Most of them in the government!
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Religion and the darkness the lights of Diwali bring
November 5, 2010 | By
KNews
| Filed Under
Features / Columnists
,
Freddie Kissoon
One of life’s tantalizing, bewildering and exasperating mysteries will remain locked away, never to be revealed, even when human civilization reaches its last moment. It revolves around the influence of God upon human beings.
The question that is as old as time itself is why does a believer in God do bad or evil or unjust things that in the eyes of God should not have been done? But more fascinating is the inquiry as to how the person that God’s church entrusted to spread the word of God behave worst than an animal – the priest, whether from the Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jewish religion.
I have put that mystery to my philosophy professors when I was in graduate school and I have got all types of answers that I am not comfortable with. The most common of these responses is that if you ask God for forgiveness he will forgive you. That is horse dung to me. You molest an under-aged female parishioner, and you ask God for forgiveness. God has to be a weird person to keep forgiving you all the time. These underaged churchgoers then just have to accept the suffering while God keeps washing your sins away. Sorry! But this has to be the largest fault in religion.
I have seen some of the most indecent and unspeakable behaviour in human beings, by people who preach the word of God. It has confused me since I was a little boy. I am not blaming religion. But there has to be an answer. You cannot fault Christianity, because some Roman Catholic priests took homosexual liberties with little boys. You cannot blame the Muslim religion because some extremists have bombed airlines and killed thousands. But why do we have to accept these people in places of worship?
I hate when Diwali times come around. I grew up in the Hindu culture. My mom had a little altar in her modestly small home on D’Urban Street, Wortmanville. As I grew up, I found out that her priest was a notorious womanizer but his victims weren’t mature women who can come off the bed and forget it ever happened. He seduced teenage girls that looked up to him. I managed to persuade my mother to see this guy as a bad man. She had a cousin who was a Hindu priest, Gowkarran Sharma, and who had his own temple. My mom didn’t attend Sharma’s church but her sister did and her niece managed to get her to worship sometimes at Pandit Sharma’s outfit in Quamina Street. The reason was politics.
Sharma was a Burnham Minister, while her pandit was with Cheddi Jagan and being a Jagan fan, she chose Jagan’s underlings. That was long ago. This Hindu priest has kept going merrily along as the decades went by. He is Guyana’s most notorious seducer of teenage girls. He has moved on in age and his victims are now in their twenties. The one incident I have held against him was the suicide of his secretary due to terrible psychological harassment.
He virtually made her into a sex slave with promise of a visa to the US. As the sex continued, the visa promise began to recede. She made alternative arrangements to have her visa. Young and stupid, she told him and cut off the sex. He took her passport away and tore it up. She couldn’t endure anymore. She killed herself a week after. The week before, she told me of her traumas. I did nothing then because she didn’t mention the contemplation of suicide. How can Hindu parents allow this man to preach to their children? They have to be as perverted as him. I ask most unambiguously, how you can let a notorious priest like this recite the word of God to your children? How can religious people be so stupid?
But in keeping with the theme of this article I ask again; what do people learn from religion. I end with a story that I have only mentioned to Adam Harris. I forgot to tell others.
At the birthday celebration of Khemraj Ramjattan which took the form of a Hindu service, I sat between the now famous Michael Carrington and Gerhard Ramsaroop.
Former Attorney-General, Doodnauth Singh took the mike to give his eulogy. After quoting from the Hindu sacred book, he turned to Ramjattan, and told him he is a good lawyer but he is too aggressive. Then he said, “I could have understood your loudness if you were a Chamar but you are not.†This is religion for you.
