How to deal with the religious

 

I was in a friend’s (let’s call him Alex) house when an elderly woman rang his doorbell. She introduced herself as a member of a popular religious cult. She wished to talk to Alex and his family for a while.

“My family is not here,” Alex said. “Wife is in office and children are working in faraway places and they come home once in a month or so.”

So she decided to counsel Alex.

“Do you go to church every Sunday?”

“Yeah,” Alex said and I blinked at him. The last time he went to church must have been for his grandson’s baptism half a decade ago. Alex went on to give the answers that the woman wanted and most of them were obviously lies. The woman might want to recommend him to the Pope as a living saint after hearing his answers.

“We are such a godless people now,” Alex told the woman very sanctimoniously. “Look at the graphs of crime rates, alcoholism, drug abuse, and so on. If all people went to church every day and prayed three times a day and had fear of God in their hearts, would these graphs have risen steeply as they do now? It’s a catastrophe that the world has become like this. Tch, tch…”

Alex was giving the woman’s own sermon to her. It became sheer fun for me as I got to understand what was happening. You can beat certain people only by playing their own game.

The woman left within minutes of her arrival. “Instead if we had started arguing with her, she would have spent hours here and wasted our precious time,” Alex told me.

“Such a good man like you should be going to church not only on Sundays but every morning.” That was her only counsel for Alex in the end. And Alex’s reply was, “Of course, in fact my New Year resolution was just that. I’ll brush up the resolution. Thank you.” And he closed the door.

No person who makes it his/her life’s mission to teach religion to others will ever be convinced by whatever you say, Alex explained to me. Whatever. Even if you take out your pure white handkerchief and say this is white they will object provided they can make a point out of that objection like do you see those little dots of stains they are like the stains on your soul. Agree with them just for the sake of peace and if you can create humour out of it all it’s still better.

Alex told me about some great person whose name he forgot. When people asked him why he went to church every Sunday, his answer was: “Loyalty to the tribe.” We are still clannish. And religion is the most clannish thing in the world now. Clan is a feeling, an emotion. You can’t deal with emotions using your logic.

“So you used your heart with that woman?” I asked.

“Didn’t I?”

“She might turn up again,” I insinuated. “Love can be dangerous especially in such cases.”

“Not in such cases. There is no place for love in their hearts. Those hearts are restless until everyone in the world is converted to their clan – which will never happen.”