Why do people pray? The mighty and the weak, the corrupt and the honest, the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, almost all of them say their prayers regularly and I wonder why? It is not that I am an atheist, I firmly believe in God and also in the philosophy that all that is happening on planet earth is his bidding.
I witness bureaucrats cringing before senior bureaucrats, senior bureaucrats cringing before ministers and politicians, the poor before the rich, the rich before the men in power and the super rich before the super powers. And all this cringing and placating is almost in the form of a prayer, though not from the heart. It is for gains, personal in nature like a favor, position, materialistic gains or power. Basically we are all trying to curry favors by praying to others.
Carrying the same argument forward, I often wonder, whether our daily prayers to the almighty also fall in the same category – an attempt to please by cringing and placating. I always believed that what the almighty expects from us is compassion, love for the life species and to be a genuine human being. If God could be moved by the cringing and placating in the form of a prayer and then if he bestows what is desired by the applicant, then he cannot be God; he has to be a human being. If he is really God after all, then all the cringing and placating in the form of prayer or other rituals would not have any effect and blessings would be bestowed by him on only one criterion, the “Karma” of the applicant.
I have since stopped praying, except for a weekly darshan of Hanumanji and now the only attempt and desire is to be a good human being.
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