Pathway to Heaven?

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

The form of human genus is only about 2.1 million to 1.8 million years old.  It took us a couple of million years from formation to where we are today.  In reality the history of human genus is relatively very short compared to the origin of our living quarters; the good earth.  The best estimate of how old the earth is about 4.543 billion years.  So compared to the origin of our mother earth, us human genus have been around for a very short and young existence.

Much of what we live and practice today probably started with electricity (about a 150 years old), internal combustion engine (1768), steam engine (1807), first car powered by internal combustion engine (1886), then came the first petrol/gas powered engine and decades later into 1930’s we came-up with the jet engine.  It took us c a couple of millions of years to really become mobile.  Oh yes – then in the last 30-60 years of television/telecommunications/internet literally brings us together; irrespective of the distances between where we live.

Calculating the evolution of our being, it took roughly 2 million years to develop travel and communications (to today’s standards) and also find solutions for what we call comforts (at least to a few).  Then we started with world war I, 1914-1918 through 2015 (just about 100 years), we humans have found every which way to destroy our own living environment, kill as many living species on earth as possible, destroy as much forest as possible, pollute as much water (both fresh and sea) as possible, use up most of the over and under the ground mineral and other resources as possible, create as much pollution and trash as possible, all destruction while multiplying ourselves many fold in the same time.  The time is also being spent on finding ways to kill each other at every opportunity we get.  Wow!  So much for the most intelligent species (as we claim ourselves).

Supposedly we are the most intelligent (a term we invented) living species.  We do find ways (constantly invent) to make life comfortable, but we also in turn destroy everything around us with a vengeance.  Along with the inventions, we have been abusing the earth and all of its natural resources with a vengeance (in the same of development), and also with a vengeance we have been hating and killing each other, and also every living being that lives around us.  We have been so good we made many a living species extinct in a very short time.  Such is the power of what we call intelligent beings.

So much for human intelligence and intellect.  We probably started early in our existence with fighting for resources (Darwin) or women or domains.  It probably was the twisted thinking rather than resources sharing.  There was always enough of everything on earth for all living beings, so fighting and killing was probably for control of others rather than any other human emotion.  Much of the last 2000 years has been spent by humans in killing each other (while making other living beings extinct) in the name of religion or race.  We have also done a great job of annihilating everything else available to us as natural resources, as we practice human killing and then torching and burning as so kind of trophy gathering after the killing.  In the last 100 years we have been accelerating the killing and destruction all in the name of what?

From gaining and displaying more intelligence, we also keep expanding our horizons on intolerance.  Our intellectual growth (as we define it) is phenomenal as has become our hatred for our fellow humans.  It simply doesn’t make intelligent sense as the smarter we get, the more intolerant we become.  It simply doesn’t make sense to define intelligent beings in the we have been behaving.

In case of our religious origins, they are also quite young compared to the origins of our mother earth.  In broad sense we started banding together about a 100,000 years ago, forming tribes (may be the Mahabharata) about 5,000 years ago, forming states about 3,000 years ago, and empires about 2,000 years ago.  All of this is quite a new phenomenon.  If we count the origin of religion (has to be from the time we banded together) and that dictating human behavior, the level of intolerance has been constantly growing as the practices become more and more defined in most cases to suit the time and place where we live.

As a person from a religious and god believing family, there is certainly acceptance of spirituality and having divine interference engrained into my life.  The spirituality brings the belief that a supernatural power that has created the universe and all our surroundings, and controls the very existence and the constant change that goes around.  We certainly experience the power of nature and the existence of the great and unexplored universe.  My religion also embraces every element in the universe as something that is to be cherished and has an important part in our life.  So, whether or not we believe it we simply acknowledge the super natural power of being which in engrained in the fact of our life and our very being.

But now a days religion is constantly used as a dividing force between us humans.  Politics and beliefs constantly drive the anger and intolerance amongst us.  We forget that we have been here for a couple of million years, we have yet to find god and heaven.  Yes, for sure we know that the power that drives the universe is out there, but despite all the so called intellect and science we have yet to reach out to our origins.  For whatever reason we believe in the supernatural power, god in any form and his messengers, we embrace a belief, we believe in heaven and life after death, with all that in our life and belief it certainly makes little sense to take a path of killing one another in the name of religion.