Today morning IHM pointed me to a tweet of the famous author Taslima Nasreen, she tweeted, ‘When religion ruled the world, it was called ‘The Dark Ages’. A very profound thought, quite apt and significant too, indeed religion did some glaring mistakes that took humanity backward in leaps. When I say this I am talking about all the religions which have had the fair share of ill practices.
However, I had some basic disagreements with the statement. Though the statement stands in what we would call as matter of fact, but the intent was to provide a satirical contrast, on how the world was referred being in a dark age when it was ruled by religion. I have doubts has the world we live in today been a better world, than it was in dark ages? The humans or homo-sapiens as the science would call them have become more humane when the world moved towards from the aforementioned darkness to light?
Secondly, if religion was not a perfect ruler of the world and has been replaced now then who or what is the new ruler of the world? The probable list of answer includes Corporations like BP, Enron, Satyam, Goldman Sachs or Politicians of the new order like George Bush, Mubarak, A Raja, and Suresh Kalmadi or the human greed or the zillion other things which appear to be wrong in our faces but still lead the way we lead our lives.
I am not a supporter of religious sycophancy but then I am a believer of religion, I do not believe in the perfection of religion but I do believe that the religion can be reformed by addressing the outdated & the evil. My problem with the current world order is we ourselves don’t know what we are being ruled by. There are no tenets for the human behavior in the current order, but each to its own. So when the CEO of the multinational corporations guzzling billions of dollars worth of money from tax payers indulges in million dollar Persian rugs for his office or when one of the highest ranking police official rapes a minor who plays tennis in the association grounds where he is the chairman are remorseless and absolved of their own guilt. The mind sometimes questions if actually the dark as it seemed in the past may be wasn’t that dark. The religion & the tenets of the religious life which kept the barbarian in the common man in check may be were not entirely flawed as the world order.
I don’t have answers to these questions, and I really don’t believe that anyone else has these answers as of now. It’s only for time to tell that this abyss is the darkness just before dawn or the closed tunnel of no hope. It’s only for the future to tell that the human race would evolve for a new world order or would stick to the old world order.
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