Fasting, self-infliction of pain, irrational austerities all tend to fanaticism as the energy they generate in the system, being not tempered by reason, vitalises the being along destructive channels. This is why all religions must have a sound philosophical system as the back-up of their core values and articles of faith. Else, they inevitably degenerate into political movements of a malefic kind that cause untold damage to civilisation. The Christian and the Muslim traditions of conquest and conversion bear ample testimony to this thesis and when the going became rough for each, history records the tumultuous events of the 150 year long Crusades and the Jihads which sent civilisation to despair. These Semitic religions, intolerant and exclusive, hold out a regimented programme before all and sundry which they call their divine commission of world conversion but they do not realise the fundamental flaws in their enforced systems of faith, their own hypnotism into self-submission to an extra-cosmic deity they term their God and their foolish movement against the grain of universal diversity of surface existence. Deep within the whole of phenomena is in essence one and no religion need be prescribed to man to apprehend this. The evolution of thought will make this appreciation possible in a much more civilised way than this crude attempt to convert everyone to the story of the Maker and His made will ever manage. After all, the religions of the world are but ancient and medieval attempts to explain life as best as the men of those times could
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