survivor of communal riots that have plagued India since independence. Someone rightly said – The third World War will be the war of religions and the first one to lose is humanity.

Humanity begins with ‘human’. Ironically, as a human being, I have never truly fathomed the notion of ‘being human’. I come from a race that has plundered, pillaged, tortured, slaughtered, raped and murdered its very own members in the name of God and justice. I call it blasphemy. The Holy Bible, the sacred Gita, The holy Quran, Sikhism’s Guru Granth Sahib and all the holy books of the world affirm the tenets of love, peace and brotherhood. Every religion proclaims humanity. If this is not what we’re following then I think we’re following only one religion, ‘The religion of Savagery’.

Water is sacred to every religion. It purifies and cleanses us. But when we’re fighting between life and death it’s not water that saves us but the blood of a fellow human that resembles ours. Indeed, the blood of humanity is thicker than the water of any religion. Wouldn’t it be right to say then, that we’re related more by blood than religion?

In hard times, religious followers will sympathize by offering money, but the followers of humanity will empathize by offering their ‘own’ selves. Empathy springs out of love and equality. Respect every other living being in a way you would want to be respected. The least we can do to sustain humanity is stand up for what is morally right, in our own microcosmic space and consciousness. The least we can do is cultivate, nourish and sustain reason, justice and morality in its pristine form.

Friends, I do not proclaim myself as the forbearer of a revolutionary humanism. Neither am I defaming religion, I ‘am’ immortalizing humanity. I think it’s time to stop behaving like selfish human beings and start being selflessly human. If only we could pledge to consciously jettison this archaic reasoning, which chooses to subjugate a few in the name of religion then maybe there will be an answer to the question, ‘What is it to be human?’