The Crazy World of Religious Nuts  – Varghese Pamplanil.

vargheseIt is 4.30 a.m.and I have woken up suddenly from a disturbed sleep in a humid room after a  hot night, on hearing some howling similar to the one heard sporadically inhabited Arabian desert calling followers of a faith, that evolved 1500 hundred years ago in  another milieu, for prayers. The high  pitch  assault on the ears and nerves in the wee hours of the morning, when normal people are bound to be in deep sleep, through high decibel amplifier, is most irritating and uncomfortable for an old man like me. In a more civilised country, the nuisance maker  will be  hauled up and put behind the bars for disturbance and antisocial activity during curfew hours from 10.00 p.m to 6.00 a.m. Then after all we are living in the “Dogs Own Country” or lunatic’s land ; “franthalayam” as Vivekananda aptly called it. 

This is Sunday, the day dedicated to “Sol Invictus” which Emperor Constantine, ardent devotee of the “Unconquerable Sun” rammed through the dry throats of the followers of the Christ. Constantine boasted himself as an Apostle of Christ, which the Church acquiesced, while he was alive and kicking. But typical of the Church, while it gleefully accepted  many goodies in the form of land and buildings, other forms of wealth, privileges etc. lavished on it by the Emperor, showed its posterior once he exited the scene. No “thank you” from the Church to the all powerful deceased ruler of Pax Romana; he was unceremoniously dumped in the waste heap of Church annals. (The Church does persist with the same attitude of mind even now.) Thus the real founder of the Roman Catholic Church is a forgotten fellow. Then, of course, it is an inborn trait of the Christian Church. After all, it is the religion that bared its teeth with a vengeance on its parent Jewish religion to curry favour with the Romans, the  real killers of Jesus, for survival. Not stopping at it, the Christians branded the Jews as Shylocks demanding their pounds of flesh, and ruthlessly hounded them to the end of earth without respite for centuries.

This is the religion which has elevated Constantine’s mother, the former bar girl, who would shed her clothes and go all the way for the asking, of any drunken mostly soldier customer, to the status of a saint without batting an eyelid. I can hear the roaring sound and the unbearable racket made by diesel powered auto-rickshaws transporting the “cattle” rushing past to the nearby church on the road in front my residence. But churching is not for me. I would be removing weeds that have infested my driveway. I prefer doing something useful instead of chasing a mirage. 

The “goats/cattle” elbow out the other animals with their heads, buttocks, legs and other body parts to have access to their preferred slots in the cattleshed. They will pack themselves like heap of stinking sardines emitting foul body odours from every orifice of theirs. After all what other smell can be expected from the sweating unwashed bodies of people who wolf down broiler chicken, pork and beef along with country liquor? 

The local church is presided over generally by some uncouth moron. He always looks dirty in need of brushing  his teeth and a thorough wash of his body with carbolic soap.The cleric hears on the previous Saturday evening, juicy confessions of unmarried  young women who had had lark of the time with  their  lovers  all the way to the end. They come  to him to get rid of the sense of guilt troubling their minds. He would probe all the nuances of their sexual encounters. Added to that he may have indulged in his usual dalliance with one of the sex starved nuns primed with oestrogen, who brings his supper. He awakes from his alcohol laden sleep past 5.45 a.m and in a hurry rushes to the alter, without brushing his teeth and cleaning his body off  the remnants of his nocturnal emissions for the first mass of the Sunday scheduled at 6.00 a.m. He would have scratched endlessly his private parts during his sleep he had to get rid of incessant itching. He would typically take out his ire and foul mood at the congregation by making nasty sermon, lasting about 30.00 minutes.

What a contrast to a Catholic cleric is a Hindu priest who gets up early in the morning and after ablutions, takes a thorough bath, if possible, in the nearest stream in cold running water. After the bath he faces East to the morning sun to pray and meditate and to absorb its energy, dons simple attire before he enters the sanctum sanctorum to make offerings to his Deity with flowers and fruits available around, (mind you no wine), and makes his short  prayers. A genuine Hindu priest is a pure vegetarian who shuns meat, sour spic and oil laden base emotion stirring ‘thamas’ food of ‘Assuras’- he smells good. His way of life and  devotion have come out of the ethos  of his native soil and not lifted from some strange far away land.

The Sunday mass said by generally cantankerous Catholic clerics last hours together interspersed with the bombardment of odious verbal diarrhoea of inanities and gratuitous bunkum. Some characters add their own additional prayers and items at their whims to keep the cattle inside the church pen as long as possible. Maximum discomfort to the maximum number seems to be the motto.

Let us  have a  closer look at the SM Church Mass. It  is a  noisy cacophony of meaningless repetitive intonations, wailings, abject pleadings. Beatings of the chests, wild gesticulations, bowing and scrapings. The comic looking clown of a priest, wearing grotesque vestments walks up and down  carrying a thin wafer of refined wheat made in some convent by nuns, with possibly  dirty hands, who might have  been prone to scratching their lice infected pubic hairs  on and off. The Holy Church conveniently forgets that the material for the wafer, namely wheat, in all probability was cultivated by a Hindu farmer of North India; it may even  contain deadly pesticides. Can any one be so stupid to believe that a man (necessarily with testicles) can convert the inert wafer into the body of his God by saying some mumbo-jumbo. The whole macabre ceremony with symbolical killing, quartering and eating their God’s raw flesh and drinking his blood for salvation from some stupid sin snd un-requited guilt appears to be idiotic to any person with minimum intelligence. The participants are made to leave the church  with a dire warning that they  may not be  alive for another day to attend  the ceremony again. The whole thing leaves bad taste in the mouth. No sensible person can stomach this witch’s brew.  

The whole charade looks like an assembly of jackals howling around some rotten bones incessantly. Or is it a witch ogre, in some remote African voodoo land, prancing about with skulls and bones on his neck and  donning feathers of some strange bird?  It may also be the modern throwback version of human sacrifice and cannibalism. 

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