Different strokes for different folks
There is room for both belief and unbelief in our secular nation
Photo- Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune
June 3, 2013 at 14:09
Fawaz Rob
The story goes like this: An atheist goes to a fancy restaurant and asks for a cup of tea. The religious waiter brings the tea and there is a fly in it. Angry atheist says, What is a fly doing in my tea? The waiter says politely, Well, I think he is praying. The atheist gets angrier and says, Prayer never solves anything, I cant drink this. Take it back. The waiter smiled and said, You see? The flys prayers were answered.
I am not an atheist. I am not a blogger. I am not a person who finds it amusing to hurt other peoples religious sentiments. However, in light of the continuous chant Hang the atheists that is going around these days, I am just a citizen who is attempting to understand this widely misunderstood phenomenon called atheism.
Persona non grata
In Bangladesh, nastikota or atheism has been considered derogatory for as long as we can remember. Any self-proclaimed nastik is automatically outcast from the society and dealt with the harshest of social ostracism. Even the Ekushey Padak winning writer Humayun Azad had to suffer because he truthfully expressed his atheism in public. The fear of being called a nastik is so widespread that even among the most educated classes very few will publicly admit their slightest disregard for religion. Therefore, any interpretation of religious dogma, no matter how outrageous it appears, will be tolerated silently. Otherwise, any protest against it would mean being branded as a nastik, a sure death to any political or social aspiration. Most of the youths in Shahbagh movement were not atheists, but as soon as they were labelled so, somehow the movement lost sympathy of many believers. An atheist is almost automatically seen as a bad person bound to burn in the fires of hell for eternity, which is ironic, because atheists dont tend to believe in heaven or hell anyways.
What I understand is that atheism is not a religion. Atheism is the disbelief of any existence of God or deity. Atheists dont have religious scriptures or holy books, they dont have a prophet or an idol, and they dont have a temple or a mosque. They believe in the non-existence of all that a theist would believe. In our country we brand anyone who doesnt follow an organised religion as nastik. In reality there are many forms of disbelief. You have your garden-variety confirmed atheists, then there are the ones who subscribe to no religion.
http://dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2013/jun/03/different-strokes-different-folks