Where are you God, when people start killing each other?

Long before you still stayed at your parents’ house, which once you were a kid sitting on the lap of your parents. Things were less complicated unlike now. Now you’ve lived as an adult living alone with one million other people around you, and what is there for you to master yourself among them, is learning how to get along with others and how to extend tolerance to those who’re not carbon copy of yourselves.

I’m friends with a lot of people. Ranging from college friends, to neighbors. I always try to communicate with them very well. We always have each other. But living with a million other people, it is not easy as imagined. Lately, there has been some tensions between us that make us unhappy. There is one major factor that leads to our relationship break down.

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Religion

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Being a person who lives in a country where religion is an important part in people’s live is not so easy. In accordance with our first nation’s ideology stating “Belief in God Almighty”. Religion plays collectively to the political, economic and cultural. With so many religions and cults that exist in Indonesia, inter-religious conflict is often inevitable. Moreover, the political leadership of Indonesia plays an important role in the relations between groups and classes. Even the transmigration program has indirectly led to a number of religious conflict in this county.

But I’m not going to feed you with religion condition in my country. Telling them, make my head hurt so much. I’m just going to tell you about my questions that I always keep for myself all this time for the couple of years. That’s all.

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“Where are you God?”

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While writing this blog. I’m sitting on my bed, drinking deeply from my plastic tumbler and playing my favorite playlist (John Mayer – Comfortable). Just to make myself feel comfortable at my new place in Bandung. Btw I just moved into a new place. The room’s a little bit smaller than the previous one. But the house is surely nice with big trees in the surrounding area and a larger garage to park my motorbike.

I feel like my life is beginning to be more that I could take. Yet, under the name of religion. If you’re not doing exactly what the scripture told you to do. You will always end up being a sinner and they will always end up being the right one.

I remembered clearly how a bad thing happened to me a week ago. I was being kicked out expelled, from my old place by my old landowner, a freaking moralist, who is still my family, my own uncle.

He’s been unnecessarily worried about my independence lately. Unnecessarily because he has no reason to be. Probably he’s just worried, for instance, about my inability to adjust to living in his neighborhood – where many azans are being shouted out for five times through mosques’ loudspeakers everyday, in a proper way as superfluous problem.

Simply because i’m not as religious as the other people in his neighborhood. I’m a sinner, let’s put it that way.

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For some years, I haven’t been doing ‘sholat’ five times a day regularly like i used to. I don’t see why I should do that and what is that for?.

Even more, i used to attend several religious meetings in different mosques, where i saw the people were very enthusiastic listening to a preacher who was so energetic in telling his hatred against other religions. Even worse, he’s telling stories about barbaric war that happened many years ago at the time the prophets still alive, that once said it’s the right thing to kill the Christians, Jews, and Atheist believer in the name of God. At the time i heard it. I silently discussed with myself in complete conscience, how the preacher have retarded human progress and how, with their conscious mind spreading good teachings to people, by choosing to call killing as a fucking morality?.

Since then, every time i hear preachers spreading hatred morality to his disciples and the surrounding neighborhood through mosque’s loudspeaker. I start objecting to having to attend the mosque that i would consider truthfully as a horrible place to avoid.

I started gradually thinking that I don’t think I need the sermons of professional moralists to tell me how I should act. I certainly don’t need them tell me how to live my life. I’m altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting their sermons that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity, that, to my mind, are nothing more than fairy tales for children held by adults. And saying that killing people is a fun thing to do, yes it’s fun.

Only when you do it in game consoles.

Religion, as what i believed when i was a kid to be the the most honest spirit to act nicely towards people. Has now turned 90% of my mind into mainly fear when i get older – fear of the mysterious power, fear of defeat, fear of death, and fear of being totally “different” than all normal beings.

And most importantly. Fear of witnessing an absence of god power to stop human from killing each other.

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Have some of you wondered what is happening to many of people on the other corner of this globe?. While Indonesian political parties are so energized in preparing for 2014 presidential election by preparing some heavenly sweet words to be spoken out loud of their street campaign to fool people. Other evil things at the same moment are flaring up at any hour of the day or night and take hundreds upon hundreds more human lives in Egypt and Somalia or any other conflicting countries in this globe.

Do you have any idea how fortunate, how privileged, and how lucky i am to be here sitting on my bed, listening to my favorite playlist (John Mayer – Comfortable) to make myself, again, feel “comfortable” while writing this blog on Saturday and not there being shot in the head at on Saturday, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and on Sundays as well?.

When measured against the sacrifices being made by those people in this barbaric war against the aggression forces – when measured against that. My problem looks so tiny. I don’t have any idea how juvenile and stupid and idiotic my problems look against those people, who could have made me aware how shameful i am right now?

This kind of thought leads me into another question to you God.

“If you were granted with unlimited power and total knowledge and millions of year in which to perfect your world, why don’t you just use some of your powers and miracles to stop them from killing each other – for some of who had died were probably people who had devoted their whole life for you?”

The power that i always believe when i was a kid to be there to make the world a better place? Why that doesn’t feel to exist anymore.

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P.S : Anyway. I wouldn’t consider moving into a new place as a superfluous problem, and neither would my uncle, I’m sure, if he were appraised of the situation. As he has every right to do it, it’s his house, I don’t think I would not mind moving to a new place again to begin my new life away from all so-called moralistic people.

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by : AP