65. Conflicts and Conquests

With the (religious) scriptures passing on through time, the coming generations started believing that the original thinkers of their religious beliefs as Gods themselves! This belief was actually intended to respect the first thinkers of the religious faiths, but it went on the exact opposite way of the intentions! The philosophers who have no part in any religions are being worshipped even without their knowledge!

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Through centuries, the religious ideas with their prime deities and Gods got solidified through a somewhat blind belief, and the beliefs were forced on the non-believers. Some religious philosophers began spreading their beliefs to the other civilisations with the intention of bringing peace to all, by following one common faith. First began discussions about the different faiths, and then came deliberations and it ended up with heated debates.

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The people following the religions sometimes, were zealous about their own ideals and they were the active voices for their religions. The travellers in their journeys, learnt and spread many ideas, mainly religions. Thus, the religious ideas spread across lands and started meeting newer and sometimes different ideas. The peaceful religious discussions between people went on for some time.

However, the ego of men works at wrong times and wrong places.

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Discussions about religions often became arguments between people. The arguments lingered on in their minds and became fights between individuals. These fights escalated, and battles started between civilisations. More and more people who started defending their religious faiths joined hands to protect their Gods. Large-scale battles between civilisations led to wars based on religions.

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The religious wars were usually accompanied by the territorial occupation of the winning side over the losing side. The winning side imposed their religions on the new lands, and the spread of religions over the continents started. The religions representing the cultures of their lands led to mixing of people from different cultures and this mixture happened in almost all the countries ofthe world.

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Science, which grew alongside all this, never gave up, and it lingered on! What started as magic, grew with people who were persistent in understanding reality and God through reason. The scientific thinkers were sometimes encouraged to understand reality to authenticate the religious scriptures. However, all the religions allowed scientific research to advance during their reign only at times. This was primarily due to the fear of loss of authority over people and the political systems.

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At other times they struck down heavily on science, so as not to kindle peoples’ thought and reason. But change comes in one form or the other. The growth of democratic political systems across civilisations had a great impact on the religious systems. Hitherto, the monarchies and the religious systems maintained a symbiotic relationship with each other; both supported the others’ presence in the society.

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This relationship wasn’t possible with democracy based polity. When people took power into their own hands, religions had to take a back step and let forward the world to bring up new ideas. The world saw the rise of intellectuals and philosophers who gave out dynamic new ideas about reality based on science without any hindrance. A few centuries later, science saw a tremendous growth with the rise of the industrial revolution, an unexpected result of colonialism.

In about 2 centuries, science reached unprecedented levels of development, and even now it keeps on pushing. The religions, however, keep persisting on the background diversified with new cultures, strengthened by new problems and fighting to find a place in the technologically developing world.

To sum up, the religions started out as beliefs in forces of nature, and transformed into a belief in an eternal spirit, got various notions of knowledge of the times attached to it, a bit of a fear factor added to subdue people below it, adopted the body of man to be easily understood, finally man became the God himself and clashed with other beliefs over the notion that his was the only correct God in the world!

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