Belief

City was burning,  walls were red with human blood, shops and cars were blazing in the fire. Dead human bodies were lying around, some not so lucky were still withering with pain, and carrying the burden of breath.  A crowd  of ten or so people were chanting loudly and beating two feeble women with sticks and stones. Cries of women were  interrupted by the loud chanting, in praise of god.

One woman pleaded – please listen to us, please just listen to me for a minute. Her plea is interrupted by some more stones and sticks and I heard her aggressor shouting – We have faith, we have our belief, we don’t want to hear you, shut up and some more stones were hurled on the women who had a slender body,  a beautiful face,  her white dress now stained with the blood. The women were holding couple of books in their hand.

I asked, one aggressor, what is the matter, why are you killing her? The aggressor, red with fury, shouted at me – We have our own faith and belief. We don’t need any stupid book written by foolish humans, we got the book from god, and with these word, he picked a big stone and hurled at the women’s head. He was panting and huffing with exhaustion and anger and shouted at me – I have  faith, I have  belief, and putting his hand on his ear he shouted,  I don’t want to listen, God is my witness, I don’t want to hear any thing other than god’s words … my faith is still with me …

Two slender, beautiful women were dead, but the crowd of faith and belief does not want to stop. They continued hurling stones at them.

I asked, who are these ladies, what are their names? One guy, with cruelty dripping from his face, has the arrogance of his righteousness with big beard, and red shot angry eyes tells me, one is ‘Reason’ and the other one is called ‘Logic’.  

We must kill them for our heavens.

He looked at me with suspicion and asked me – Don’t you want to go to heaven? You must deny their existence, if you will listen to them you will be in eternal fire of hell. People with faith don’t need any reason or logic.

Once the crowd realized that there is no movement in those two women, there is no life left in them, they left victoriously, chanting and jubilantly dancing.

I went near to the dead bodies, and picked up the blood stained books from their clenched white tender fist. The books were,  The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The end of faith by Sam Harris and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

Tonight, there will be a big festival in the city; Church’s, mosque and temples will be decorated, beautiful big empty buildings, as enormous as human apathy, symbolizing graves of rationality, will be bustling with activity, all the believers will dutifully assemble.  Under the huge chandelier of ignorance, they will celebrate the death of reason and logic. People will get intoxicated on their belief and will dance in trance of faith. Prayers and chanting will continue till the wee hours of morning.

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P.S:  In all fairness, not all religions are violent against Reason and Logic.  Unfortunately,  majority  of people will not hear or read about reason and logic in favor of  blind faith and belief. I seen this behavior in very educated people, who are working in high tech industry and breaking technology barrier on daily basis. Many of them told me that they  will never read anything which will question their faith. Is this because they know that their faith is fragile, and any small fresh breeze of reason will destroy their two thousand year old castle of cards?