The spirits, they believed, exerted salubrious or harmful influence on their day today life. The fervent effort to propitiate these spirits for their wellbeing was never found wanting.

So, the principle of cause and effect took its firm roots in the hoary past. The same principle in different garbs is flaunted with flourish even today after subjecting it to so-called updated version of re-interpretation from time to time.

The National Geographic shows that some tribesmen offer pigs, whiskey, and cheroots to their cherished gods. For them it is right course of spiritual action leading to truth, bringing mental peace, and overall well-being for the society. But this very act may be horribly repugnant to many others. It may amount to sacrilege to some other.

We dismiss many such practices of the past as outcome of blind faith and superstition. It is common knowledge that adherents of one religion denounce the precepts and practices of another. Everyone thinks he is in the right track and others are groping in the dark alleys of ignorance. The act of conversion to a different faith out of one’s own volition or due to any external persuasion presupposes, in a way, moving away from a wrong path to a right one.

Religious tolerance, out of compulsion or otherwise, doesn’t imply endorsement of other faiths as equals, although all of them answer the same eternal human quest. Every seer, ordained by divine will or being self-enlightened, led his flocks from darkness to light. The tragic fact remains that the light thus shown doesn’t enlighten every other individual. For some, spirits of the dead keep on hovering in the vicinity of the living relatives longing for votive offerings for their salvation. Some claim that the souls are, as if waiting impatiently in a sort of transit camp for the clearance on the final day of judgment, to enter heaven of endless bliss or be condemned to internecine hell for ever, on the basis of their performance -- good or bad in this earthly life. Still for others, the soul instantly takes birth as a new being, better or worse determined by his deeds in this birth, till in successive births it merges with the absolute never to be reborn. For some this liberation can be obtained through sex.

There are numerous other variants of the same truth. All are mutually exclusive. Rituals and practices are so divergent that even under extreme emergency situation one can’t be substituted by another for serving similar purposes such as funeral rites or marriage

ceremony.

Convergence of many basic values of all faiths is not a matter of fortuity. It’s in fact, in response to the dictates of necessity. To protect the weak majority from the predatory nature of handful cunning and mighty rules framed, written or otherwise for playing the game of life evolved over time into value system -- naturally conform to the requirements of many for the survival of the society.

The past and present disputes over places of worship of the same Supreme Power that everybody believes in though called by different names, bear ample testimony to the woeful subjectivity of the human belief system -- albeit the most stupendous and galvanizing force for mankind. It is a cruel irony of history that the truth barrier, so to say, is the greatest divisive factor of humanity.

Man is caught in a peculiar paradoxical situation. Due to his innate intelligence he can’t rest content without delving deep into what he wants to call as absolute truth. His bloated ego blinds him to the utter incapacity of an insignificant creature that man is, to solve the formidable mystery in the face of mind-boggling enormity of the universe, the outer fringe of which still remaining beyond the reach of the most powerful telescope ever devised by man, leaving alone unraveling the bewildering complexity of the microcosm despite phenomenal strides made so far by science. As a result, the much vaunted rational man in his relentless pursuit of this elusive truth slips blissfully into crass irrationality by claiming to scan the entire universe and everything in it through his mind’s eye and clutches ecstatically at the grandiose crutch of illusory truth – the easiest escape to self-delusion.

Honestly speaking, if we have the courage to admit it, flashes of similar truth are arrived at under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

It is awfully strange that much-sought-after truth while passing through the prism of human quest disperses into a wide spectrum of illusory hues not compatible with one another. Yet one gets over elated with it. It is perhaps an indispensable placebo an inwardly insecure and timid man can ill afford to do without to sail through the vicissitudes and uncertainty of life.

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