On Weaning People away from Religion …

                                                     On Weaning People away from Religion...

I am not even sure anyone can take up the task. In India, over a century people lot more capable than I have tried, but have not been able to. Still, I think I am brave enough to even venture into trying to do this. I have tried this with my family, the smallest unit of HUF (Hindu Undivided Family), and have failed. Yet, having been born in a privileged caste and of marginally middle class (of the pre-independence era) parents, I have availed such privileges that gave me a leg up at times of desperation and with my conscience pricking repeatedly on that count, I owe it to myself to try with at least a broader set of people.

Religion, whichever one you may reference, came on the scene as an organizing principle. Such a principle must have had two goals: gain and establish perpetual advantages to a sub-group while promoting and prolonging, both across generations, disadvantages to the other sub-group of people, each having distinct kinds of internal kinship relations, cemented by tradition and custom.

Today I listened to a YouTube lecture in Thamizh for 12 minutes and 38 seconds (a total of 758 seconds). In those 758 seconds, I did not hear the word god, not even once. In the same duration, religion was mentioned dozens of times. No, this particular lecture did not hurl me head-long into writing this post. 

That started more than four decades ago, in the early 1980s. I was making fun of a group of Christian fundamentalist preachers and realizing suddenly that I could have been taken to task for not disowning the rites and rituals of the religion that I nominally belonged, and still belong to. Here also, the word god never entered my internal conversations. It was always religion. 

The point of my attack here is not religion per se but the tools it uses to stir people into becoming religious. God is the foremost tool in the toolkit. Hierarchically, below that are the manuals on how to use them. Religion sits on the head of God.

Yet, this has not been recognized even by people who claim to have soured on god. They are the so-called atheists. They must call themselves anti-religionists. Richard Dawkins titled one of his books provocatively as The God Delusion. It must, instead, have been The Delusion of Religion.

None can wean anyone away from religion. However, religion can be weakened, though it has been caked up dry in people’s soul (for want of a better word) and scraping it away is a fool’s errand. But, as religion extends a helping hand, through the tools it has devised as manuals, the aim has to be to blunt the instruments. Easier still, the tools, the rites and rituals,can be burnt to ashes.

Religion is not inviting you to this auto-da-f−an “act of faith”−of its tools. The manuals are not singing Come on, baby, light my fire as The Doors did. One should not need invitations to perform the holiest of such rites and rituals that supposedly please god. I learned this today about differentiating between the good and the bad (ugly was left out). Bhagavad Gita taught Hindus that what pleases god is good, and what displeases him is bad; the god and him refer to Krishna himself. So convenient wasn’t it? Krishna (with reverence, it goes Lord Krishna)who preached The Song Celestial that is about as conflicted as you can get about the morality of killing. 

The God Father (the first of the trilogy) showed us what Baptism by Fire means. When Michael’s son was being Baptized inside the church, every one of the enemies in the Mafia was done away with by guns firing outside, planned by the then about-to-be crowned Mafia king; his minions did not use any under-handed poisoning (James Bond movie Spectre and No Time to Die) and other devious methods of murdering, like what Vito Corleone did in his visit to Sicily and avenged his father’s death. Religion must be Baptised by Fire−its proponents killed off by the anti-religion squad−in this sense, per this essay.

I heard someone say (a YouTube segment) that he is an atheist because he thinks. This gentleman, a lapsed (?) Muslim poet, went way beyond where Ren Descartes. He claimed that he exists because he thinks. The difference is the former asserted, in a manner of speaking, that if you are into thinking, you cannot but help being an atheist.

A Buddhist becomes a lapsed Buddhist if he ever were to accept The Buddha’s teachings without testing them. Even such an empirical instruction gets flushed down one’s kitchen drain when one’s brain is washed in the sink. 

So bad.

Do not think that weaning anyone away from religion is like fast food, or Maggie on the go; or, even a full course meal delivered on time by one of those food delivery app-based enterprises. Knowing that religion must have taken generations to become entrenched, removing it is likely to take millennia, if ever. 

But as Bhagavad Gita says, do not concern yourself with the result. It would come, as god has indeed promised! As the necessary step, god would make himself vanish, and then so would religion.

Bhagvad Gita too has to experience its Karma, though! Hopefully it would exist to see god vanish.

Raghuram Ekambaram