I have read several of the contributions here and thought that a Vaishnava voice should be added.

All religions have a core of genuine seeking and genuine insight. As a Hindu, I believe that the search takes many lifetimes, and indeed, since God is infinite, it never really ends, not even after so-called liberation.

Most people's understanding of religion and God, however, is unfortunately trivial. This site bears testimony to that. The reasons for adopting a religion, for rejecting a religion, all rest on the bodily platform. I have no other words to describe it.

Existence itself is the first miracle. The beginning of religious understanding lies in consciousness. There is no more miraculous phenomenon than our conscious awareness. We may attribute these miracles to purely natural reasons, but for a Hindu, even that is an admission of God's existence. But only a partial one.

The real challenge comes from the third element in the basic Hindu description of God as sat-chit-ananda. It is ananda, or joy. Though through self-reflection we can see that we all have a basic joy within ourselves, we tend to look constantly for an Other. Since we identify with the body and mind, the Other we seek tends to be sense pleasure and other material satisfactions for the body. These are trivial and can never bring the sense of arrival that comes to one who realizes that the Other is the Supreme Person, of whom we are eternally part and parcel, and whom we are ever destined to serve and love.

The various religions are all instinctive realizations of this underlying truth. Unfortunately, everyone takes their basic material conditioning, based on identification with body and mind, and contaminates this pure instinct. Nature has three qualities or modes, which can be called goodness, passion and ignorance. Religion predominated by the modes of passion and ignorance is unfortunately more common than religion in the mode of goodness. Those who are outside religion, the Christopher Hitchens of the world, see the deeds perpetrated by people in the modes of ignorance and passion who propagate their religions and say that all religion is bad. This is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable.

The true goal of religion is to attain saintliness. Saintliness has three components: Knowledge, action and love.

• Knowledge of God is a combination of ordinary worldly knowledge, the study and reflection on scripture and the teachings of the saints, the intuition coming from God's grace, and the inner realizations coming of one's own spiritual effort and practice.
• Action means engaging in devotional practice, association with the saintly, teaching and engaging in good works.
• Love means love of God and seeing God in all things.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy. Jai Radhe!

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