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
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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 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