Another Look At Humans

Let’s try to understand religion. Guess what, you can’t.

But that isn’t something you want to hear. You want to hear answers, to questions you don’t understand who and when to ask. Like what religion you should follow, and when to practice it. But as always, you’re stuck between two variants of human interpretation of knowledge- religion and science.

I am not much of a religious person but I am not a heathen either. I am a Hindu. I wouldn’t actually care if I were Muslim or Christian or anything, provided I get the same upbringing as I am getting now. But I also have a very keen interest in religion along with science. I like religion not for its’s beliefs or it’s practices, nor for which god they follow. I like religion for it’s stories. Because god or not, human philosophy is a true science. A science studied in these amazing stories in every aspect imaginable. Though I do want you to note that my source of stories were the Hindu epics, the tales of Prophet Muhammad and the teaching of Buddha. I don’t have much knowledge of the Bible or stories from the Catholics. Much sorry.

The thing about Hindu epics is that there is always the same exact premise- evil is born on Earth, good comes to defeat it. And there is always one person who comes to defeat evil- Lord Vishnu, whether he came in the form of an archer or a philosopher, evil never stood a chance. But that is not the topic of interest here, its the knowledge he gave along the way. One of the most renowned philosopher was Krishna, a simple cowherd turned into the defeater of Kansa and the adviser to the greatest. He, unlike the other gods, didn’t talk about why to believe they exist, rather he talked human behavior, which was then compiled into the Bhagavad Gita ( it is an amazing read by the way, I totally recommend it). And this book is the reason I perceive human behavior as I do. I’m not telling you to join Hinduism, I have no right on that at all, but if I can, I will totally advise you to read it. The stories in Indian Epics all interconnect like a huge web. Everybody knows the Marvel Cinematic Universe and their movies, if you multiply the number of their movies by tenfold, forget that, a hundredfold, then you will get the stories in these epics. These stories are not only for fun, they give you life lessons you didn’t know even existed. You have heard a lot of how Indians had already

known many things that were discovered later in modern medicine or philosophy and science, well, these epics are the reason. Let’s now take Buddha, a prince who did not know the suffering of humans until he devoted his life in philosophy, whose ideas are practiced till now. I don’t follow Buddhism, but I have quite a knowledge of his adventures and his stories. All leading to many yet the same thing, that humans are humans.

The whole point of this post is to tell you that human behavior is confusing, it cannot be understood by only one of the two aspects of science and religion. It’s a huge tree of knowledge, with science as its roots and religion as the branches – and the multicolored leaves as the many interpretations of human knowledge.

I once saw a talk show ( I genuinely don’t remember which ) where a celebrity gave his ideas on science. He said, ” If there’s a moment in time when the whole world gets destroyed and a species like ours has to build back up from total scratch, there will be many variations in everyone’s beliefs. Everyone will have different stories for different things but science….oho science will always be there, always ready to present new discoveries and unimaginable things that even religion cannot fathom. Waiting till the end of time to just be discovered and forgotten again, a cursed and blessed cycle all at the same time.” I was perplexed that someone who didn’t even work in either fields of human knowledge had that much context in his mind.

Nevertheless, what he said was very true and you cannot change my mind whatsoever.