Why aren’t we born with our religion stamped on our body? (PK answered 8)

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Transcript

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Hare Krishna. Why are we not born with a stamp of the religion to which we belong? Answer, because the religion to which we belong, whether it is Hindu, Muslim, Christian, these are external to us. They are attributes of our body and we are not the body, we are the soul.
So these religions are characteristics of the body, just as say Indian, American, Pakistani, these are also characteristics of the body. So now, we cannot expect that whatever characteristics of the body are there, we are born with the, they are born with us. Nobody is born with a stamp of being an Indian or a Pakistani.
Similarly, nobody is born with a stamp of being a Hindu or a Muslim. So now, what does this point imply? That we don’t have a stamp of which religion we belong to. Does that mean that all religions are false? No, it simply means that religion as we understand it is not innate to us.
But religion is a process that we adopt to bring out that which is innate to us. The Sanskrit word Dharma means that which is our original nature. And what is our core nature? What is that without which we can’t exist? That is to love and serve.
Wherever we are, whoever we are, we want to love and serve. So to direct our loving and serving propensity properly towards God so that we can love him and we can love all loving living beings in relationship with him and thereby gain lasting happiness. The process for doing that is religion.
So we can adopt different religions or we can practice a particular religion so that we develop love for God. The purpose is important. So religion is not our innate characteristic in the sense that we don’t belong to a particular religion right from birth.
But to Dharma, our Dharma, our innate characteristic is to love and serve. And to help us to love and serve in a way by which we actually grow in life and become happy and help others become happy we need to follow external process. So religion in that sense is like a university.
So just as nobody is born with the stamp of the university in which a person is going to go but then that person chooses a university so as to become educated. Similarly, we practice a particular religion so that we become purified so that we develop love for God so that we get to know God and we learn how to love him. So in that sense, whether it is Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, whatever we follow the purpose is to follow the religion by which we can develop love for God.
The university which we adopt, we are not born with a stamp of that university. But just because we are not born with a stamp does not mean that we don’t need a university. It means that we have to intelligently choose a particular university and go to that university for the purpose of getting education.
So when people follow religious rituals blindly then they do it just because it has been done in the tradition. They don’t know what is the purpose of doing it. And then that religion can become, it may not take them to God and sometimes it can become a source of divisiveness also.
But then that divisiveness can happen because of anything. That divisiveness can happen because of nationality. India and Pakistan are fighting or it can happen because of race.
It can happen because of even something as basic as football and cricket and baseball. Cricket fans of two teams may fight with each other. And similarly baseball fans of two teams can fight against each other.
So when people have ego, then that ego leads to conflict. That ego can lead to violence. So when people have ego, they can use any cause and every cause for fighting.
So just as people can use sports for fighting, fans of two sports stars can fight because saying my sports star is the best. So patriots of two countries can fight. Leaders of two races can fight and similarly people of two religions can also fight.
So the cause of fighting is not just the fact that differentiation has been created because of religion but rather that religion is practiced not for a spiritual purpose but for the sake of ego. So religion does not come with a stamp and we should not think that religion is something which divides people and because it is artificial it has to be rejected. Rather its purpose has to be understood and fulfilled.
And then that which is our innate nature to love and serve will be directed in a way by which we can attain lasting peace and happiness. Thank you. Hare Krishna.