Distinguishing religion and entertainment

Unfortunately, at various stages of my life, I have come across many people who falls under one of the below types.

1. The people who want only entertainment in religion

2. The people who find only sacrifice in religion

3. The people who don’t care about religion

The reason I say it as an ‘unfortunate thing’ as it makes the society very intolerant. I will make a daring attempt to highlight the problems associated with each type and where our society needs to make adjustments.

A religion loses its seriousness when it becomes a mode of entertainment for its followers. And a religion which has lost its seriousness fails to receive respect from the people of other religions. Essentially, religions were created to provide guidance on spirituality and to develop harmony among people. Each religion makes an attempt to define protocols which people needs to follow. For the sake of universal benefits, certain protocols tend to be very strict. Consider for example, few religions prohibit eating of meat. While, the protocol is an imposition on the followers, it cannot be considered as suppression of rights of a person.

The most stupid thing that majority of the people across the world do is to follow the religion which their parents have followed without even understanding the rest of the religions. I call it stupid because it makes no sense to follow a religion just because you were born to a person who was following that religion. Believe me, 99.99% of the people across world do this. This also leads to a major crisis, which dictates the politics of the world.

Because, the people made no choice in choosing the religion, as they grow up, majority of them tend to pick only those protocols within the religion that gives them entertainment. For example, everybody celebrates festivals because they give entertainment. What about the other great teachings of religion? Well, they just ignore them. Which religion allows injustice? Which religion allows tyranny? Which religion allows people to kill another people? Which religion says not to help the fellow human beings who are hungry and homeless? Which religion says treat women as slaves? Which religion says to distinguish people on the basis of their color? Which religion says to snatch away the land of the people and make then live in refugees in their own homeland? Given the fact that, there is no entertainment in solutions of these questions, the world goes on without caring.

Then, there are another set of people, who again have chosen the religion purely because their parents followed that religion, over the years tend to develop a mentality that religion is equivalent to ‘sacrifice’. Over the years, these people pick only those protocols in the religions which speak of sacrifice. They consider martyrdom in fighting against people who don’t sacrifice in the name of religion. When these people come across few intelligent ‘entertainment’ hungry people, they become fooled.

And the third types of people are the ones who don’t care about religion. For them, religion doesn’t mean anything; they find it foolish to think that there is God. Given that, I don’t carry a positive opinion about atheists, I would not like to comment here as they might consider it as personal attack.

To conclude, if one has to follow religion, then the person should spend time understanding the religion. Remember, religion is neither meant for entertainment nor meant for sacrifice. Religion is way of life.