We don’t need any more religious edifices. There are plenty and more for the ritual purposes of the population, and too many for the smooth running of society. All the effort that goes into the construction of new ones can be better directed to the maintenance of existing ones, and better still to social service.
Shrines seem to crop up in any public space, beginning as a small idol or even an uncarved stone, with here a wall and there a roof added until a point where a decorative compound wall and security beepers get installed. Spots where people paused to piss have been transformed to spots to shed footwear and discard the plastic wrappers of worship paraphernalia. These hypertrophic shrines soon draw stalls selling material for worship and souvenirs, and stacks and people to guard footwear.
Naturally, traffic flow is utterly disrupted by the parked vehicles and milling crowds around them. To compound the inconvenience caused to users of the roads and areas around these shrines, many of them have audio equipment to amplify the announcements, music and chanting occurring within.
Governing authorities hesitate to touch such edifices for fear of wounding vote banks, guised as reluctance to injure religious sentiment, but this comes at the cost of public comfort. When will logic take the place of sycophancy and fear, and the (usually unauthorised) proliferation and growth of religious edifices be checked? Exalted representatives of various religious bodies are usually unworthy of the weight given to their views, as is clear from their sanction of religious expression’s becoming a public nuisance.
People should take to treating their minds and bodies as temples, and worship health and civic sense.
