Humans Are Pavlov's Dog

By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam 7 October 2022 “If you constipate and don't defecate You'll be in a hospital without being late But if you don't go for the Sunday Mass You'll have more time to spend with your lass -Ogden Nash I seriously intend to write to the Nobel Committee to introduce one more discipline to award the Nobel in and that will be Religious Erudition, precisely Quranic Erudition. The very first award will unanimously go to the greatest ever exegete and commentator on the Quran to have graced the earth: Mr Naseer Ahmed for his weirdest entanglement of defecation and offering namaz five times a day! This 'enlightened' man should know that the former is a mandatory bodily function whereas, the latter is an optional 'spiritual' duty of a faithful. They cannot be bracketed and yoked together. Moreover, a ritualistic activity can be completely jettisoned and by abandoning it, your well-being doesn't suffer at all. “I don't care for the audacity of an atheist. What disturbs me most is the cloying piety of a believer, “wrote William Butler Yeats in a letter to his friend Rabindranath Tagore. The regimented ritualistic behaviour has enslaved most of the (lesser) mortals and they panic when the robotic routine gets disturbed. They all behave like Pavlov's dog. That 'educated' people go through the motion day in and day out is a proof that enlightenment is a misnomer and humans are still creepers and parasites encircled round the trees of evolution, failing to reach on top. The blinkered humans are miserably hamstrung by mechanical religiosity and living like the Russian great Gogol's ' Dead Souls.' This saddens me no end. ----- A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to world's premier publications in several languages including Persian. URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/human-pavlov-dog-quranic-erudition/d/128121 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism