These graven images

Sometimes I wonder if the people who insist on making temples and statues to worship are entirely sane. For according to me it is sheer i...

Sometimes I wonder if the people who insist on making temples and statues to worship are entirely sane. For according to me it is sheer insanity to spend lakhs of rupees in constructing imposing halls when the same amount can be used to fill lakhs of stomachs. In constructing pillars when the same amount can be used to build hospitals. In raising stone statues when the same amount can be used to raise and educate millions of orphans. It is surely insanity to believe in the worship of graven images when you can worship God8217;s greatest creation in the flesh 8212; man himself.

Learned men. True believers of all nations, all persuasions. Pray let me make a humble request. Look around you and find God everywhere. Do not seek him in stone. He is there in the little naked boy with a toothless grin. He is there in the girl with the ragged dress. Feed them. Teach them to read and write. Teach them to stand on their own feet. Teach them to worship the Creator Himself, not mere stone. Teach them the importance of mankind.And then you shall have found God. For it is He who created you and them. He is there in both of you. You just have to look for Him. And when you find the Creator in them you will have found the Lord in yourself.

It is wrong to follow a whim to create great places on a piece of land 8212; land that belongs to you and me, not to great blocks of stone. Make shelters for the poor, hospitals for the needy, schools for the poor. Don8217;t waste land on mere stone.

It is wrong to make statues of God, for He is not stone or mud alone. He is everything, everywhere. He is not one man8217;s private property. He is there for all to love and care about. He is there to cherish the right and punish the sinful.

Why, then, is there this insistence on the part of God8217;s followers to make His image in stone and to house it in vast, ostentatious structures of brick, lime, mortar and more stone? I wonder if they have access to privileged information. As though they had dropped in for tea with God one day and he said: 8220;I want a stonemansion, so make it or there8217;s likely to be trouble.8221; Or probably they had God visit them in their dreams asking for a palatial estate. Or maybe they just have a very human weakness for sights of bloodshed. Whatever, I wonder if God insisted on central air-conditioning in his latest mansion.

After all, why should the Almighty care if hundreds die in the process of the creation of his palace, or if there are lakhs of people dying of hunger and poverty, so long as there is that temple at Ayodhya for him to take His ease in.

Don8217;t do that to our God, men of prayer. Please, let us believe in Him, as we always have. Let us believe that there is still hope for the hungry and the downtrodden of this world. For if you go and build that temple, you will tarnish the Lord8217;s image for all time. You will make our Lord a comfort-seeking, greedy, uncaring and blind creature. You will leave us with no hope then. If that temple is built, then we will believe that our God is blind to all the misery in the world. Themisery the money that went into the temple8217;s construction could have alleviated. Or the attention of the politicians, the bureaucrats, the whole machinery of state, that could have been directed to more useful ends.

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For you to construct a stone mansion over the land where one of the Creators creations was born is plain foolishness. We are all His creations. Each one of us needs a mansion over our heads. Each one of us needs to be worshipped. But there is more of the Lord in the needy and hungry, for they have suffered less corruption. So worship that hungry newborn. For he is the Lord, he8217;s yelling it out. Pity no one can hear him over the din of construction and destruction.