If I explain it to you anyway, you wouldn't understand

Minggu, 20 Februari 2011

Football and Other Religions

There are only two things that can actually able to unite and also divide Indonesian at the same time. It’s either football or religion, or both.


I’m not a huge fan of football like most guys in Indonesia. I’m also not a fanatic fan of particular religion. For me those thing have different purposes, different merit but collegially, somehow they both creates the same effect on people behavior, especially men.


In some country football clubs (or soccer in US) can be consider almost the same as religion. They have their fans and some “fanatics” fans that are willing to go and do things without asking question. They both have their gathering place on Sunday or any other day, it can be churches or mosque for religion, and stadiums or bars for football fans.

These “organization/clubs” have leaders and followers, these leaders could have prominent control over their followers, and I’m telling you these followers are not just loyal but they also committed.

Both of their “fans” will cherishes and support their team for better and for worst, and will mocks and (if the need to) fight the other supporters from different team.


Since the Roman, governments all over the world have been using both “sports/entertainment” and religions for means of politics. By using sports or religion one can generate significant amount of followers. It is easier because once a person becomes a follower the automatically committed both mentally and physically to the group behavior the person’s identities will became the group identity.

If you live in a country that has 250 millions of population, which 90% of them are devoted to one particular religion, and football is the number one sport, once you have control over sport or religion, you control the people.


And if you somehow managed to control both at the same time, you are God.


Politicians, and corrupt government officer will use either of this two “groups” as a facility to their personal gain, it can be for financial gain, political or just simply for the thrills. All they have to do is to control their leaders, usually with false promises and they can make them do anything they want.

Individually people have different needs, but when they are in groups it became the group’s needs, and those needs are usually easier to achieve. The good thing is that whenever the group’s needs are fulfilled it’s automatically fulfilled the personal needs (purposes) at the same time, because it’s very hard to negotiate individual needs when you already committed into a group.


In a football match the winner will be decided by a score, while in a religion there can’t be any winner or loser, and there is no way in earth that we can (should) do to measure that. It is not a competition for righteousness, or for “heaven” sake.


The worst part of this is the referee. In football a person (human being) is responsible to keep the game “fair”, there also laws that was designed by human so the game would be played in harmony. Players, officials and supporters can protest the referee decisions, and there are countless times that a referee would be found guilty of fixing the game, which sometimes could leads to public outrage.


IT IS NOT THE SAME IN RELIGION.


No human being should or would have the capacity to become a “referee” between religious believes. It’s not within our realms of perceptions, analogies or even common senses that another human being could decide which religion or believe is better or righteous than the other.

Whenever a fight broke out between two football supporters it probably will last for several hours. But when a fight broke because of religion it could turn in to a war that could last for thousand of years. Doesn’t matter who started it, but for “God sake”, it’s NOT for us to decide how it should end.


There can’t be any winner in this situation, and there shall not be any loser either. Only God would be the only one that has the right to decide, whether in this life or the next one.



“You shall have your religion and I shall have my religion” (The Quran, 109:6)

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