Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Religion Is Abstraction

I frequently reiterate that I am not one who wants to preach any of the existing religions. I am not one who wants to prove that any of the existing religions is actually consistent with the modern science or modern psychology, or modern politics and is good for the well being and moral behaviour though they look superstitious and old fashioned. I do not want to prove that modern life is analytic and people should have a synthetic soul and should escape from the maddening tumult and lust of their environment in cities to comfort and peace of religions in the convents and monasteries and meditate.
No, I want to say that religion is not religion. Pyramids supposedly were built as being very big tombstones for a wealthy and powerful person as the symbol of his religion. And archaeologists go there and clean bones with a fine brush and sit there for years to find a piece of charcoal. For me it shows practical people sitting together, calculating, knowing materials, managing workforce, and defending projects to sponge more money from the king for their wild imaginations. It means they knew formulas of trigonometry. They were true when they told the king that with such a project he would be resurrected. They were true when they said that the king needed all those paraphernalia when he would resurrect. He needs the golden mask to be recognised as with his real face as a king. They were true that he needed those paintings and writings on the walls with servants and ministers and story of his daily life when he should be resurrected. They were not fools to put stones on top of the stones because of their wrong stupid idea of resurrection of their king.
Now listen to people who were descendants of builders of those pyramids and were living millenniums after those builders. They had all kinds of stories about those pyramids such as being built by monsters and jennies and such; couldn't believe their great great grandfathers were in that capacity they attribute to monsters. Even in modern times some people said that man could not build such colossal buildings. They say that those were built by aliens from other worlds. They say that those were built by whipping slaves. You can gather not slaves, but a million of paid workers and start to shout at them to build a mound of dirt and then go and come back after a year and see if anything has been done. But, we have Euclid who could make an elegant abstraction out of those builders' rough ideas; abstractions that did not include monsters and aliens and slaves.
In the similar way we have other types of stories such as a garden and a married couple and a mesmerising snake who could defy the sanctuary of god and could tempt the woman to eat from a forbidden tree. What is its abstraction? Here, a most dreadful animal for human becomes tempting. Why that thing should not come in a more presentable form?
Then we get to the story of a flood that covers all the earth since in a village a group of people were making fun of a crazy person who was building a ship far from any water in the middle of the desert. This is more acceptable story than the tempting snake.
Then Abraham's and after him Moses' gradually become more acceptable: There is no tempting snake and Sweden will not become flooded for the sin of a village in the Middle East.
Until we get to story of Jesus Christ which includes even less supernatural events. Still, he has some strange arts such as converting water to expensive wines but people kill him instead of making a profitable business out of him. When it gets to Muhammad it becomes so realistic that "Muhammad goes to mountain if mountain does not come to him." Then people know very detailed account of his time and day to day life of him.
What is the abstraction of these. You might say that it is enough since you can guess that I am going to paraphrase them as symbols of something earthly. No, remember, Euclidean geometry is abstraction of the facts and by itself it is divine. It is not earthly

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