Thursday, March 09, 2006

What Faith can do to you?

Sometimes Faith is good for short term benefits and "start ups"
Suppose you are a human resource manager of a company. Its your responsibility to interview people and chose the person who is the most suitable for a vacant position. You may interview him. Practically, few hours of interview won’t tell everything. In that interview both parties build up a relationship based on faith on each other, which will lead to an eventual recruitment. ( You can’t disagree with that, that may happen without your intension ). So, faith is good for relationships in our society.

Have you heard about miracles performed by people in curing people?
In psychology, getting rid of phobias and other mental abnormalities. This is what faith can do. Here , you believe in a person that he is your savior and he will cure your “haunted feelings”. It really happens because you are hypnotized when doing rituals to him and you yourself internally orders yourself that you are not haunted anymore, or you are not afraid of cockroaches. So, your faith lead you to cure your illness. Simply, if you have a problem you can confess that to a person where you have faith on him. So, for that short term benefit, faith is good. Again you have to keep in mind, that you are not using his supernatural powers, but the power you have internally ( This is the power which you can command yourself ).

But… Think about the situation when we lost the faith for that person because of a fault in your exemplary supernatural character!

Therefore we can conclude, faith (into some extent) is good for social relationships. Lets talk about extreme faith and the harm in next thread. Any problems with this? This is an open discussion. Not intended to criticize any religion. But you can compare religions. Eg:- What Christianity has and what is lacking of. Good or bad compared to a philosophy like Buddhism.

(Published in All About Buddhism blog)
The Religion Faith and You

Before going into logical or philosophical ways , I think its better to have an understanding of the way religion affects a person. As we all know our feelings and thinking are highly influenced by a religion ( for most people ). When a child is born, obviously he himself can’t determine the race, language or religion. The child gradually observes his/her environment as he grows. For that the input for him coming from the society he knows at that moment, which is his family. He learns the language their habits which are influenced by the religion ( Eg:- If you are a catholic, you usually pray before your meal ). Well, then if your parents are catholic , now you become a catholic too.

So religion is something you grabbed from the society, which was not with you by birth.

So, keeping that in mind just consider following cases ( I am NOT pointing at any religion )

What if you are used to kill animals as a tribute a person who think he has super natural powers?
Obviously that is socially unacceptable. But you do because of your faith to the god.
( Will discuss more on this later )

What If you believe that if there is a mystery you can simply say “Its some other person’s wish” and just forget it.
It’s the time for you to break the thinking barrier. That’s how people make innovations. For an example Isaac Newton could have put his “Apple Experience” ( which we all know ) into nature’s account we could have lost the great gravitational theory.
( Will discuss more on this later )


So, do u “believe in” a religion which is forced on to you by the society. Or Follow a philosophy which grants all the powers to your self. You decide. I’ll continue this post later. This is not a religion, but a philosophy where you can understand the “World” within you.