Is there a religious Democracy in the West and The Middle East

If you look at the middle east and western countries there is a fundamental issue of the lack of religious democracy in these parts of the world. First, let us define the term religious democracy - it is the ability to worship God in any form one wishes to choose. In India from ancient times we have followed the idea of many forms of God. A devotee chooses the form in which he or she wants to worship the God. Even people who are atheists can be considered to be part of this system. The idea of negation of something is not new. In science we can find it all over the place. In physics, we talk not only of matter, but antimatter too.

There are lot of misguided and ignorant fools in the proselyting religions who think negatively of the above aspect of Hinduism. They think just because of we worship idols we are are ignorant and their so called gods are somehow real. There are many inconsistencies in their logic. If you ask them what was happening to their gods before they conceived it, they will have no answer. The fact that in Hinduism we worship idols is deliberate and not some historically accidental fact. The idols are there to help a practitioner of meditation focus and concentrate on his object of worship. The idols are the representation of God in its many forms as humans conceived. The idols themselves are not literally God. Just as physicists represent an electron on the paper by some symbol, a Hindu represents his object of worship by the idol he chooses. Think of it this way, you can tell a lot about people from the gods they worship. So there is no religion which is objective. People who claim objective truth in their religions and criticize other people's religions are stupid and not spiritually advanced.

Now this spiritual and religious democracy is great for the individuals who practice them. But it is not great for communities and countries as a whole. A people who are divided in their religion have seldom proved to be great conquerors and exploiters of the earth. Christians and Muslim followers in the past had bigger exploits in the world all because of their single minded devotion and unity among their followers in terms of belief systems. As societies grow and people become more capable of independent thought it may indeed be possible that these religions may come crumbling down. But at present there is no way to predict it.