Religion and politics have often been strange bed-fellows in spite of the payday loan low rates fact that one claims to care for the soul (next life) and the other for the body (this life). Politicians and religious leaders have rightly understood the great power religion wields in the human soul. Assuredly religion is addictive opium; when sufficiently drugged the addict can be nose and noose-led. So religious leaders have often doubled up as secular heads or as the real power that manipulates the secular head. History has proved that this marriage of politics and religion inevitably leads to horrendous bloodshed. The politician desires to have that extra power—either religious supernatural power or popular, religious, people-power to preserve his power; this has been true for tribal religions and for more advanced ones. The easiest way to make a reasonable man unreasonable is to bring into the controversy a religious tangle. From that point onwards the reasonable man will behave like an opium addict. History is replete with examples of pacts made by religious dignitaries and political heads for mutual advancement.

This is not to deride religion completely. The very basic need of man to be religiously devoted can be easily distorted by scheming power-brokers to gain their own end. When even sincere people find how much power there is in whipping up religious sentiment, their sincerity erodes, even as the new-found religious power corrupts. Religious power corrupts, like any other power does; personal loan secured by a term deposit amply proved in medieval Europe, Rasputin’s Russia , Iran , Nepal and Tibet . Marxism holds such a grip on the young mind, because of its utopian and eschatological flavour—something worth living and dying for—Secular humanism is a religion too, with a creed and manifesto—a path of liberation, with no moral restraints! It is extreme folly to foment extraterrestrial (religious) devotion to gain terrestrial ends. It is equal folly to use terrestrial power to advance or protect religious interests.

All religions spread through political patronage. Constantine the Roman Emperor in 314 AD saw Christianity as a powerful tool to unify the empire. When he pronounced hitherto persecuted spiritual Christianity as the favoured state religion, true spiritual Christianity went underground and an institutionalized Christianity was propagated by state power and later with brutality. Catholics and Protestants alike used military power in advancing their cause. What they advanced is not true spiritual Christianity but a religion that served the politics of the country that espoused that particular branch of Christianity. Organized Christian religion is not the only culprit. Every world religion has spread at a time it had a powerful state authority backing its propagation. All organized religions have spread with state patronage. The true spiritual path will be that one that has survived in spite of persecution and oppression.