Skip to main content

The Absurdity of Religion

Photo by Deepak Amembal


Whenever I see crimes committed in the name of religion, I am baffled. Ask any religious believer about religion and you will surely hear that all religions teach believers to be good, loving, compassionate, etc. But the crimes committed in the name of religions or gods outnumber all other crimes, I think. Remember the Christian crusades and Muslim jihads, for example. The numerous acts of genocide in the name of religions or gods, witch hunts, burning of heretics, the Holocaust (Hitler was not motivated by religion but his victims all belonged to a particular religion), religious terrorism, ethnic cleansing, lynching… Not all of them are things of the past.

Someone tells me that these acts are committed by a minority of people. Most people don’t take their religion to such extremes. So I look around at the very ordinary people I know. They are all religious in the sense that they go to church or temple or mosque. They pray regularly. They practise the rituals of their religion. But they have no qualms about hating certain people, being cruel towards people and animals, cheating, lying… So what does religion really mean to them?

Most religions sanctify violence. The God of the Old Testament kills innocent Egyptian children to teach pharaoh a lesson. Islam established its roots as a conquering army. Mohammed is not only a prophet but also a military leader. Even the supposedly non-violent Buddhists in Japan supported their country’s war efforts during the WWII. The Gita teaches its believers that violence in the defence of justice isn’t contrary to spiritual life.

A few years ago I wrote a short story on the occasion of Christmas about one of Herod’s soldiers who felt nauseated by the killing of innocent children on the occasion of the first Christmas. [The story can be read here: A mad man’s Christmas] “I’m thinking of god,” the soldier says. “Someone told me that God was born on the earth and that’s what set the fire to Herod’s ass. Some dream or prophecy or whatever shit, you know, the religious people.” And a little later he says, “I’m thinking of god. How will god wash away his sin of killing thousands of infants?”

Gods and their followers don’t make sense to me. I do agree that many people live morally upright lives in spite of their religions or even because of them. I have seen a lot of non-believers who are far better people than believers. Probably religion has little to do with goodness. I wonder what it really is about.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanMarch 20, 2022 at 12:24 AM

    Hari OM
    "Humanity" is a wide spectrum; it starts at the base and becomes more challenging the closer to the summit it gets. Maintaining a standard of humanitarianism - not matter how it is coloured, be it as a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or any other mysticism comes down to how advanced each of us is in our state of humanity. It is appaling how any faith structure is let down by its practitioners... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 20, 2022 at 7:13 AM

      I too believe in the evolution of the heart / soul. Without that advance, no one can make religion meaningful. And with it, religion may not be required at all.

      Delete
  2. Pandian RamaiahMarch 20, 2022 at 3:51 PM

    Good person is good person where ever he is. Just because I believe in religion I can not be good; Just because I am an atheist I can not be bad and vice versa. If there is no religion, some other reason - like race, geography - will fill that vacuum. Radicalization and and slaughtering will still continue! So, just by crushing the religion we can not crush the mindset, imho. Increasing the intelligence and crushing the weeds may help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 20, 2022 at 4:39 PM

      You're right. I don't want to decimate religion. Far from it, if anyone is helped to live a good life by religion - as many are - I endorse that sort of spirituality.

      Delete
  3. nareshnkJuly 18, 2022 at 5:51 PM

    The process of conversion of religion started with a simple desire to know that there was someone out there greater than them.

    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

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more