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Problems with Religions in General (long)
I'll use the examples from Islam to highlight this issue:
- We did not send any messenger but (speaking) in the language of his people, so that he might clearly convey the message to them (Quran 14:4).
- And if We had made it a non-Arabic Qurโan, they would have said, โWhy are its verses not explained in detail [in our language]? Is it a foreign [recitation] and an Arab [messenger]?โ Say, โIt is, for those who believe, a guidance and cure.โ And those who do not believe โ in their ears is deafness, and it is upon them blindness. Those are being called from a distant place (Quran 41:44).
- Now if We had willed this [divine writ] to be a discourse in a non-Arabic tongue, they [who now reject it] would surely have said, โWhy is it that its messages have not been spelled out clearly?โ (Quran 41:44).
As we can see, the language was used by prophet Mohammed to tailor the Quran to the population of Arabia. But now, since they don't want to modify the original word believing in it's superiority, instead of tailoring the Quran to non-Arabic, they require non-Arabic speakers to learn Arabic.
Now this is not very ideal. Because that would be against the purpose for which Mohammed explained the Quran in Arabic. But can you translate the Quran as it is into other languages? Not really, because the meaning of an idea is closely tied to the language.
For a simple example, we all know how a joke told in one language may not translate well to another language.
So, what is to be done about this? I can say that the only person who understands Islam well is Mohammed himself. Or rather, he had a vision, and he conveyed it as well as he could to the people of Arabia. Now, having a strong vision would also make him an excellent poet, who can convey the idea with clarity, so I cannot say that he made mistakes in translating his idea, however, I could say that he was biased by his knowledge of the Abrahamic faith.
It is because, I myself once had a moment of realization, and suddenly I started describing the experience in terms of the Biblical religion - such as having seen the Eden garden, and an unseeable, but very present god. But in my descriptions, what I did omit was that I saw more than just the Eden garden, I felt like time wasn't real, and I could visualize anything, although I used struggle with visualizing everyday objects mentally. Later I would realize when the mind is calm and clear, free of thoughts or beliefs, you can see a lot of things mentally. And you could imagine things faster than usual and that would feel like time has slowed down for you, and sometimes you even feel free of time. So, what happened was that, when suddenly put in such a state, I tried to make sense of it by referring to the closest thing I knew about all this. It was the Bible, and I had read the Book of Genesis in my childhood. So I started looking at that experience through the lens of the book of Genesis, and hence I saw the Eden Garden. And the memory of this experience lingered on for a long time, so even after the experience, which actually felt more like being in a state of deep self-awareness and introspection, I would tell myself that I was in the presence of god, and he was answering all my questions. But I didn't see or feel a person, and neither was he addressed as he, nor did I see the Eden Garden. It was actually when I started looking through the lens of the Biblical god back to my memories which lingered on, that I started seeing the Eden Garden. But in reality, it was more like I would see anything I wanted to see. I saw everything, but looking back, I fixated on just the things I wanted to see. I even saw images of ethereal landscapes, covens, beautiful witch houses in the jungle, Vikramaditya and Vetal in the jungle, Krishna in beautiful landscapes, etc., but I fixated on just the Biblical god at last. Why I chose the Hebrew Bible was because the Hindu books are really large, and I wasn't entirely sure about the history of the religion, but I had read the Book of Genesis as a story book from a friend's Bible when I was in 7th. And I didn't know much about Islam or other religions.
But this made me trust the Biblical god a lot, so I wanted to know the rules of God. Actually, I figured out that the rules of life can take any stable form, but a lot of the time, these rules converge, because life requires maintenance by work, and we also require rest, and so on. So a standard schedule would be better to follow than inventing my own schedule, and I believed the Bible would have it, because I thought there is a god, and the Bible is what people believe. I also thought Quran would probably be purer, but I found the Quran app harder to read, and I thought I'd have to learn Arabic well first, and so I decided to read the Bible. I did know that the Bible had some questionable phrases, but I thought maybe I'm taking things out of context, and maybe the verses about women are more like verses aimed at keeping a stable standard rather than outright exploitation. Anyways I wanted to read it linearly, or at least properly, since that's the best way to not take things out of context. Then I realized that there are several books in the Bible, but I decided to read in linearly, because it was at least one of the ways to read without being totally wrong.
But by the time I reached the story of Lot's people, I got really weirded out, and I felt that this had nothing to do with god. It felt so weird that the people of a town would just come and ask to rape guests. As for lot's daughters, people justify that Lot was referring to the women of his land whom he considered daughters, and he meant marriage. But even then, the previous incident is totally weird for me to accept. So I skipped a little forward. I had also seen the movie The Ten Commandments (1956) along with Benhur after this, because I recalled them from school days, but the audio wasn't clear back then, and there were no subtitles. So The Ten Commandments taught me the story of Moses, but I knew it was a film than the real story, so I wanted to see it anyways. I wanted to know what happened post the movie, to all the people who wandered for 40 years. I skimmed Deuteronomy (or maybe the one after it), and found that God demanded animal sacrifices, and a lot of weird rituals. So I stopped reading it from then, knowing this had nothing to do with god or divinity. Just people's beliefs at the time imprinted on to a book. Later, the Quran was better to read, but it still referred back to the incident of Lot, and by this time, I had long moved on from the mistake I made by viewing my experience through the lens of the Bible. Alan Watts and his lectures on Taosim seemed more natural to me, and that was closer to my experience and understanding than the strict rules of Abrahamic religions. In any case, the god of my experience too reasoned just like me, it was just that I was in a state of heightened awareness, and I realized that there are no punishments, and one's feelings are merely illusions causing them to feel hurt, but by breaking free of the chains of thought given to you by the world, you could see the clear picture and be happy. And life, being more eternal and spiritual had no hierarchical distinction between this world and heaven, it was more like world with different purposes. Heaven was the world for one's imagination, and this world was a place for coexistence.
[I wouldn't even say the Hebrew religion was a lie, but optimistically thinking, it was possibly more of an approach, and believing it as fact could've come from an innocent mistake]