Searching for Solace

The more independent a person, the less dependent one becomes towards God and religion. At least, that’s the case of many in other parts of the world. H.J.C. Princen, a Dutch, a deserter of Dutch army to become an Indonesian freedom fighter against his colonialist country and a human right activist during Suharto’s era, once said as reported by TEMPO magazine a few decades ago, that he’s actually in no actual need to any religion. Despite he followed one of them.

That is understandable. The basic character of human is that they will make priorities based on their immediate needs. People in the West (Western Europe particularly) who are relatively more independent than that in the East, financially as well as emotionally, find religion as a non-immediate priorities. And hence atheism or agnosticism finds a fertile breed out there.

There are moments, however, where money and anything it can buy, cannot resolve problems. And there are times when logic reaches its limit. Here human will need something else. Something beyond human capability to do and to think. It’s at this point of time when you have only two choices: turn to religion, or spiritualism if you like; or you are dead in its literal or metaphorical sense. Revealed a 2004 study:

According to a recent study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry religious affiliation is associated with significantly lower levels of suicide compared to religiously unaffiliated people, atheists and agnostics.

John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene’s Megatrend 2000 also told us how a fanatic Atheist in the Sovyet’s era need to call an Orthodox priest to pray for him in his deathbed.[]