What is religion?

Religion is any given system of belief in and worship of a God. Who is God? He... or She has been variously described as the all-knowing, the omnipresent, the superconsciousness, the Paramaatman etc.

Most religions accept that God created the universe and us. Most religions, however, 'worship' different Gods. They attribute the same powers to their Gods. They describe the same entity and define this entity into various identities.

The concept of religion, historically speaking, would have been to make a cohesive group that followed common rules and provided safety in numbers. Gradually, rituals and celebrations came into the picture as events that gave people a reason to congregate on these occassions.

So far... so good.

Man grew. He matured- if one could call it maturity. He was evolving. He graduated from the perilous living of being a hunter constantly under threat from his food to a gatherer who discovered safety of collecting his food from the trees that could not attack him. With this came more time at hand and more thinking. Then man moved further down the road learning to grow and cultivate, making life even safer and freeing up even more time to contemplate.

Religion began as a means to provide some rationality in an unfavourable world. It not only laid down the rules that the community had to follow, it also prescribed the punishment God would wreck on those who broke the Law. The safety thus established freed up even more time for culture and conmtemplation.

Till now, man was satisfied with his environment; he fed it with his toil and sweat, and was amply fed by the product of his effort. Somewhere down the road, he became dissatisfied with tilling his own soil. He found his neighbour's or his neighbour's neighbour's soil more attractive. Territorial wars began. He who won, also imposed his own religion and culture on the one who lost.

The concept of "My God, Your God" became a reality. The God was still the same- now came the war of ideas and ideals.

In all of his own history, man forgot the basic premise that had prompted him to create religion. Safety. Contemplation. Maturity, self realisation.

Those who choose to fight wars for their Gods- Is your God so weak that He needs you to defend Him? This might have been the revelation to a certain evolved soul in a taxi ride- but it is the harsh truth. If God is so powerful that he requires nothing, He also does not require to be defended.

Today, religion has become the flashpoint of Human existence. It has become the reason people are unsafe.

Why?