Foreword: If you are a hardcore Theist, please don't get offended.
History: History has always been an intriguing subject to me. It is more interesting than science itself in some cases because the experimental results in science are authentic which is not true in the case of history as we only have an account of it written by someone resulting in it being limited by his/her sincerity. Further, science results can always be cross-checked by repeating the experiment. This is completely ruled out in the case of history.
Religion: Coming to religion, many educated modern people argue that religion was just a means of creating a feeling of safety in the common man and giving him some common guidelines to live so that all humans can co-exist. For a person to follow what scriptures say dumbly, he needs a lot of belief in it. This is done in the childhood(that beautiful stage in a human being's life when the wonderful quality of innocence is still there).
Many believe however that god is just a name given to the belief that brain is not the ultimate form of nature, that there is some other higher form of nature which is beyond our grasp.
I am not discussing all these ideas here. What I am presenting is my own version of relation between history and religion.
The theme: People say a lot of things about history.How far is it correct? No one knows what really happened back then,right? So,what if all the religious characters are just human beings from the past. What if Ramayana and Mahabharata are real stories of two great people called Rama and Krishna? Many do believe this is true. Maybe Rama was a great king very long ago. Valmiki wrote about his good deeds which over a period of 100's of years became legendary and people started calling him God. Maybe so are the works of Vyasa. It happens many times. When someone great is gone people tend to exaggerate his deeds and their stories, over the years become legends. Maybe that is the case with these persons. Maybe people started believing in those legends and elevated them to the highest position and called them Gods. And who knows someone across the timeline may have thought "why shouldn't I combine these two characters?" and gave the God a name, Vishnu and made these people, his incarnations. This is quite possible because the story of RAMA and KRISHNA occurred several thousands of years ago.
A Corollary: This leads to some interesting speculations. Who knows,maybe after several thousands of years, people may believe Gandhi as God. Maybe a new religion starts with Gandhi as god or who knows maybe he will be called another incarnation of Vishnu! Its just 60 years since he passed away and we already call him Mahatma. So, calling him God is quite possible in the future.
Note:Such a point was already made in a movie called "The man from the earth". It has an excellent plot. I was completely stunned by the movie. It deals with Christianity but I believe the idea is a generalised one. People who are highly religious may get offended by the movie but it really has strong point.
Just Joking: This maybe a bit too far fetched but on the lighter side what if people in the future believe Gandhi has actually comeback from life and even changed a bad man to his follower(Yes,I mean Munnabhai!!). In the movie the protagonist says Jesus did not die after he was Crossed. He escaped from there after 3 days. One of the followers saw him then and thought Jesus resurrected. What if this happens in the future in the case of Gandhi? Worse than all these what if there were no Rama or Krishna in the first place? What if Valmiki and Vyasa are just two writers who used to write novels about the ever standard "Good always triumphs over Evil"? They just wrote two series like say, LOTR and HP!!! They became famous and over the years the books might have become legendary elevating the protagonist's role to that of God!!! Too far-fetched huh? That's what I too thought. But why not give it a thought?
P.S: I just tried to compare religion and history. It is purely out of interest. I assure you I am not a strong supporter of atheism. I will be happy with any form of criticism on both my writing and my ideas!
