Contrary to the popular belief, religion abhors division of the society and wars. People seem misguided by the man-made texts about religion. They need to revisit the Scripture.

‘Religion’ is Divine Ideology for the way of life. It is in place since the Adam’s era. Scripture emphasizes belief in one God and a natural and/or rational way of life for the humankind. However, capitalizing on the people’s complacency about Scripture, theologians, from time to time, have been designing their own versions of religion by interpolating blind imitation (taqleed) and mystification into it. ‘All’ current faiths are, thus, the theological offshoots of religion, such as illustrated below:

‘Theological’ offshoots of religion

Scripture enjoins moderation (justice) and compassion in social interactions. Theologies are theocracy-oriented ideologies that foster radicalism and the division of people into sects. Hatred, intolerance and extremism cannot be uprooted globally unless the ‘purely’ Scriptural version of religion is revived worldwide.

‘Scripture’ (kitab, Book) means the verbatim Word of God (kalam ilahi) revealed (wahey) to His Messengers. It is God’s Reminder (dhikar) about the purpose of human life. Divine content of the Bible and Qur’an is the Scriptural text of religion. ‘Theology’ (deeniyat) is the study of religion in para-Scriptural texts that are designed by the people. Mysticism is part of such texts of almost all faiths.

Religion (deen) is not the name of spiritual beliefs and rituals alone. Its Scriptural version intricately binds the worldly affairs to spirituality. Therefore,religious scholar will be a believing intellectual who understands sciences and the Scripture. Theologians are experts primarily of the theological texts. Theological ‘concepts’ are not necessarily endorsed by the Scripture.

This website presents the ‘Scriptural’ version of religion and highlights of its ‘theological’ version(s) as well. Reference [5:3], for example, refers to verse (ayah) 3, or part thereof, of chapter (surah) 5 of the Qur’an.