What drives us?

What drives us?

I don’t know what drives people. Or even what drives them to be great thinkers. J P Satre (and Simone de Beauvoir) are some of the people I admire. Well, I’m actually taking this bit from my old diary. At this particular moment, I don’t really think I admire him.

I can’t remember the main reasons why I admired him…because I wrote this some two years ago! Anyway, one thing about JP Satres’ ideas is that he did not believe in God. And yet today I went to church…actually for the first time in almost a year. Its not that i don'n like going to church, just that my work does not allow me to go on Sunday! Because i always work on Sunday. I go to church sometimes on a Wednesday evening, but that mass never feels like the Sunday one!

Any way, on this particular Sunday, I experienced some great change. Was it joy or happiness? I really can’t describe it but it is the kind of feeling I used to get when I first got fascinated with chatting online.

And I remembered. When I was a child I attended mass everyday. And sometimes when I step into that building I do not feel like I have missed anything. It is like a routine that I followed so many times and even mastered it. Every time they open the big book to read some verse of the bible…it is not new. I can almost say the next sentence. And yet, if one does not regularly attend church, society frowns on them.

Church going is a routine that we have mastered forever. I think about communication theories that talk about “conditioning”. If I put it in simple language….there was a guy named Pavlov. He had dogs. He fed them at a particular time daily..or is it he rang a bell when feeding them? Anyway, the dogs associated the bell to food…. If they had a capacity to think we can effectively say, they stopped thinking.

I think I admired both Satre and de Beauvoir because they challenged the cultural and social assumptions – and expectations of their society towards them.

Must we go to church every Sunday?