People who were educated to be believers should have the decency not to look down with arrogance on people who were educated to be disbelievers. What is your merit in this? You were born in the right place, good for you. I remember that throughout my education I was relentlessly and implicitly discouraged from holding any religious beliefs – even from entertaining the very idea of it. Those among my peers who were from religious families, who observed religious practices and held religious views, were objects of ridicule. And who would want to be an object of ridicule, to be judged and ostracized? We were trained to firmly believe in rationalism, materialism, reductivism, scientism, in a mechanistic universe devoid of consciousness, for years and years. And we would have been ashamed to entertain or express doubt – as if these were the only and absolute truths of the universe. If in my own life I have come to cultivate belief, it is only after having gone through a long process of reflection, contemplation and experience by which I freed myself from the burden of years of conditioning that had made me ashamed to even own a Bible in my home, let alone using the word God in a sentence – except for derision. If it was not from this pull in my heart that has drawn me all my life towards a higher Beauty, I would have remained an atheist myself. So I would advise my friends who were raised at the opposite end of the spectrum to look long and hard at their attitude towards Western atheists, and hopefully to have some compassion and humility. Those who were raised to believe in religion, God, daily prayer, fasting, the rewards of Heaven and the punishments of Hell, etc., likewise have no merit in the matter. They equally were conditioned all their life to believe that this is the only acceptable way to think and to live. And until the disbeliever, who disbelieves only because he was conditioned to do so, and until the believer, who believes only because he was conditioned to do so, have both sorted out these questions for themselves in their own heart, they have nothing, and certainly not the right to puff themselves up at the sight of someone who was raised to see the world differently than themselves.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 21:48:23 +0000
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