Holy Monopoly

Picutre a monopoly board with squares marked Jerusalem, Vaikuntham, Paathalam, Jahannu, Jannat, Earth, Limbo etc. And picture a game with an invisible opponent with invisible dice where you move to where you are asked to, when you are asked to. Picture too that Jail is the most probable position you might end up at in simple Monopoly, and here, you have nothing but Earth that you know anything of. If it doesn't frighten you, okay; but if it does, Welcome to the Holy Monopoly, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and listen to the Voice of Religion.

I have always been confused about religion. There are people who claim it releases our latent potentialities and others who say its just an opiate for the masses. I was even troubled when I decided I was an agnostic and discovered Yann Martel roaring against the "hypocrisy" of agnostics. Religion is a difficult and thorny issue and I don't even want to start on my views on it; suffice to say, I persist in my agnosticism without affiliations to any religion, borrowing sometimes from the mystics, sometimes from the scholastics, for my ideas; and lean heavily on the Hindu Vaishnavism of my parents' for form. And while I doubt that religion (any religion at all) can be useful(forget necessity), I think people who believe otherwise have the right to persist in their ways(folly or otherwise). But whether this includes even those who indulge in publishing fatwas and carrying them out, burning up kids inside cars because their fathers preach another creed, condemning people they dont like to death on the Cross, burning alive people they don't trust etc etc, I leave to each person's conscience and understanding. The more important thing to note is that religion has always controlled social responses even where secular law purports to hold sway. I was horrified after reading this news article on rediff.com yesterday. Not just that religion controls all life, denying the heart while claiming for it reasons that the head does not understand; worse, people are ready to suffer for it even when they get nothing in return. Perhaps conformism is 'useful' to live in society; perhaps there is another world. But what price will we pay for our beliefs in this world? Does it not matter at all? Then why all the hooplah about a better world and a better life on earth?