Skip to main content

Faith and Doubt

Book Review

One of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, argues that doubt rather than disbelief is the opposite of faith because disbelief is as certain as faith.  Doubt is uncertainty, a refusal to take sides.  Doubt is the ultimate openness towards phenomena.  Doubt can question both, faith as well as disbelief. 

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book, Doubt: a History, is a masterpiece that presents to the reader all the great doubters from the ancient Indian Carvakas and the Greek Xenophanes to our own Salman Rushdie and Natalie Angier.  The best feature of the book is its readability in spite of the highly philosophical themes it deals with.  The next best is that it does not confine itself to philosophers, rather it discusses novelists, scientists, historians and others of some significance who have contributed to the history of doubt.

Thousands of people have been killed merely because they questioned certain religions.  In the heyday of Christianity and its colonial empires, doubters were killed mercilessly in the name of heresy and witchcraft.  Today Islam is doing the same thing in a different way.  Narendra Modi’s India has a unique way of bringing all Indians back to their original ghar.  

Doubt has driven the world forward, towards light and enlightenment, while religions have sought to keep it in certain degrees of darkness, the degree being determined expediently by the priest and the politician.  That’s why the French writer Denis Diderot (1713-1784) averred that “humanity would not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.” [Quoted by Hecht, p. 347]

Hecht’s sympathies are with the doubters though she does not share my abhorrence of the religious people.  She knows that “great doubters are often more invested in religious questions than is the average believer.” [p. 364]  But her approach to the subject is very balanced and objective.  She quotes the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), “Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong!  See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them.” [p. 364]

Jennifer Michael Hecht
Jesus was a great doubter.  In fact, he questioned most of the beliefs and rituals of his religion, Judaism.  The more he doubted, however, the more he insisted on the importance of faith.  Faith was the ultimate means of redemption for him.  Yet his last words on the cross were, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”  Hecht says that these words could have been put into Jesus’ mouth by later editors of the Bible who wanted to make certain links between the New Testament and the Old Testament.  Jesus’ lament actually belongs to the Psalmist [Psalm 22].  Jesus, however, turned his religion upside down.  He brought faith and love in the place of the Jewish commandments and rituals.

I discussed the example of Jesus in slight detail to show that Hecht’s history of doubt is also a history of religions.  Anyone who is interested in understanding religions and/or religious doubt will find Hecht’s book a treasure.  It is written in the most lucid style possible.  It is even subtly witty at times.  It is indeed a masterpiece.


PS. Below are a few blog posts of mine inspired by this book: 
·         Galileo’s Truth
·         Marcus Aurelius Dies
·         God is within us



Comments

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 Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Books and Rebellions

Books become my ideal companions in times of political turmoil. Right now, as you’re reading these lines, there are dozens of active armed conflicts going on around the world. Besides, developed countries like America are asking foreign students as well as others to leave. The global economy is experiencing significant instability, characterised by weak growth projections, persistent inflation, high debt levels, and geopolitical conflicts. Even when a country like India advertises itself as becoming the third largest economy, the living conditions of the poor aren’t showing any improvement. Nay, the world isn’t becoming any better than it ever was. It's when such realisations hit you from all sides, you need the consolations of an abiding hobby. Reading is at the top of my list of such hobbies. First of all, books help us understand current events in a broader context . They can reveal patterns in history: how democracies falter, how propaganda spreads, how resistance movements...