God, Morality and Religion

In my previous post, God and Morality, I expressed my views regarding how there is not any relation between the two concepts. But in that post, I didn't talk about one thing and that is Religion.


Many of the world's current problems has their roots in religious hatred, the recent Israel-Gaza problem is one of the examples. The notion that any certain religion is superior to others is like saying that "Gravity" is a better movie than "Titanic" or saying that Twilight series is a better than Harry Potter. All of the above things aren't exactly comparable. All of them are just a figment of someone's imagination. All of them are stories. Everybody has their personal opinions about these things. Some of us may like the story of sinking ship more than accident at space station. Each of us has a right to have their own opinions. And at the same time it is wrong to judge people based on their views about these things. Judging someone from their religion is literally like saying a guy is not "cool" or "dude" if he doesn't like Fast and Furious movies or if he likes Taylor Swift songs.  Religions are all just made up stories like all of the mentioned things above. But still, in my personal opinion, Hinduism is better than all others. The story that a god killed his son by separating his head from body and then after realising his mistake fixed the head of an elephant to a human body and brought him back to life is just amazing. Although it raises some questions like, if he could fix a once cut head,why didn't he fix the head cut by him earlier? or with that elephants head being attached to body, wouldn't the elephant have sprung back to life rather than human getting life back? The story is just unbeatable. But the competition is really tough here, the Christian story of god creating blah blah blah things on the first day, blah blah blah on second day has gained so much popularity, that it's actually questioning the facts like evolution.

Sorry for drifting away from topic, coming back to it, Religions have been a tool of imposing morality in people for many centuries. I don't think that I need to explain how badly religions have failed at their task. This system of making people behave morally, by putting a fear that god will punish them or they'll be sent to hell, is just designed to fail. Recent scientific studies have shown that punishment isn't as useful as reward in order to manipulate the behavior of children to make it positive. In case of religions, there isn't any punishment that can affect us right now. Bad things happening in our lives aren't exactly the punishment given to us by the god. Thus, this imposing fear methodology doesn't work.

The dictionary definition of the word "Morality" is "Recognition of the distinction between good and evil or between right and wrong". Distinguishing between "right" and "wrong" is something people can't do on their own. Most of the people are lazy thinkers. They don't want to rake the trouble of developing their own thoughts on morality, they don't want to work on developing their conscience. They would rather like to be told by somebody, how to behave. In that way, they don't need to take the responsibility of their actions. They just assume that religion is always correct in determining right from wrong. This leads to problems, chaos. When religions determine what's wrong and what's right, they determine what's moral and whats immoral, conflicts arise. For example, Hindus consider it immoral to eat beef, while Muslims specifically eat it. Conflicts between religion and common sense also arise, while religions consider it immoral to have sex before marriage, it isn't wrong as it's a natural instinct of human beings.
This is why each person has to develop his own set of morals. He himself has to decide what's right and what's wrong in each of the scenarios. But the problem is that this system of morals will not be uniform. There will be things that some people will consider immoral but others will consider morally correct. This is going to be a problem. And only to solve this problem religions were started.  To prevent this from happening, we have to establish one universal guideline for deciding right and wrong, and that according to me should be-
"If your action is in any way can physically, mentally or emotionally harm any other human being or affects society in a negative manner it is wrong."
This, according to me, should be basic principle, on which all our morals should be based. This principle should not only be taught through our education systems but it should be inculcated in our children.