I only can guess that when Lenin labeled religion: “The opium of the masses”, he might have concluded that the majority of adherents to those religions were only spiritually empty, hypnotized, sedated and comatose, no more than marching zombies, mechanized robots and rewindable androids, manipulated by few of the larger than deity and life charlatan clergies, who turned us to be like tombs marbled from the outside rotten from the inside.
Religion may be considered an absolute or accidental necessity, keen knowledge, zealous fanaticism, social ignorance, wishful thinking, mistake of nature, or freaky and eccentric aberration, but it is nonetheless that sacred cow and spiritual engagement undertaken by a group of people as a spiritual and cultural trademark of their beliefs and the common foundation of their religious life, which pervade the whole of their public and private life, centralized around a holy figurehead of one cosmic god or hosts of gods, starting with cosmogony.
All faiths “advertise” bittersweet colorful clichés of brotherly love, mutual respect, sham tolerance, open-ended forgiveness, this or that Deity’s mercy, this or that Deity’s given human rights, peaceful co-existence, freedom of choice, of religion and of speech, coupled with holiness and sanctity. All mankind are brothers and sisters in Adam and Eve, but not necessarily in all beliefs and faiths.
How many religions are in our present world? Are they in the hundreds; are they in the thousands or beyond? There are reportedly some 15000 documented and identified religions in this world. The major Religions of the world are under thirty in number, but they remind me of the Russian doll the “Matryoushka” (the great grandmother of all), their offspring, offshoots, brethrens, siblings and kindred are numerous. What a sad reality, everyone can kill a person, but no one can kill a thought; the reason is so simple, when you kill a person, you only kill his body, while the thought stems from and lives in his/her soul; his/her soul is eternal, hence his/her thought is also eternal. It is not possible for the original thought to die, but it might become forgotten, improved or its application modified. Since the beginning of time, the various Gods instituted distinct religious beliefs; the believers, who supposedly were followers, elevated themselves to the rank of their divinity, more knowledgeable and keener than their god, thus witnessing daily the story of Babel Tower on the stages of our lives, where in addition to the religious multi-lingual babbling, we witness the thundering of killer guns, evolved into all kind of weapons of mass destruction we dart against anyone who dare to differ with our beliefs.
