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. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. mandakolathurAugust 30, 2012 at 5:11 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 30, 2012 at 5:37 PM

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

      Delete
  2. UnknownSeptember 9, 2012 at 2:02 PM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Life of an Activist

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...
10 comments
Read more