An excellent thought piece, one to the standard I haven't come across in a while.

It's funny that religion came into being for the precise reason of becoming able to control a large mass of people.

As Yuval Noah Harari explains in his book Sapiens, your friends and family trust you as they know you and your mutual friends trust you a bit since they know your friends but this form of "knowing" and trust drastically reduces as familiarity decreases. This is why even tribes went around in groups of a few hundreds at max.

But bring religion into a mix, potray a "God" and tell the people that it is god's will to do something and you got yourself an army of strangers that trust each other for the sole reason that everyone of them believes the same God.

Well I went off on a tangent.

Returning to the topic at hand, just as powerful of a tool that religion is to unite people, it is equally if not more powerful at breeding anitpathy and hate between different peoples.

This is exactly what the British leveraged and antisocial elements continue to leverage today.

Hypocrisy, corruption, prejudice is there in every community but play the blame game and you can save yourself from the "contamination".

By purporting religion as being much more important than it actually is, you tend to reduce an individiual to his religion. It never ceases to baffle me why religion is a necessary field of information as you said.

Well I can go on and on but I'll stop here.

I loved this piece, you write beautifully, a sense of professionalism that makes me feel like I am reading a professional political writer's piece.

Thanks for sharing this Devansh!

Looking forward to reading more from you