Religions have done nothing else than to engrave in the mind of men marks that have prevented them to evolve freely. They have done nothing else than, through the medium of the priests, to build dogmas that are taught from the early childhood to children and make them become blind to the laws and beauties of the universe. It is through those dogmas that the different religions of the book have built for themselves power and money and have ruled and are still ruling multitudes with a rod of iron in plunging them in the sadest ignorance, that is to believe than one knows something without having the less ability for discrimination. Blind belief is what is the worst in this world. Man becomes like the dog that has been taught to jump on the first one as soon as it heards "attack!". When Marx said that religion was the opium of the people, it is proven impossible to lay the blame on him if one means 'religion' as 'sect that has met success'. But the tragedy is that the word religion has dressed in the opposite meaning of its real sense that is: what links the being to his Being, what links the jivatman to the Paramatman, what links the drop to the Ocean, for since childhood man learns not to feel neither to follow the universal law that is inscribed in his heart of hearts and from which he is cut.
Before reaching sanatana dharma, Religion, or at least its notion, one has first to get rid of all those mental fetters, and this leads to countless moral sufferings whre the being battles with himself. His 'heart', what he feels in an innate manner in his heart of hearts and that is universal law, goes in the opposite direction of the mental marks that have been engraved with care inside of him. What a waste! How many wars, how many sufferings, long ago and still now, perpetrated under blindness in the nam of a personal god bind himself, a personal god with a human face of the Kali Yuga.
Mullahs, priests and sorcerers have no other power than the inner power at the level of realisation they have possibly reached. In fact theyhave no other power than a power of persuasion, being themselves convinced by the own mental marks from which they are unable to be freed, to hold the only and sole truth. Alas, the age of ignorance in which we are living allow them a big lot. On one side, power, money and ignorancde, and onthe other side just ignorance. Ignorance is the very opposite of Religion, of Sanatana Dharma, of which Gayatri Mantra is an appeal to the Paramatman for 'bringing light to our intellect'.