Skip to main content

What use is religion?


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers

“Why Blame Religion?” asks Matthew Adukanil in an article of that title published in the Open Page of The Hindu (Oct 13).  [In the online edition of the paper the title is Blame it on politics, not religion.]  The article is a response to an earlier article by Vasant Natarajan, Let’s aim for a post-theistic society.  While Prof Natarajan’s article was a rational and sensible argument why we should strive to create a world without religions, Prof Adukanil’s is sheer trivia fit for catechism classes.

Religion and science “are twins, one imparting wisdom and the other knowledge,” argues Adukanil.  There are many problems with such statements.  For example: Does religion really provide wisdom?  If it does, why is it the cause of so much misery in the world?  Why has it engendered so many crusades, holy wars, jihads, terrorists, and other appalling evils?  What about the numerous atheists and agnostics who were/are wise?  Aren’t they proof that religion is not at all necessary for acquiring wisdom?  How many people, in fact, become wise because of religion?  If we examine wise people who are also religious, we are likely to find that their wisdom is a product of their character rather than their religion, though religion might have played some (minimal, most probably) role in the formation of that character. 

According to Adukanil, the problem lies in mixing religion with politics.  What good is religion if it does not suffuse the entire life of the believer?  “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is,” said Mahatma Gandhi.  If religion indeed makes people as wise as Adukanil claims, it should be the guiding force behind the entire continuum of an individual’s actions as well as thinking.   That’s why religion was meaningful for people like Gandhi.  The truth is that people like Gandhi would have been eminently good people even without their religion.


And that’s precisely my argument.  Religion is redundant.  It does no good to anyone really.  Good people will be good even without their religion.  Bad people will use their religion for politics and other evils.  So who needs religion?
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 13, 2013 at 3:19 PM

    Indeed religion is redundant and The Bad Ones are always in a Lookout to take advantage of this redundancy and many fools fall for them and create the Chaos which ultimately does harm to everyone...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 13, 2013 at 3:43 PM

      Religion was a mean of amassing power in the olden days. Today it's a business. Politicians use it still for political power, though.

      Delete
  2. SujithOctober 13, 2013 at 9:59 PM

    "Prof Adukanil’s is sheer trivia fit for catechism classes." exactly the same ran into my mind also. that was such a childish argument. Human history is the proof that religion and politics are two sides of the same coin.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 13, 2013 at 10:16 PM

      Adukanil is religious by profession and is used to preaching sermons.

      Delete
  3. UnknownOctober 14, 2013 at 5:58 PM

    I don't like religion at all. It offers nothing but excuses to dominate others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 14, 2013 at 7:08 PM

      I love the way you bombard me with comments in a series. :)

      Delete
    2. UnknownOctober 15, 2013 at 12:32 PM

      LOL...told you before, I am seasonal rain :P

      Delete
  4. AnonymousOctober 15, 2013 at 10:13 AM

    Very interesting point. Probably one can attribute the presence of religion to induce discipline by fear of something greater. I view it as a tool that was invented to keep a sizeable multitude at bay, for those whose intellect alone might not have sufficed to keep them from vices.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 15, 2013 at 10:24 PM

      Yes, religion was required in the infancy of humanity as a means of controlling the savagery within the species. But now isn't it time to go beyond, time to grow up?

      Delete
  5. Sunil DeepakOctober 15, 2013 at 5:38 PM

    I think that it is the human tendency to go to extremes about their ideas - usually linked to religion, but if religions will not be there, will this tendency go away? Some of "science" persons are also very fanatic about the good their science can do and some of the financial fanatics or development fanatics that are dominating the world, how much harm do theiy create? :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 15, 2013 at 10:27 PM

      It is not as much a question of whether human behaviour will be much different if religion is not there as whether religion performs any meaningful service to humanity.

      Perhaps, human nature will be far better if liberated from the fetters imposed by religion and allowed to see things more rationally.

      Delete
  6. Manav SinghiOctober 19, 2013 at 5:25 AM

    Nice Post, A G+ for Ur Post and Have a nice Day. . .. :)

    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
44 comments
Read more

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
6 comments
Read more

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
10 comments
Read more

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
4 comments
Read more

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
8 comments
Read more