Religion is belief in
someone else’s experience.
Spirituality is having your own experience.
~ Deepak Chopra ~
My (religion) teachers
when I was in primary school said that it was in the hands of parents to make
their children Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. Since the majority of Muslim
people believe that Islam is the only right religion – the others were no
longer ‘valid’ or even wrong – Muslim parents have a very big responsibility to
‘MAKE’ their children Muslim. There are at least two reasons behind it:
First, one
hadith said that Muslim people who have died will still get ‘blessings’
(pahala) if their religious (shalih/shaliha) children continue praying for
their deceased parents. Muslim people believe the more blessings from God, the
bigger number of ‘savings’ to enter God’s heaven. They have been taught – or my
‘favorite’ term ‘brainwashed’ – that heaven is their ultimate destination
because all comfort is there while hell is the place they must avoid because never-ending
torture will ‘accompany’ their ‘hereafter life’ forever. (Muslims believe that
after someone dies, he/she will wait for the doomsday and the day of “Judgment”
in one ‘dimension’ of life called ‘Barzakh’ – one domain between death the
resurrection day. During their staying in ‘Barzakh’ someone still can get
blessings sent by their religious Muslim children prays.
Second,it is
stated that on ‘Judgment’ day, all human beings will be judged directly by God
one by one. Muslims believe that there is possibility for one person to fail to
enter heaven only because his/her children convert to another religion during
their life on the earth and their parents do not prevent them from doing so.
From the two
reasons mentioned above, one can conclude that they refer to parents’ ego and
desire to enter heaven; parents who never think that their children possibly
have their own experience in adhering religion / handling their spiritual
journey; parents who fail to have a two-direction communication with their
children.
As a case study,
I will take a comparison between one best friend of mine and me myself.
She did not get
rigid teachings of religion when she was a kid, either from her parents or from
school. Her parents did not teach her what to do to communicate with God
although they were Islam. She learned Islam by herself, either from reading
books, or from asking her friends, or joining any religious gatherings (called ‘pengajian’
in Bahasa Indonesia) until one day she decided to wear ‘hijab’. It was all her
own ‘findings’ from her effort to find a way to communicate with God. Perhaps I
could draw a conclusion that Islam is her religion, but based on her own
experience, so it is also her spirituality.
I was on the
somewhat contradictory life experience. I got a very rigid teachings both from
my parents and my teachers in primary school (I went to one conventional Islamic
school). The teachings were ‘choked’ into my brain while I was brainwashed that
Islam was the only right religion and it would be safeguarded by God until the
Judgment day so that the teachings would always be eternally applicable in all
ages.
The
disappointment I got from religion (check this link
and this link) made me have my own spirituality. I no longer embrace the
same religion taught to me when I was a kid and I adhered till my 30 years of
age.
However, you can
guess that there are some people very close around me who do not let me have my
own spirituality; they still expect me to go back to “religion” (read รจ someone else’s experience, be it my
parents or teachers or religious leaders (ulema)) despite my mature age.
Sigh ...
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