Skip to main content

Why Religion?


Religion has always been a tool for oppressing sections of people so that the oppressors can uphold their own interests easily.  In our own country, some clever men (men, and not women) invented a supernatural creature in order to establish the caste system which was highly oppressive for the vast majority of people.  A small minority became the most powerful people who controlled gods, the scriptures (rubrics and canons as well as truths), politics by subordinating the kings and their warriors, and everybody else.  

From the time Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, it ceased to be a religion of love and compassion.  Thousands of people were eliminated labelled as heretics, witches, pagans, and so on. 

Islam has its own jihads of all sorts which oppress and even eliminate whole sections of people.

Connected with the oppressor role of religion are the material benefits it brings.  The priestly classes always enjoyed infinite benefits.  The Brahmins in India and the first estate in France are just two examples.  Today, people attach themselves to those in high positions in religions and derive many material benefits.  For example, I know businessmen who have established strong relationships with godmen and other religious leaders at whose residences take place meetings between the religious leaders, political leaders and the traders.  Under the guise of religion, a lot of malpractices get ritualised or sanctified.  You can encroach on forest lands, break any rule with impunity or do just anything (which ordinary mortals will never dare do) provided there is a religious leader to support you.

In India today, nationalism has become a dominant discourse and it is inextricably intertwined with religion.  Violence and even terrorism become holy because of the religious associations.

Like the clichéd coin with two sides, religion has certain good aspects too.  There are plenty of religious people who carry out remarkable service for fellow human beings.  There is a lot of charity work being done.  There are excellent schools and hospitals run by religious people (though most of them are becoming commercial ventures today).  There are genuinely saintly people. 

Most human beings have an urge to transcend themselves.  Religion provides avenues to reach the divine, what is beyond the self.  Personally, my firm conviction is that divinity should first of all be discovered within one’s self.  One who cannot do that will seldom discover divinity anywhere else.  And one who does that will be compassionate to fellow human beings because he/she will realise the divinity that underlies all reality.

There are thousands of people who lead eminently good lives with the help of religion.  But the limelight seldom falls on such people.  The limelight invariably falls on those who misuse religion because it is in love with power and power structures.  Two of the prominent political leaders today who steal most of the media attention are persons who have misused religion in order to kick up nationalist sentiments in their people.

If such misuse of religion could be prevented, it could possibly be a good transforming agent – transforming the world into a paradise.  But experience shows that it is mere wishful thinking.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 161: #WhyReligion



Comments

  1. You've traced the extra mural aspects with quite some precision. Good read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. Mostly from personal experiences so far.

      Delete

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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...