This is the week of carnage. Apparently, God, gods and goddesses have given the sign – they demand blood. Man’s inhumanity attains a crescendo when he sacrifices innocent animals on the altar. During this week, Nepal’s ground will be soaked with blood from decapitated heads of thousands and thousands of buffalos. This is all to satisfy the whims of goddess Gadhimai. Do people really believe she would deliver the goods? Men cannot kill their fellow men with impunity, so they satisfy their bloodlust with large kukri knives to chop down young calves. Despite protests from many quarters, Nepalese Government had given their blessings to this unimaginable horror that would extinguish about a quarter of a million animal lives. This repeats every five years. And this repeats, every year, to a lesser degree, during the worship of Kali. This is the week of carnage. Millions of animals will be killed because Ibrahim thought God was telling him to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion. The son was spared, but a sheep was sacrificed setting a way for slaughter of countless number of animals for forever. Man might need to eat meat, but mass murder of helpless animals using brutal methods cannot be considered self-sacrifice. These monstrous tribal rituals have made their way into the twenty-first century. They make our heart heavy, because we know that a simple sacrifice performed by an easy blow of a kukri knife, on a coconut or an orange, can be a gentle and noble representation of self-sacrifice. If men were to be the custodian of this earth, they need to be the gentle custodian, they need to be responsible for all living and non-living.
6 Responses
Thank you very much for pointing out these awful rituals. It’s a shame that these types of barbaric practices are being allowed and followed in this day and age. Countless hapless animals are being murdered to satisfy the human lust for sacrificial rituals.
I can’t rationalize this practice no matter how hard I try. The process is nothing but forcing an animal to give up its dear life for the sake of a human game call ‘sacrifice.’ What are we sacrificing? Someone else’s life, isn’t it? Animal can take the credit from the blood thirsty God (?). Human can be credited for butchery. Many people know this fact but, very few have the courage to protest this inhumanity. Blindness reigns high in the religious practices, isn’t it? Why we give so much credence to ancient people and their primitive practices? Were they smarter or more intelligent than us? Can anyone answer these questions?
[Reply]
Doctrinal belief,religious instruction and ritual ceremony are the popular identical cultures of us both (educated!)and uneducated, who usually find the joy and happiness in conventional life being hell to our useful animals in the name of self sacrifice what is not a self sacrifice at all.And they never try to realize that inhuman practice because they are religious!Even today,it is a common device of most governments to keep their citizens ignorant for the sake of safe, sound and trouble-free rule.
It’s amazing this year thousands of Indians have joined the Gadhimai ritual in Nepal since a large number of animal killing in such ritual is banned in their locality.
Everybody knows the world of modern, rational philosophy has no room for any myths including God,Abraham,Kali,Gadhimai and so on. Yet in real life when thousands of even highly educated, rich individuals go to cattle market with bags of money,and buy cattle one,two,three and more, and even though they know they do it out of more fashion and tradtion than religion, and what the other unconscious people take it the educated people’s religiosity is another cause to keep those myths alive as a hope to celebrate them next year more enthusiastically and in this way the nurture of irrational belief and killing is on the road to success.
Actually, religious persons can have no way to be kind to animals unless they give up the ritual habits, what is quite impossible without changing the mind set in the first place.
[Reply]
Thank you very much for pointing out these awful rituals. It’s a shame that these types of barbaric practices are being allowed and followed in this day and age. Countless hapless animals are being murdered to satisfy the human lust for sacrificial rituals.
I can’t rationalize this practice no matter how hard I try. The process is nothing but forcing an animal to give up its dear life for the sake of a human game call ‘sacrifice.’ What are we sacrificing? Someone else’s life, isn’t it? Animal perhaps can take the credit from the blood thirsty God (?). Human can be credited for butchery only. Many people know this fact but, very few have the courage to protest or stop this inhumanity. Blindness reigns high in the religious practices, isn’t it?
Why we give so much credence to ancient people and their primitive practices? Were they smarter or more intelligent than us? Can anyone tell me why God used to talk to those ancient people but won’t talk to us anymore? Why? I want to know the rationalization of this senseless killing.
[Reply]
I wonder why you decided to leave out Bakri-Id and ThanksGiving from your blog-post. Millions of goats and turkeys are sacrificed during Bakri-Id and Thanksgiving respectively!
Why single out the rituals of one religion when in this week, there have been two more similar rituals, and on a much larger scale!
You say: “This is all to satisfy the whims of goddess Gadhimai. Do people really believe she would deliver the goods?”
==== Well, people who sacrifice the animals do believe in it. That is called freedom of religion, isn’t it? To each, his/her own beliefs or lack of them. So long as those people do not encroach on the beliefs of other human beings (and I do not see any evidence of encroachment), they are free to do as they like.
Ofcourse, you may choose to criticize them using your freedom of speech (and you have done that by writing the blog-post), but cannot stop them from offering the sacrifices!
[Reply]
I thank Jiten Roy and Salam for their positive comments.
Hello Mayuresh Gaikwad: I think you missed a paragraph in the article where Eid al-adha (or Kurbani/Bakri Eid) was addressed. And Thanksgiving belongs to a different category as it is not a religious event (although, I agree, this leaves some unanswered questions).
I can assure you that picking on a particular religion was not my intention, it is only that my background allows me to more critically appraise a Hindu animal sacrificial event.
You have cited freedom of religion to justify animal killing. During my childhood, we would recite the line: jibe doya kore jei jon, sheijon shebichhe ishwar : A person serves God if he shows kindness to animals. I suppose that type softy attitude wouldn’t stand in front of Gadhimai’s wrath.
For an interesting exposition on animal sacrifice, within the context of past Hindu reforms, please check this article published in The Hindu.
http://www.hindu.com/op/2003/09/16/stories/2003091600290300.htm
Regards, Dipen Bhattacharya
[Reply]
Hi Dipen,
Point taken on the Bakri-Id paragraph, my bad for not spotting it.
However, the major point is whether these sacrifices are a good thing. One reason I can think of is that the animals are innocent / meek / defenceless, hence it is easier to kill them. The same thing can be argued with plants, they are the meekest and the most defenceless of creatures. Yet we offer flowers to our Gods, use flowers to decorate our homes and our hair (the women). These flowers have lost the chance of pollination, conversion to fruit and the seeds finally giving life to new plants!
We eat grains, offer them to Gods on rituals, etc. Each of them is an embryo! Hell, we eat entire plants like Radddish (roots + leaves), coriander, etc.
Not to say that we should stop eating them. My only point is: “So long as it does not hurt any human being, whatever I do to plants / animals is nobody else’s business.” I can agree to some exceptions like endangered species of plants and animals, or destruction of an entire forest, that would be detrimental to the environment.
Other than that, if I am allowed by law to kill an animal for food when I am perfectly capable of surviving on vegetables / plants / etc., I see no issue why someone else should be bothered if I kill the animal for some other purpose. Taking it forward, I am against any kind of law that states bestiality as a crime. If I can kill an animal for food, I can certainly copulate with her and it should bother no one else.
You say: “During my childhood, we would recite the line: jibe doya kore jei jon, sheijon shebichhe ishwar : A person serves God if he shows kindness to animals. I suppose that type softy attitude wouldn’t stand in front of Gadhimai’s wrath.” -
You are definitely free to believe in it as long as you do not expect someone else to believe in it too.
Bottomline: Let rituals be, those rituals are their beliefs and they are entitled to them just as much as everone else.
[Reply]