Religion or God?

We do not know exactly when first religion came into existence, but we know that early humans started worshiping animals, rain, sun, moon, fire etc. to please them to protect them from things they were afraid of, like animals, fire, draught or going Hungary. With time humans also started a quest to understand big picture of life. Is there some one controlling their lives? Is there any after or before life? Is there a God? If yes, how can God be pleased? Slowly there were groups of humans who started praying to their deities  in various forms or started have a set of common beliefs which we now recognise as various religions.

As long as  religion remained a quest and means to please God, it served its purpose well to give a sense of purpose and a way to connect to God. However slowly humans started manipulating other individuals using religion as a tool. Religion became a means to gain power by forming groups. It results in creation of groups which hardly agree with each other, and creates communities which often clash with each other. It no more remains a means to connect humans to God, but become a means to differentiate people based on traditions or rituals, or looking alike. Religion thus started creating divide between children of God. It started creating communities which are stereotypes, which as an undesirable outcome, started creating a sense of fear and discomfort amongst those who are not part of these communities. This has finally resulted in a kind of chain reaction which starts turning every community more and more rigid and opposed to the ideology of other community and this breeds hatred which feeds on itself and grows. This hatred goes to an extent that no more trust remain between different communities and people even start killing each other to protect their own religion.

From times immortal people and communities have been tormented, some even wiped off only because of conflicts between religion. Number of people killed due to communal clashes would be much more  than people killed due to any disease or hunger. End result is that it forces people to do what is against their own religious beliefs. Every religion persuade people to bring peace , but there is hardly any religion in which followers have not killed people of other religion. Instead of serving God, people started serving a religion. Be it Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism or any other religion, every religion has a history of bloodshed, and people continue to be killed because of religious intolerance. Finally a religion which was supposed to bring humans near God ends up doing exactly opposite.

Unfortunately religion has this intrinsic flaw or limitation that it can only help those people who are already closer to God, who can differentiate between religion and God. At any given time, there will always be a majority of people who cannot differentiate Religion  from God.  For most of the people religion will always remain ends instead of means. We keep forgetting that if religion was the ultimate Identity for humans, then God would have created one himself for every one and every child would have been born with a stamp of religion on his forehead.

It is a difficult fact to accept that idea of religion has failed miserably and is actually the cause of great miseries to mankind. However things are not as gloomy today as they were 1000 years ago. Compared to middle ages, number of people who believe in God but not in any religion have grown, these people have the ability to understand human's  relation with this world, nature and God in their own ways? These people do not need an old Text Book written centuries ago to understand their purpose of life. These people are the key to a future with World Peace.