Skip to main content

Religious or Virtuous?


Very few Popes of the Catholic Church were saints.  Far from being saints, many of them were remarkably depraved compared to the common layperson whom their religion promised to redeem from sinfulness. 
It is not easy to combine worldly power and spiritual sanctity.  Authentic spirituality is a highly personal affair though it can and does wield much power over other people.  The power that Mahatma Gandhi wielded over many of his followers was spiritual to a great extent.  The Buddha and Jesus also wielded spiritual powers.  Unlike them, Gandhi did not become a god because of the time in which he lived.  Like Jesus, however, he was martyred by his own truth.
The power that Jesus, Gandhi and others like them wield is quite different from the kind wielded by, say, Hitler or Osama bin Laden.  It is the power of the truth they believed in and put into practice in their life.   The power that Hitler and Osama possessed was political and hence worldly.  The power that most religious leaders exercise even today is too earthly to be spiritual of any sort.
Spiritual power sees sin or evil as the enemy, while worldly power perceives certain communities of people as the enemies.  The Jews were the enemies for Hitler.  Non-Muslims, particularly the Western Christians, were Osama’s enemies. 
Today, we have a lot of leaders who fight in the name of religions.  None of them has any more spiritual authority than the depraved Popes of the Church.  They are potential conquerors and actual killers.  Their species is multiplying rapidly in our world.  The recent communal disturbance that broke out in a small region of Assam and went on to grip many parts of India is a proof of the decadence of religion today.  The divorce of religion from spirituality seems to be complete now.
Yet it is most likely that political parties with religious garbs will come to power in many countries including India in the days to come.   
Religion is merely a means for covering up our vices, not for curing us of them.
What if a genuinely spiritual person were to emerge today?  He or she would be eliminated – most probably by the priests if not by political leaders – even as Jesus was, even as Gandhi was.  Why?
A genuinely spiritual person would hurt the vanity of the ordinary people who would rather take pride in their little acts of goodness like the weekly worship in a church or temple or mosque, donations for charity, or participation in an anti-corruption rally organised by an apparent do-gooder.  Worse, a genuinely spiritual person would frighten the average believer with his/her inimitable goodness.  [Cf. Bernard Shaw’s preface to Saint Joan]
It is far more advisable to be religious than virtuous!  It has always been so.  Ask the ghost of Socrates, if you don’t believe me.
But there are genuinely virtuous people in this world.  Quite many.  They wisely choose to lead private lives. 

Comments

  1. Matheikal,

    I don't think the virtuous would identify themslves as such. That could become a black mark on their nature. There is really no need for them to hide or go incognito.

    It is like Moses writing the Pentateuch and yet he has God saying in tit that Moses is the humblest!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course, Raghuram, the joy of the virtuous is their virtues themselves; they don't need any certificate for them.

      Delete
  2. Thoughtful piece. I'd prefer to refer to Gandhi as having being killed by Hindu fanatics, though. Reminds us who the enemy is.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation