On the nature of religion

October 27th, 2007 admin

Recently, we had a long discussion on our IIT Guwahati, Class of 99, Google groups. It was related to a petition filed with the Indian Supreme Court regarding a song in a Bollywood movie, the lyrics, costumes and imagery in which were deemed derogatory to religious people in India. The discussion meandered its way through several interesting topics and opinions. Here I present a glimpse of my views on the topic of religion and why it is futile to judge what is religiously right or wrong. My friend, Samya, encouraged me to put these views up on the website. I present my thoughts verbatim from my email and therefore any contextual references that seem out of place or emotional here should, kindly, be excused.

I find the notion of religion an interesting subject to think about. Even in this short discussion we have found many points of view, many frames of reference, many notions hidden behind the word “religion”. Thinking of religion reminds me of the story of the 5 blind men trying to understand what an elephant is. I do not see those men, as the story seems to imply, as lacking any specific faculty. I see them as normal humans. I do not see the elephant as an understandable subject that is only difficult to understand. Finally, I do not see the blind men as failures because their “limited” point of view. If those were blind men and that elephant was their large unassailable subject, what makes us, the reader of that fable, special in that we are able to see the big picture? In the real world, we are one among those men, and, therefore, we will not be able to see the entire elephant. Even more importantly, what *is* the “entire elephant” in such a real world? Just because the blind men are feeling around does not mean there is an elephant to be discovered. If there was no one to tell those blind men that they were touching an elephant, how would they *ever* know that it was an elephant they were touching? To me the “elephant” is the ability to be able to simultaneously acknowledge that each of the billions of blind men do have a piece of the view that the others will never have. Further, to me the elephant is the ability to distill those billions of view points into some common, uplifting, purposeful goal. This live interaction between the minds and view points of these billions of people is not just impossibly difficult, thankfully, it is unnecessary. Why should there be one common elephant that all have to agree to have understood?

Search for a common religion is like this search for the one elephant. It is impossible. Again, careful when I say impossible, it is nothing to be dejected about. It is an elevating feeling. It is like the blind men saying, “Hold it off for a minute…why do we *have* to *all* see the same thing?” It is an elevating feeling because you can, finally, let your conscience guide you without the haunting feeling that you are missing something. We have a faculty for thinking. The blind men still had the sense of touch. Let us use what we have and figure out what purposeful goal we see from our vantage. Let there be a billion religions for a billion people. Anytime we *name* a religion we are in trouble. There are not enough names to make it worthwhile. And anytime two people who name their religion the same but are at different ends of the elephant, there is bound to be frustration. Anytime two groups of people name their religion differently, they try to evaluate the better point of view, the “true” religion. They try to *help* the other group out by bringing them to their end of the elephant, while not acknowledging that there is no *reason* why their end is really better, except that *they* feel so. This brings in ego. The problem with ego is that it is the tendency to prioritize your thoughts over another person’s thoughts *without* reasoning through them, that is, without using your faculty of thinking honestly.

Therefore, I am cautious anytime I am asked, “What is your religion?”. If I thought about it long enough, I might be able to convey some ideas about what my “religion” is, but it will not make complete sense to anyone else in the world, because no one else shares my exact same position next to this impossible elephant. Why? Because no one else is me.

Here is the conclusion from a John Saxe poem

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean;
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

The complete poem is here

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On the need for religion

October 27th, 2007 admin

After thinking a bit about the nature of religion, I started thinking about the need for it. Why are the blind men so intent on discovering an elephant? Here are some thoughts related to that topic. Again, Samya was the motivation behind putting these up on this website, and once again, a fable helped me explain the thoughts.

Another fable that I think applies to real life is the “grapes are sour” story . That one, as I recollect, portrays a fox that gives up on reaching a grape vine, consoling itself by saying that the fruit is not worth the effort. The way the story was presented to me seemed to imply that such an attitude is laughable and that one should be honest with oneself.

However, I believe that there is much to look up to in the fox’s attitude. The fox was able to weigh the cost and the benefit given the situation it found itself in, and decide the cost is more than the benefit. Such analysis is very important in real life too. It keeps us from getting stuck. Further, the fable seemed to imply that the fox wrongfully chose to “believe” in falsehood. It knew that the grapes would be sweet, but it still walked away thinking and saying they are sour! But think about it. Lots of people are able to live their life without going insane because of such an attitude. If a poor person suffers from a dreaded illness that has a cure but is expensive (or if a poor person, for no fault of his, gets run over by Salman Khan’s SUV), often they or their relatives resign to their fate saying that such is their karma, or saying that they must have done something wrong in their past lives, or that such was God’s plan, or even more tragically, that God loves that person more than others.

Those we call religious and those we call superstitious might actually be very reasoning oriented. They are so starved for a reason for why bad things happen to them that they create, or succumb to, this pacifying fantasy of their being a superhuman controlling their destiny; that there is someone who sees and cares. If you read the book “The Life of Pi”, this is the underlying theme in the book. There is a plain, calculated, probabilistic world where you do have a certain vaguely measuarable probability of dying in a freak road accident. And then there is the world where the accident had a reason behind it. Someone had a plan for why it had to happen. You did not die a meaningless death. No wonder we choose the latter view of the world under extreme helplessness.

The fox could have walked away acknowledging that it was completely helpless and that it would never, in its lifetime, be able to taste grapes, or, the fox could have walked away genuinely believing that grapes are sour. Guess which way the fox would be able to continue living with some sense of equanimity? Afterall, sometimes, we do take life too seriously, And sometimes, these grapes *are* overrated.

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