'God wants me to be poor – nothing can be done about it!' - Religion's bad Effect

I mentioned in the diary of day before yesterday, that Indian people have an easier time accepting changes in life and life in general than people from the west. Unfortunately this does not only bring positive effects and that is what I would like to write about today.

Can you not imagine what negative aspects it could have to accept life and not get upset about the bad things in it? In general I agree, it sounds positive – unless it brings you inactivity and the inability to bring change into your own life. An example from our daily lives with several of our school children’s parents: when poor people simply accept the situation that they are in, they don’t even try to get out anymore.

Yes, we have talked with a lot of poor families, a lot of poor men and women who are trying to make ends meet. Many of them work and get minimal money, just enough to feed themselves and their children. Nevertheless, when you come to their home and they are not at work, they just lie around there. They tell that they work as priests or rickshaw drivers and well, sometimes they get work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a son or a daughter also earns, so the family gets by. Why to do any more?

They just don’t try to do more. They don’t seem to have any enthusiasm to work hard and get up and above the state that they are in!

It is how it is, if god wants this for us, if it is the almighty’s will… we hear such sentences and it makes me, as a non-believer, shake my head in disbelief! I really cannot understand how you can simply give up on the chance that you could lead a good life in abundance, thinking that some mean super-being decided that you cannot be successful! And religion created this!

Hinduism is full of such teachings, telling people that they have a fate that they should accept, that they should not fight and that everything is pre-written anyway. This is the reason that women, even if they are abused by their drunkard husbands, don’t even think of divorce: this is what life gave me, what god wants for me.

So yes, of course, acceptance is necessary in life and it is good that in the Indian culture it has developed in this way, because they need it a lot. On the other hand however, people here could learn just a bit from people in other countries who believe that hard work and discipline can help you get out of your miseries!