40 days of Reading the Bible by a Clueless, Wandering, Wannabe Christian

21 March, Day 36: John 8: 21-30 Nobody wants to be reminded about the presence of sin in their lives. It is more pervasive than we want to acknowledge or admit. But, wanting to be aware of it is far away from our thoughts. How many of us take the time to actively reflect and examine ourselves and our lives everyday - our thoughts, acts and behaviour? Nobody has the time or mindspace to spend on this kind of thing. Why face all these uncomfortable truths about ourselves? What is the purpose? It's quite uncomfortable to pay attention to and dwell on our weaknesses, so why even go there? Isn't life hard as it already is, without the need for all this self-imposed prodding and introspection. In fact, most of us are quite comfortable with the fact that we live pretty decent lives. We tend to follow the rules. We help people when we can and when it's convenient to us. We don't treat others very unkindly. Most of us are not inclined to, steal, kill or do something ex...

 4 March, Day 19: John 2: 13-25 One of the things I hate most about religion, second to fundamentalism, is its commercialization or people making money off God or religion. I've had a personal experience of this at a church in Kerala, India where you could pay a priest to pray for you. People stood in long queues to buy his prayers, right outside the church, within its grounds. There are other examples of world-famous preachers and so-called religious leaders (across religions) who amass a huge following doing the same, pushing "religion" onto a mass of believers, performing miracles and healings and selling a brand name - providing opium to the people. One such religious "leader" in India, now had a multi-million FMCG consumer brand. I've always found this repulsive and disgusting, yet people lap it up - for their good or not- I don't know! On one hand you can argue, if people are taking something good away from it to apply to their lives, than...