The Religious Text

People who find themselves bound by religious scriptures often fail to understand why those scriptures were created in the first place. And that failure is precisely what turns them into fanatics.

To my understanding, those scriptures — regardless of which religion — are nothing more than books of law. A modern parlance would call them a Constitution. And similar to how and by whom constitutions are created, those religious scriptures were also created by people of similar intellect. We can fancy them by giving them names — Prophet, Sage, Son of God, Incarnation. But the point is, all those gentlemen saw through the problems of society at myriad scale and formulated rules so that a large section of the population could follow them. This was done to avoid chaos.

However good those scriptures were at the time they were written, they do not hold the same sheen with the test of time. There will certainly be a good portion of those scriptures which remain valid for as long as human life exists. But that does not make any of them infallible.

Most importantly, ideas mentioned in those scriptures must be challenged and rewritten as time goes by. Otherwise they will be nothing more than works of fiction.

A constitution, on the other hand, can be modified and changed if a majority of stakeholders believe so. That makes it a better scripture than any existing religious text. Constitutions are written in legal language — there is no storytelling about why a particular law is the way it is. It simply is, and it can be changed when it no longer serves.

As humans we have evolved exponentially, particularly in the last couple of centuries. The democratisation of knowledge — once purely dependent on individual exposure to the wider world — has fundamentally changed. These are the most progressive times in the history of civilisation to be alive in.

And yet, only one thing has not changed since the oldest scriptures to the modern constitution — human lust for greed, money and power. Hence anything that remotely addresses this lust will remain valid for eternity in any book of law.

That is the only eternal scripture. Human nature itself.