Imagining a world without religion
In my last essay, I talked about demolishing places of religion as their place in the world is done, but the blanketed destruction of these places of worship will create a further circle of violence that well into the future. One idea would be to convert these spaces into museums of “what-went-wrong-with-the-world”, museums of archaic thought whose cultural and moral relevance can be talked and debated about, without the central authority of a God or in extension, a cabal of humans propping up a mythical demagogue to further their interests.
Religion through the ages shaped our culture and paradigms , which in a scientific world can be distilled through means of reason and calculation. It is important to know our history and where we come from and in this sense religious institution can serve as existing set-pieces of knowledge of times past. Stripping these spaces of all power and converting them into places of real education will serve as a net positive for society, for when the dust settles the world will be a better place without imaginary control. What will become of such a world is a mystery, but it requires a belief in the total renegotiation with the ways of life as we know them now. These actions cannot stem from smaller ones, as the forces that wield this power will not yield their access to them. Cumulative, coordinated radical action is the only hope, erasing millennia of human inquiry (worthless for our age) in hopes of a better time to come. The moral learning from these religions have now formed the core of our social character, it is time to move on to pastures that can help us unveil our true potential.
As I write this, there's a new conflagration in India regarding Hindu temple remnants in the Gyan Vapi mosque in Varanasi, another burning flame to further fuel the right wing Hindutva ideology of the RSS/BJP. Issues like hunger, reducing power of democratic institutions, inflation, income inequality have all taken a back seat in the big dick competition of which stone has to be worshiped. Though the current batch of hyper-religious, politicized Hindus might want to avenge for past wrongs, the future will not be so kind for their misgivings in other fields.