Religion's Day Blog

What have you learnt about religious belief today, and the reasons people have for their beliefs?  Please refer to both specific points from the day, but also to your own beliefs, and your overall TOK experience, reading and understanding.

On Wednesday the 12^th of February, all the grades 11’s of the 2015 batch were put of timetabled schedule for something called TOK Religion Day. This is the second of the four that are going to happen. TOK Religion day was an entire school day dedicated to the exploration of the origin and the nature of the various different religions around the world.

The day started off with the students going to three separate presentations from followers of different religions. I went to a presentation from a Christian man, an Atheist man and a Jewish lady. They all had various standpoints on the issue of religion. Although all of them believed in religion, they all had a different approach on “God”.

The latter part of the day was spent listening to a performance of a tradition Zimbabwean song used to gather a community in a spiritual manner. Prior to the commencement of the performance, we were all asked to lie down and enjoy the performance is all comfort. Personally, I was quite suspicious as to whether the music would really touch my inner spiritual side or not. Once immersed in the music, I was still under doubts till somewhere towards the middle of the performance. However somewhere after the middle of the performance (more towards the end), I could not help but clear everything from my mind and get into a zone where I reflected on a lot of things in my life such as my behaviors, my school work, the activities I take part in. I began to think about the discussions that happened earlier on in the day and my personal standpoint on religion and the concept of “God”. I am not a big fan of listening to music and generally I only listen to music when I need to go to sleep. I was taken in for a surprise when the music took me into a state of reflection. As I am not a sort of person who likes to actively reflect, this was a good thing. It just happened and I could not think of anything else but my personal development for the future.

The third and final activity of the day was a student debate on the motion of whether “God” exists or not. In my opinion, the debate was a very interesting idea but at the same time I also think the students responsible for the debate did not do a very good job at the debate. In my view, the overall debate quality was less than satisfactory. Even though both sides had valid points, almost all examples given were very much questionable. An interesting argument was brought up stating that for something to exist, it has to be tangible. There are plenty of things in our everyday lives that we acknowledge such as trust, loyalty and love. We have trust on pretty much everyone in our day-to-day lives such as our parents, teachers, friends and even shopkeepers. We trust our parents with our lives, we trust our teachers to educate us well and show us different perspectives. We trust our friends with a lot of different things. We even trust shopkeepers with the fact they are going to give us the product they say they are going to. Trust is something which takes a long time to build but can easily be destroyed. We are loyal to people around us and also expect them to be loyal back to us. Just like trust once loyalty is lost, it is hard to gain it back.

The day was an interesting day and it led me to a conclusion that every individual has their own beliefs and a set of principles to help shape them as a person. There are no two individuals who have the same. I believe that because of religion a lot of people are separated. A prominent example, which comes to my mind about this, is the India and Pakistan separation. One of the main reasons of the separation was religion. It was because certain people wanted others to join Islam and the others to join Hinduism. This led to a conflict and hence the separation. It is still going on with Kashmir. However at the same time I also think that religion unifies everyone. People go to the place of worship together, spend some of their time together and make new bonds.