A game of chance

Hence, since we are the ones who are going to pay for this mistake, should we not be the ones to decide what is true and what is false? Hence, also, should we not be allowed to decide what we wish to believe in since at the end of the day we are the ones who will suffer the consequences?

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

Let’s say, before your parents got married, your father was a Muslim and your mother a Christian. Then, when they got married, your mother converted to Islam and a year later you were born. What religion do you think you would be following now?

Let’s say, before your parents got married, your father was a Christian and your mother a Muslim. Then, when they got married, your mother converted to Christianity and a year later you were born. What religion do you think you would be following now?

Let’s say both your father and mother were Christians. Then, after they got married, they went to Tibet for their honeymoon where they visited a monastery. They were so impressed with how the Buddhist monks lived their lives that your parents converted to Buddhism. One year later you were born. What religion do you think you would be following now?

Today, there is more than a 99% chance you would be following the religion of your parents. There would be less than a 1% chance you would leave the religion of your parents to follow a new religion.

So are you 100% absolutely sure the religion you are following today is the correct religion? It is ‘correct’ only because you have been brought up in the religion of your parents. What if your parents never cared much for any religion and brought you up in an environment where there was no religion. Would you not probably be an atheist today?

How many of you have pondered on this question? Are you not what you are or who you are because of your parents? What if your parents had made a mistake and left the ‘true’ religion they were born into to embrace a ‘false’ religion? The religion you were brought up in would now become the ‘true’ religion while the earlier religion that your parents abandoned would be the ‘false’ religion.

Hence which is ‘true’ and which is ‘false’? Is ‘true’ the new religion of your parents that you were brought up in or their old religion which they abandoned?

Hence, also, is true and false subjective and merely an opinion based on what you have been raised to believe? Or is true and false real and tangible?

Today we fight and argue about what we perceive as true and false. We uphold what we believe to be true and oppose what we believe to be false. However, if our parents had ‘changed course’ some time in their life by abandoning their old religion in favour of a new one, and they had exposed us to what they believe to be true, then our interpretation of true and false would be what we have been taught to believe to be true and false.

So are we really fighting for the truth or are we fighting for what we have been taught to believe to be true? And are we really confident that God has blessed us with the truth or has Satan misled us into believing that we are following the truth when actually we are following something false?

I suppose one day we will all know the answer to that question. But we will first have to die to get the answer to that question. In the meantime, while we are still alive, we want as many people as possible to follow us down this path of the truth.

But what happens if we are not on the path of truth and we end up leading others down a false path? While we will pay for this error of our ways, are we also going to pay for the error of the others we misled down this same false path? Or will each person pay for their own errors even if that error was made because others misled us?

Yes, there are those who would like to force their beliefs upon us and compel us to follow what they believe to be the right path. But if that so-called right path is actually the wrong path then we who followed them down this wrong path would end up paying for this mistake.

Hence, since we are the ones who are going to pay for this mistake, should we not be the ones to decide what is true and what is false? Hence, also, should we not be allowed to decide what we wish to believe in since at the end of the day we are the ones who will suffer the consequences?