LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD, LAZARUS, THOU FOLLOW ME

LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD, LAZARUS, THOU FOLLOW ME

If a religion cannot be reformed, its adherents must be. Else, both religion and the religious will die out of an ever-altering world owing to lack of adaptability. And if it is a death-cult, it will carry disbelievers en masse with it to the nether world. 

One more thing. Hindus burn the dead but Muslims and Christians bury the dead. Yet, in Hell the Abrahamic God mandates burning. I guess the Rishis got it right before the Prophets and, true to the Sanatan Dharma, universalised it.

The fire, emblematic of cosmic energy, was adopted by the Greeks as well as is borne out by the continuously burning Olympic torch. The Greeks were, you could say, the European brahmins who apprehended truth better than the desert tribes of the Middle East, and it was the cultural conquest of Rome, the foster-child of Greece, by Christianity that undid the progress of European scientific and philosophical thinking for centuries before the resurgence of Greek thought brought forth the Renaissance in Italy.

Likewise, Hindu thinking was impeded by Islamic invasion and the freeflowing Vedic civilisation brought to a trickle for centuries till European colonial intervention, amidst the infliction of deeper economic wounds, delivered it.

Now the civilisation of the Greeks and that of the Hindus are meeting in a globalised world with Abrahamic religions dragging culture backwards as is their wont. The world yet progresses unto fresh fires of inquiry, investigation, information and light but no more of that of the Inquisition or of hellish inferno.

Written by Sugata Bose