Acharya Prashant addresses a question about a temple in Chittorgarh where drug smugglers offer a portion of their goods to God, hoping their illegal activities will not be caught. He explains that religion can be of two types. Ninety-nine percent of the time, religion is the wrong thing, a tool for fulfilling desires. This is what the smugglers are doing. When a desire is not being fulfilled because the desire itself is wrong, people seek divine intervention. He compares this to seeking a recommendation from a powerful person, like an MP or MLA, to get something done that should not be done. Similarly, people go to temples to seek the recommendation of the ultimate authority, the supreme being, for their wrongdoings. This is one kind of religion, a means to fulfill desires. The other kind of religion is for self-knowledge. It is to realize how foolish one is to keep asking for trivial things. These two types of religion are opposites. One is poison, the other is nectar. One is an axe, the other is a tree. People often think that the religion of desire fulfillment is like a primary class that leads to the Ph.D. of true religion. This is a wrong analogy. The two are in opposite directions. For a follower of desire-based religion, the religion of self-knowledge is like death. This is why there is so much opposition, as the true religion is a threat to the false one. Addressing a second question about atonement (prashchit) in Vedanta for past wrongdoings, Acharya Prashant clarifies that you are not the one who committed those acts; it was the agitated ego. Your reality is the Atman. Therefore, in Vedanta, atonement is not about washing away sins but about washing away the sinner, the ego. Atonement means self-dissolution (atma-visarjan). It is not about correcting the mistake, but about understanding that the mistake was inevitable because the doer itself is the mistake. The common saying, "Hate the sin, not the sinner," is not Vedantic. Vedanta says to focus on the sinner, the ego, because sin is just its shadow. He dismisses the notion of making a mistake by mistake, stating that this does not work in Vedanta. You are what you do, and if you are wrong, everything you do is wrong. He says, "You don't even know how to buy a handkerchief. The day you learn to buy a handkerchief, your life will be transformed." This is because the buyer, the ego, is flawed. The central mistake is the ego itself. Therefore, the only true atonement is to recognize the one who is sitting inside and is the source of all actions. It is the dissolution of this false self.
