And everyone thinks his creed is right. The way out of this dilemma in the modem world capable of annihilating itself in the nuclear holocaust is peaceful co-existence to live and let live with the realization that we share common humanity in joys and pains of life, while breathing the same air and getting the same sustenance from the mother earth.

In the present life too, you are asked to supinely bow to your karma or fate for the past acts of which you have no inkling and you are required unconditionally and faithfully to submit, and adhere to the good deeds and ritualistic chants in the fond hope that this time you might obtain release from the wheel of rebirth to achieve Moksha or release. It appears that very few qualify for such a good luck, as is apparent from so many sinners who keep returning to life, so much so that the population of India has swelled to over one billion persons and will double, as highest in the world exceeding China in a period of thirty years at the present rate of 3% per cent annual exponential increase.

These recluses, without family ties and cares, having shed the affections and relations as an article of faith, had nothing to worry about the hard facts of working for the living. Meditating in isolation and living in harmony with nature, it was natural for the hermits to develop mystical musings and preach esoteric and ascetic views of insignificance and self-renunciation that life was an impermanent and a transient illusion. Man’s status in the world was a matter of karma or destiny, struggle for improving one’s lot in life was otiose and detachment from every worldly attraction, including wife and children, was compulsory for obtaining the ultimate release from the cycle of rebirth and illusive existence for merger in the unknowable.

This example of Hinduism reveals that every vibrant religion evolved its distinct methods of lore and worship consonant with its geographical conditions, the climatic impact in its place of birth and other growth and historical compulsions. Rigorous and long fasting is not unfamiliar among the monks of Christianity and Buddhism for penance, as in the Muslims whose traditions emanated from the dry and barren regions of scarcity, where sun is divided nearly evenly between light and darkness. However, the periods of fasting change in the Arctic region or in Europe with sun in the sky upto the midnight to rise again early in the morning.

Christians approved eating of pork or ham because the Europeans reared pigs before the advent of Christianity and particularly because the Jews hated and banned them as loathsome. The Christians of Australia, located in down and under, cannot celebrate white Christmas, as it is hot there in December. The Europeans of cold icy regions could not be expected to worship elephant and snakes like Hindus, as these species were simply not known to them. They also did not know about sweet honey, a produce of forests and oases. It could not have occurred to them or to the Hindu or Chinese of warm regions, where vegetation and flowers were abundant and who had honey aplenty, to be impressed like desert Arabs to treat it as a gift of heaven in the life hereafter.

Similarly, cross became the symbol of Christianity, because Christ was crucified on two wooden planks placed and raised diagonally. This was a cruel and normal method of the Romans brought from Rome in the Jewish Asia for executing common criminals by thirst, hunger and exposure to the elements. And Christ was regrettably treated like one, creating thousands of years of enmity and hatred between the Jews and Christians.

The ancient man had to worship something in nature more powerful than him or someone to whom he could attribute mystery and awe fer the sake of allaying his fears of the unknown.

Appeasement of the powerful or mysterious was his compulsive need for protection in this life and continuity in hereafter. He subsequently sublimated his instinctive requirements of perpetuity, as a sophisticated sense of belonging and oneness, as the rare and sensitive souls like Buddha and similar other persons proclaimed through transcendence. Man satisfied his instinctive urge for submission either by deifying objects in nature or by worshipping mysterious ideas in variegated and unique forms of the stories of geneses, rituals, beliefs and codes of life. Actually, man had to justify himself, bewildered as he was by his mortal existence in pain and peril, in conformity with the impact of surroundings and climate in which he lived.