YOUR RELIGION AND MINE by Taiye Olaniyi
What do you know about your religion and how careful, careless, and caring are you about yourself and those of other peoples’ religions?
Sometimes I begin to wonder whether it is man or religion that will outlive one or the other but then I reasonably realize that without man there is no religion and there can’t and could ever have been.
Founders or may I say certain Vistas of Light of old after whom religions were founded were earlier exposed to Self, Nature, and from Whom all came into being.
These personalities could not be fully known no matter how close or fervent in belief one could be to them.
For those of us of this age, we could only read, hear, and are taught about them by those to him we decide to entrust all authorities.
Whereas Mary, mother of our Lord Jesus Christ was singled out amongst many virgins of her time, even as his mother, Jesus had to remind her his mission was to accomplish the assignment given to him by his Father in Heaven.
Doing, carrying, and accomplishing such an assignment and experiencing the pangs of pain at the Cross of Calvary, he again reminded his mother and those sorrowing around not to cry for him but for themselves including you and me today mere mourners, wailers, and moaners.
So, we read history about what was, what might not have been actual, and how such journalists of old reported such being objective, subjective, inductive, or deductive as such no option for us to take their recordings and records either in reflective moods or hook, line, and sinker.
In putting the self into reports, records, dictates, observances, and immutability of what the scriptures of our various religions contain, the changing “Self” from birth to old age would discover variants in meanings and values we attribute to our various religions and those of others.
Our lives may be meaningful or meaningless even in our religions because of the science of life and living which individual or collective experiences are. Certain experiences dictate to us how actual or relative we should be in our religious inclination, disposition, and persuasion thus necessitating further need for further search and admittance of personal conviction if not even confusion.
I concur with Prophet Mohammed (saw) who gave an injunction to all Muslims, including You and me to search for “KNOWLEDGE” as far as humanly possible which to me and my tiny knowledge is to help attain peaceful co-existence.
Little wonder a Muslim scholar in particular hardly rejects sharing ideas on and over his religion and those of others and is thus to me more tolerant when not provoked.
Little wonder the pain of every one of us when our cherished religions are misunderstood, misinterpreted, misappropriated, and misrepresented.
In such a belief without knowledge and where ignorance, poverty, disunity, and misrule reign supreme in the society according to Ustaz Oguzhan Dirican, “Peace becomes elusive” and Things Fall Apart as the Centre does Not Hold.
For Peace to reign and tranquility to obtain, many of us of Mystical persuasion yearn in the humble quest to see God’s hands in every Religion but go further to appreciate similarities in all Religions but the superiority of ” Having a Personal and Intimate Awareness of God Within the Domain of Self”,
The Spiritual Kernel of all Religions is the Mystic way of proving to the “Self” like Jesus Christ once intoned ” My Father and I are one”.
Further, Jesus Christ concluded, ” That same Father is in you and greater things we all can do”.
What then is our role(s) as a religionist in fostering religious understanding, tolerance, harmony, and conscientious search for the “Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood, of Man? Think about it.
(vitalnewsngr.com)
