On the need for religion

October 27th, 2007 admin Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

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.