religious fervor

This is an opinion I have that is not confined to one religion but to all religious persuasions. While I do not doubt the freedom and peace of mind some individuals may get from such pilgrimages, they are merely man inspired events, which no child without any learning from another will indulge in from ones own intuition.

I find it illogical, irrational and wholly slavish that people believe they need to go on some pilgrimage to a holy place on the mistaken belief that they may get some sort of blessing, be cured of some ill, or obtain merit of one sort or another.

If I was a higher being, what is important for me to see would be how people conducted their daily lives in following my teachings or morals and commandments laid down in a scripture. I would be horrified if people go and worship in a place because that was where I died or was born or some miracle happened in my name. It is such a simple concept, that I find it hard not to think otherwise.

I don’t have a problem with people worshiping shrines statues or going on pilgrimages, but they should realize they are doing so only out of a sense of duty, charity, tradition, blind faith or for the memory of having gone there. It should not be felt that by so doing one can obtain any sort of special place in the eyes of the beholder, from whom no one can hide.

I find it so hard to understand the mumbo jumbo that people use as an excuse to go to these places or feel that by not going they are not fulfilling a religious obligation if they are so able to perform. The world is so full of man made beliefs and so little of following a true religious existence that the former seems to take precedence over the latter which is the crux to one’s life.

This need to go is so enshrined in every religion, that I find it hard to persuade people to think the opposite, which seems to me the only solution to common sense. Blind faith damns common sense and that is the nub of the problem. However what has blind faith got to do with living according to the teachings of one’ religion, nothing!!!