Why religion baffles me

Sunday meditation

“Didn’t you cut open the womb of a woman and eat the foetus?” It was Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, a celebrated Malayalam poet, who put that blunt question to a Gujarati trader who was travelling with him on a train. Kadammanitta was returning to Kerala after a visit to the post-Godhra Gujarat. The poet had seen the agonies of thousands of people living in Gujarat’s refugee camps and heard their heart-rending stories. The Gujarati trader on the train had asked the poet a question: “Are you a non-vegetarian?” “I’m not very particular about food,” Kadammanitta answered. “What about you?” The Gujarati’s brag was: “I’m a Vaishnavite. We are pure vegetarians.” It was then the poet asked him the question about eating the foetus.

Later Kadammanitta composed a couple of poems on what he had seen in Gujarat of 2002. One of them was about a group of pure-vegetarian Vaishnavites setting fire to a banyan tree under which a boy named Kamrem Alam had taken shelter. The boy became a ball of fire and soon reached the feet of God Vishnu but his ashes wouldn’t serve to fertilise the Aswatha. The poem is titled The Aswatha of Bapuji Nagar and has a reference to a line from the Gita: Aswatha sarva vrakshaanaam.

Kadammanitta wrote an ode to Bilkis Bano. What the pure vegetarians did to her made the poet hate himself, he wrote in the poem. “I accepted the curse of being born a human as I listened to what my fellow beings did to you.” 

Whenever I hear religious people talking about divine blessings, Kadammanitta (who was a devout Hindu) rushes to my mind. Why doesn’t the world become any better a place with so much religion around? That is the plain question which haunts me whenever I see thousands of people flocking to pilgrimage centres like Sabarimala (the pilgrimage season has just begun) or Bible Conventions or many other similar religious gatherings. There is so much devotion and yet there is ever-increasing evil all around. How do we justify religion at all?

What baffles me no end is that there is more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than good. I have no doubt that religion helps many people to be good and to do good. Their number is infinitesimal. That is my problem. If religion doesn’t help people to be good, what use is it? On the contrary, religion seems to make more people inhuman! That does baffle me.

In one of his letters (which became part of the Bible) Paul wrote: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love in my heart, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” The problem with today’s religious people is precisely that: they are little more than resounding gongs and clanging cymbals. Religion that does not touch the heart of the worshipper does more harm than good. That is what I learn from my observations.

PS. I took Kadammanitta and his poems as examples only. The problem of religious violence is ubiquitous. There is no religion that has escaped this catastrophic fate. All the more reason why we need to look at the problem seriously.