Religion as a Manifestation of Human's Essence

Majority of people think about their religion as a static dogma, opposed to a dynamic spiritual journey. This definition makes most of them mentally underdeveloped, either too close-minded and fanatic or too carefree and careless. A religion is more than just a standardized light house. Instead, it is a distinctive ship, which one could freely custom with experiences, ideas, core values, and many other things as one matures. With this thought in mind, a religion will be a personal guideline which would boost one’s discovery of one’s true self.

It is quite a pity to see people who claim to be religious but not spiritual. Their actions are full of wrath and hatred, though they consider themselves to be the foremost followers and the truest of their own creed. Their live is fully on the physical plane, with no regards to the law of the divine, and their heaven is full of greed and lust. They blindly follow their superior as they have no personal reason of doing anything they are told to do, and they are hopelessly seeking their own enlightenment in the darkest corner of the earth, only if they could just realize. As their wickedness is contagious in societies they live in, they are the bane of humanity.

 Unfortunately, there is plenty of this kind of societies in the world, in developed and developing countries, either loosely or tightly organized. In the United States, there is Westboro Baptist Church with their extreme, foolish ideologies to the point they are widely described as a hate group. Another example would be most capitalist, banker, and merchant class. They falsely believe that they are doing the God’s bidding by creating jobs and making profits, when all they actually do are exploiting the nature, oppressing the people, and altering the belief of the people by aiming in making global capitalistic, hedonistic civilization, which actually is very unspiritual. They don’t even consider raising the minimum wage! In the Middle East there are Taliban, with their infamous assassination attempt of a little girl called Malala, just because she wanted girls in Pakistan to get educated. And lastly, in Indonesia there are a group commonly known as FPI (Front Pembela Islam/ Islamic Defenders Front) which are famous of their sweeping operations and violence acts. Another example would be the Indonesia’s ministry of religion and culture, which is infamous for being one of the most corrupt ministries in the government. It is just sad to think that these kinds of people still exist in the 21^st century.

“The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.”

A quote from Alan Ashley-Pitt is perfect to describe the nature how the relation of a person and religion should be. To say it roughly, a person in the same religion group should be heretic to each other and there would be no problem as long as the core values of religion is kept intact. Because people have different backgrounds and different missions living on earth, the slight difference is tolerable since religion is the manifestation of a person’s unique essence. Moreover, a religion should be more and more personalized so it would not be intertwined with civil, politic, economic and social matters. Ideally, everybody could freely interact and work together with no boundaries and sense of discrimination caused by religion.