To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, May 04, 2019
 
I have written about my explorations on the question of the existence of God but never really explored in analytical terms the question of religion. I do know that I have believed for a long time now that religion is distinct from ‘God’ and ‘man-made’ to use a crude term in the sense that religion was created by people and it was not ‘created’ by God even if people say that their religion is the only means to the one God. That being my position I never really ‘believed’ in religion at all or rather that religion is the means to the one God (if he exists) even though I do call myself a Catholic simply because I was born in a family professing the faith and it’s something of an inherited identity for me (with some practices that go with it) rather than a suggestion that I ‘believe’ that that’s the only route to ‘God’.

Now, in the course of my research (yes, dear reader, everything seems to flow from my research these days ;)), I was going through what ‘Hinduism’ is all about and the question of ‘what is religion’ came up in the context of why or how ‘Hinduism’ came to be characterised as a religion. I admit that even though I had sort of subconsciously worked out that religion is ‘man-made’, I never really thought about how it came to be ‘made’ and what the implications of this ‘making’ were in a historical or worldview sense. What I understand now is that rather than Christianity or other religions being fitted into a broad category called Religion, it was Christianity itself that gave birth to this category of Religion, and from then on, based on the features of Christianity, the category Religion developed its general features which evolved over a period of time. And this broad category based on specific features was then applied to other ‘almost similar’ phenomena and brought within the ambit of that category. Sometimes the phenomena themselves were diverse and fragmented and loose such that they were brought together under a common label such as in the case of Hinduism to be placed under the category of Religion—as that was a western way of making sense of an eastern phenomena that did not fit into any other classification within their cultural view. This also meant that the eastern ‘religions’ not having the same features as the western ones could be considered outlandish by western standards even though they were outlandish by the very same standards that they had adopted in the first place to classify what should come under ‘religion’!  

This makes me think: what purpose does this category Religion really serve? One obvious purpose from a historical point of view seems to be—specifically from the point of view of western or what are called Abrahamic religions including Islam—to delineate which path leads to God and who is the one true God. Which is why these religions since inception have had a stake in proving their superiority over other religions if not to actually delegitimise other religions because the very foundation of a religion would be threatened if it were to accept that there was another way of reaching God or that God himself could be affiliated to a different religious order. If there was a different path to reaching God and not this one, then why should I follow this path could be a natural question. The wars and bloodshed that have occurred in the name of religion (and arguably still occur today) make sense when one notes that this question of superiority or legitimacy is not really a theoretical question but crucially and profoundly affects one’s very existence, not just on earth but ‘beyond’. Additionally, whoever holds the key to the one true religion and through it to the one true God, naturally also holds a position of immense power...and one could probably think of these struggles not so much as a struggle to establish the one true God but the struggle to establish oneself and one’s own interest group in the position of ultimate power… because no other form of power comes even close to one that reaches beyond death.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 2:51 am 0 comments
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