Religiosity and Conscience ...

 

Religiosity and Conscience ...

...Don’t go together.

To me, religiosity is a feeling that goes beyond the marketplace type of religion. One feels unmoored from everyday and mundane reality. If you are “afflicted” (word used intentionally) by religiosity, you would not accept the religious observances of even those in your “in” group.

In some sense, the above is what happens to a drunk, on her first binge, and on subsequent sessions. Once introduced and inured to drinking alcohol (liquor), the brain seeks additional “fixes” – just as a drug addict does. The best joke I heard before I even thought of taking alcohol was this: “How to avoid hang over the next morning? Stay drunk!” Unfortunately, I was not wise enough to extend the argument to religion!

Agreeing with my thesis, encompassing the title and the starting line (together), would be made easy if one agreed with the parallels I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Religiosity fills one’s basket of superstitions. Mangal ki mai, Shani ka chhaya, the cutting words of an atheist in the Hindi film OMG Oh My God! are the direct results of religiosity. You have to blame someone. If none is available, blame yourself. Most importantly, do not ever blame God.

One of my colleagues advised me against buying a two-wheeler years ago on a Tuesday. He is a Punjabi and he said one should not buy metal stuff on Tuesday. My retort to him, “I am a Thamizhan, and your thinking does not affect me!” It so happened that I was involved in an accident, suffered a head injury, and bled from my left ear, lost hearing in it, but not a scratch on my body anywhere else. There were a few people who helped me survive that episode and let me get on with my life, disability and all.

Was this because I bought the two-wheeler on a Tuesday? You would never convince me, because, I will throw this at you, “Then, why did I not die?” The responses they could give are, “Your parents’ good deeds saved you!” or, “Had you bought it the next day, you would have averted the accident!”

For the first, I would argue, what else could my parents have done, being overly religious as they were. No response. The second is counterfactual and meets a dead end. The accident happened because it had to happen as Saturn and my birth stars were badly aligned, or I bought the scooter on a Tuesday and on and on, are the arguments of obscurantists.

What your conscience does is to be discard religion and force you to analyze the facts. No, I am not telling you that you would find the answer to whatever question you asked if you did. To repeat, NO!

One goes far as one can go. If one fails, take that in good spirits and this could impel her to probe further, but a word of caution here: do not give into the temptation to stop at some arbitrary point, a half-way house, and posit and seek solace in the inane idea of an all-powerful entity coming to your rescue. I, to my credit, was no less of a non-believer after the accident than I was before.

Life is full of coincidences resulting in good and bad things happening to an individual. Que sera sera!  This is NOT resignation to fate, only the realization that you are still alive, though disabled and incapable of doing some things that came naturally to you, and you adjust to your current situation in life, this moment and the next moment and so on.

There is a lesson for those who bemoan ageing. What is the point? Now, you take 50% more time for some tasks than before. Allocate the increased interval in your schedule. Life is on a flexible time schedule. This is the greatest gift.

Conscience is a personal trait, of a high order and wound up very tightly around one’s mind. No one knows what mind is and where within it to find it, if it exists. No one can define it for the others. Each and everyone needs to go on a search individually, in all likelihood to lead everywhere (meaning nowhere). The universe looks the same from every point in it. That is, each point is everywhere, without any specificity, nowhere specific.

What can an individual do is to reach out within oneself for individual definitions. Of what?

You define for yourself what is morally good and what is morally bad. No one else can do this for you. Where individual moral conscience exists, there can be no religion as it is external to you. Where religion exists, there can be no moral conscience, only group conscience.

Hitler may have been an atheist; the jury is out on that. Yet, German people were Christians, at least some infused with hatred for Jews.  These fell for Hitler. Religion overrode or even totally erased their moral conscience, aided by the patent severity and unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles. Similar perceived insults could be said to have made religionists vicious during the Partition of India that created Pakistan.

Yet, you may discard your conscience and go religion on yourself. That is your life.  

From when I was 28 years old, I am travelling on the Road from Damascus. Which road, you ask. I have travelled on many and found that they all lead to one and only destination. The realization that one defines herself merely from her acts towards existence. You exist only through your essence.  And, there can be no place for any religion in that essence and outside of you.

I rest my case.

Raghuram Ekambaram