Welcome To Worship: Fill & Download for Free

As a high school student, I was forced to sit though prayers. There’s a whole story here, but basically whenever we would go to performances for band (parades, concerts, etc.), we would do a prayer before we performed. The teacher was a pretty hardcore Christian.As a Jew, especially one who even then didn’t really have much of a desire to be religious, I didn’t want to be involved. I don’t like being involved in a “prayer circle.” It reminds you that you’re “other.” You don’t belong. You aren’t like everyone else. I was even yelled at by the drum major for standing silently outside the circle, doing nothing.Worse, when you decline to be involved, you get a nice little target on your back. Of the dozens of fights I’ve been in during my life, I would guess that a dozen of them have been people who attacked me over my religion. I don’t make a big thing of it. In fact, quite the opposite. That didn’t make a difference. I remember one kid in particular who punched me in the face after screaming that I’d “killed Christ.” Unfortunately for him, I’d already been in dozens of fights at that point. After a while, you start losing surprisingly few of them.I’m very much opposed to schools being involved in religion in any way. If students want to worship, they’re more than welcome to do so. They’re welcome to do it in school. They’re welcome to have a Bible Club. They aren’t welcome to use that opportunity to push their religions on others, use it to marginalize people, or use it to harm them. Fortunately, things appear to have changed in recent years, and this appears to happen less frequently and less overtly.

I’ve been in a few synagogues around the Chicago area, and I’m not Jewish. They gave me a yarmulke to clip to my hair. It felt weird to me, but just because I wasn’t used to it.I also learned through experience that their song books are printed so they read from right to left, like Hebrew, even though the words are English.

Nowhere in the vast library of Hindu scriptures does it say that God must be worshiped, adored or venerated or even believed in. The reason is simple -Those that feel that God has to be worshiped are differentiating God from themselves i.e. creating and perpetuating the vision of duality and difference.The Vedas emphatically declare that this ātman which is us, is an expansion or mode or spark of the totality of Being - Brahman. Brahman or God if you will, is everything and the ONLY thing — nothing exists apart from Brahman.In other words each and every one of us is non-different to the source from which we sprung. Just as the sparks are non-different in their essential nature from the fire - or a drop of water from the ocean - the difference is not in quality but in magnitude.Thus, being sparks of the Divine Light, we have no existential need to worship or pay homage or grovel or to abase ourselves before some higher creative, authoritarian power, all we are taught to do by the Veda, is to pursue the path of Self-realization (ātma-bodha):– contemplate, meditate and realize our true essence as being one with God/Brahman — and to live an ethical and wholesome life, and to be a benevolent presence in the world.But for those who cannot do this and wish to form a devotional relationship (bhakti) to the Supreme being male or female - they are more than welcome to do so - it is their personal choice - not a universal compulsion. Every Hindu is encouraged to choose his/her own path and method of communing with their higher nature.There is complete freedom of thought, belief and spiritual practice in Hinduism.