Descanting Upon Dr Ghulam's 'Are All Religions Man-Made?'
By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
15 November 2025
This pertains to Dr Ghulam Mohiyuddin's short but succinct piece, 'Are all religions man-made?' Now don't say that I rush to defend him. He doesn't need my help or endorsement. I highly respect him and the subject that he has broached is very close to my heart. Mind you, Dr Ghulam is not an atheist like me. He is a rationalist Muslim who brooks no religious nonsense and fiddlesticks.
That said, all religions are man-made and god is a clever concoction of mankind, esp. the fabrication of our troglodyte ancestors. Mark Twain said, “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.” Seneca said, “Religion is considered by the people as true. By the wise, false. And by the rulers as useful.” Isaac Asimov said, “Reading the Bible from cover to cover makes one an atheist.”
You are more than welcome to believe in whatever makes you happy. That is your right. But nobody else is required to believe exactly as you do or believe at all. That is their right. Gods are the invention of primitive men. We know from evidence left behind by our paleolithic ancestors that we started inventing gods around 300,000 years ago, back in our stone age. God with a capital G is a much more recent invention, dating back only 5,500 years.
God is reportedly capable of hearing everyone’s prayers independently, and yet is only capable of communicating to select individuals, and needs them to spread his word for him. If God was truly capable of communicating directly to any one individual, then he would be capable of communicating to all individuals. Any baby born today would never know anything about any religion if no one ever mentioned it. In order for religion to survive, people need to teach it to one another.
Every baby is born with a complete absence of religion. Every baby is technically born an atheist. This is why in order to become an atheist you simply need to let go of religion. You are actually reverting to the state in which you first entered this world. There was no religion in the dawn of human beings. Religion occurred innocently and organically as a means to explain the unexplainable.
The basic fundamental human survival instinct depends on being able to classify one’s immediate environment: is it safe or dangerous? Is it something I can eat? Is it a tool I can use? Religion provided a handy way to fill the gap for unknowns. Along the way, man discovered that religion itself could be used as a tool.
Religion is actually just a phase of our evolution. Faith is mankind's inexorable fate. Every religion was a code of conduct when it emerged or came into existence. Anthropologically, religion was/ is a group of people with an antediluvian idea of a primitive god and a false and deceptive sense of divinity. God is mankind's biggest hoax, perpetuated by all bogus and man-made faiths. Humans needed (plausible) excuses to ascribe their successes and failures to. So, they invented god, religion, Karmas, fate, destiny and all that's intangible and also preposterous.
Every religion is so different and every faith calls itself to be the best and only way to a god who never existed. Religion and god are the products of family and society's influence, if not always pressure. Why is the presence of religion well-nigh negligible in the Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, among others? Because the families and societies in these countries are least bothered about Jesus, Allah, god and their faiths.
Holland is yet another country which is religious so insouciant, scripturally indifferent and the belief in god or a supernatural power is so weak and casual. Yet, they're all so happy. No one explodes his or her car and kills innocent people in the name of a desert faith and its non-existent Allah whose only business is to frighten its followers with hellfire and all sorts of punishment and who's abnormally obsessed with its worship by the unquestioning and fearful followers. Can all these utterly insane things ever be acceptable to a rational mind?
Mind you, this irrationality is not confined only to Islam or all Abrahamic faiths, all religions are equally flawed, juvenile and jejune. It's time to love all humans as your brethren and these are not hollow and shallow words. In this very forum, you've seen how I've been hounded by people who don't like my irreligious and atheistic views. I've not met them. Nor will I ever meet them in person. I've no personal enmity with them. Yet, I'm a bête noire to those individuals because I excoriate all faiths and their false gods and deities.
To evolve, we must get rid of all man-made faiths and their god/s. But this doesn't seem possible in our lifetime because most of us are snugly ensconced in our falsely 'comforting' belief in god and religion. Humans have begun to believe their own lies through psychological phenomena such as self-deception, the illusory truth effect, and the memory is reconstructed. We're condemned to believe and remain deluded forever.
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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 the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/descanting-religions-man-made/d/137644
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