Religion emphasises the unity of humanity
MENTION the words religion and business in one breath and the chances are good that someone will take offence.
It’s a common conviction within most Western societies that the two do not and should not be mixed – ever.
Religious leaders generally renounce worldly pleasure, which is one of the prime motives for accumulating money. However, that being said, this is how I feel religion and its leaders were once seen.
Long ago, temples, churches and mosques were built by donations given by the rich. These places of worship welcomed both poor and rich to pray as one but it seems as time went on that the realisation of “restrictions” such as the pleasures of life could not be enjoyed because the beliefs within religion forbid most from indulging in pleasures.
Today, regardless of your financial position, religious organisations or committees decree that both rich and poor need to contribute to maintain and decorate places of worship.
Having grown up in a humble home, I have never once heard my parents or grandparents complain about the costs of doing prayers or going to the temple.
Today, you are given a receipt after giving donations.
In essence, they operate as fully functional businesses and people lose their joy and zeal for worshipping God because they are so worried about the cost behind it.
However, with these costs come certain pleasures, which may be enjoyed after we feel we’ve worked hard enough to buy our prayers.
We indulge in pleasures, consume more alcohol than we should and purchase clothes to stand out as we pray – all because we forget the simplicity surrounding our faiths and become too concerned with fitting the costs of going to pray and how we would look when doing so.
Yes, we are all human, we have a right to live and enjoy life to the fullest. God knows I do, but the one thing I never believed in is making God a burden, a financial burden to be exact.
Religion has been around before money was important and before we even existed.
It was the simplicity which made it so beautiful and brought the spiritual essence to religion, but we as a community contribute to making what was once so pure and simple complicated and vague so as to accommodate selfish desires.
Religion helps us realise where we come from and how to detach from a world that was inevitably going to be cruel. We should preserve and honour our faiths by worrying not about how much we contribute to our place of worship but rather whether those contributions are but a contributing factor to commercialising religion and removing the beauty of spirituality.
We fool ourselves saying that as sinners we can redeem ourselves for our misdeeds by paying for what is asked of us, and buying what we see on a list, blindly thinking that because we are “donating” we are repenting, that we did our best for God and did what was asked of us, or I daresay what we were told to buy.
Many people are too afraid to address this situation. They feel so guilty thinking that their lack of monetary donation will mean a lack in receiving God’s blessing.
I’ve never claimed to be a symbol of flawless spirituality nor would I ever, though I do believe in the sacred scriptures and that they were written to see us through troubles that money cannot.
All religions and all races both materially rich or poor are beautiful in the simplest way. That is, the unity among man.
Unity is so easily destroyed by materialism in this day and age, and our religious faiths are the only line of defence we have to keep us united as humans.
But if we continue to believe that we need to give for extravagant structures and to maintain the material beauty of it all, what do we actually believe in?
I believe contributions are important for the day-to-day running of our place of worship, but I do not believe a set price and financial expectation should be set on these contributions.
Seeing this naiveté and gullibility of the people, many unscrupulous people enter into the field of religion and become self-styled god men. And if these god men happen to have some charisma and some sleight of hand to perform “miracles”, then they become anointed as incarnations of God.
They invent some rituals for their own worship and fleece their doting worshippers of hard-earned money. The sad truth is that people are okay with this and are guided by a tragic way of thinking, that by paying money you obtain the highest of blessings.
We need to re-evaluate the phrase “invest in God” and understand that we need only invest our time, love and faith in God to obtain blessing and enlightenment, and we should not be brainwashed into thinking that without money we are exempt from God favour.