You Must Be a Holy Fool Coming to Here
While intrigued by all this international news about nationalist people trying to use religion to control people, I started to realize the violence of religion. When you are not taking into consideration all the references from religion and all the philosophy in support of this religion, you are easily getting manipulated by one aspect of this picture, one very narrow thought within all these thoughts. However, most people do not have a chance for an advanced education of one religion before they started to believe the religion or make their own decisions because of it. Not only politically, the power of abusing religion can also happen in the commercial area. Santa Claus’ clothes did not show up as red and white until Coca-Cola shaped his figure in order to sell their drinks. Taking this topic to a deeper level, what about science? Are there any scams in this world using the coat of “science” for propaganda purposes? In this project, I took pictures through a very religious perspective of a science museum, which is considered as the opposite of a religious place. As believed to be telling the truth, this topic is also a way to illustrate the debate that can photographs lie? Through this photo series, I do believe photographs are not necessarily recording the truth when you are “quoting” out of context. Combining these photographs with questionnaire, it’s very interesting to ask questions such as: do we know what we are actually choosing? Are we choosing what we think we are choosing? Do we have a choice or have our thoughts already been shaped in a way this society expected you to choose?
References
The Ray of Flashes written by the great Islamic Sufism Philosopher Jiami. His work, explaining the idea why is God one and Union, and God is light, makes me see all these signs and observe the written work in the museum from another perspective, and thinking if science is using the language of religion to make people closer to it, and attract people’s attention.
This News Article about Ayodha Temple being disputed. Religious violence is really the starting point of this project, reading this article makes me think about how nationalisms using “evidences” from the ancient text to control people’s mind.
Further research on this aspect of thoughts, this article about the relationship between Santa Claus and Coke-Cola comes up. This furthermore supported my idea that religion are used as a tool of manipulation modern days.
