Why religions are expected to decay

Religion may or may not be the last resort of a scoundrel, but it is an ideal hiding place for many who answer that description.
Why religions are expected to decay

I was pleasantly surprised that those who welcomed my article on the rot in Christianity outnumbered those who resented it by a hundred to one. This is a sign of hope, for it proves that the common man, as against the merchants of religion, hasn’t lost his senses. His light has not yet turned into darkness. He recognises that religion could turn, over a period of time, into a contradiction of itself.

The secret of religion lies in man, not God. Man is at once natural and spiritual. The natural dimension of his existence functions in affinity to the world of matter and is governed by its laws. Action and reaction, to take one example, being equal and opposite in the natural domain, finds its echo in the religious sphere as the Mosaic law, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Spiritually enlightened as he was, Gandhi insisted that this is not viable. It will leave everyone eyeless and toothless. Evil must be overcome with good, and not resisted with evil. Evil cannot eradicate evil, just as a hammer blow on the head cannot heal a headache.

The conditioning of the natural man makes him assume that the spiritual world operates on principles identical to natural laws. In the material world, for example, it is material resources, not ideals, that drive a project. It is a sign of the material imagination overpowering the spiritual vision that the merit of a religious establishment is measured by its wealth and its importance, by the number of believers hooked to it. This is a norm to which the spiritual outlook is indifferent.

Now consider this. Why is it that God becomes superfluous to enterprises founded for his glory? Why is it that advocacies of hatred and cruelty are undertaken in the name of the God of love and compassion? Extreme violence, as in the Crusades, was justified by appealing to the presumably lofty aim it was supposed to serve. Why is coercion used in the sphere of religion, which is meant to be a realm, as Jesus and Swami Vivekananda insisted, of pure freedom? Why is it that religion, which is meant to ennoble human beings, induces in its followers types of behaviour of which even wild animals could be ashamed?

It is imperative that this monstrous contradiction bristling in the heart of every religion is confronted upfront. The familiar word for this pattern is ‘hypocrisy’. The distance between religiosity and hypocrisy is wafer-thin. The essence of hypocrisy is that behind the façade of spirituality the affairs of religions are managed strictly accordingly to worldly norms and considerations. Religion becomes, in such situations, the worldly passing off as the spiritual. The more the worldly gains ascendancy, the more the religious garb becomes deified. Those behind the curtains of religious establishments know the raging hypocrisy of it. They forfeit, as a result, what little godliness they had when they got started.

In the wholesome phase of religious consciousness—the phase in which the spiritual guides the material—the spiritual exists in harmony with the physical. This is a period of sublime creativity and ethico-philosophical effervescence. But over a period of time, as the institutional straightjacket, with its affluence and influence, smothers the spiritual vision, the physical overpowers the spiritual. The body triumphs over the soul. At the extreme end of this process of religious decay, God gets sidelined, which is the mystery, in the biblical faith, of the Crucifixion. It is wrong to assume that Crucifixion, or the brutal exclusion of the divine from religion, is an aberration peculiar to Judaism. Symbolically, crucifixion as the exclusion of God is prevalent in the institutionalisation of all religions.

The ennoblement of humans and the sustenance of the ethical sanity of the society are the prime goals of spirituality. Attention from this is deflected either with the promise of a future heaven or with moksha or nirvana from worldly suffering. Decoying them into a theatre of possibilities that do not lend themselves to verification is a precondition for the unfettered manipulation of people. It is incredible how priests, a majority of whom are more mediocre and unspiritual than the laity, are in smug control of supernatural realities. And how millions of people, better endowed, swallow their canards with effortless ease!

Such priestly pretensions amount to outright fraud. That priests thrive by fooling the masses in their millions points to the extent of spiritual blindness that prevails. The idea that any priest can hear the confessions of fellow human beings and absolve them of their sins is superstitious. But importance is attached to this practice primarily because it serves to sustain the priestly mystique. It is for the good of the priest, if not of the sinner, that confession appears to be prescribed.

The mystification of places of worship—churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras etc.—too is similar in kind. It is contrary to a spiritual understanding of the nature of God and of our relationship with the divine. If God is omnipresent, he will not stay trapped in man-made structures. If God is omniscient, he cannot be flattered or manipulated with priestly mumbo-jumbo. God is not honoured with our lips, but with our lives. Religious observances are nothing in spiritual importance compared to honouring God through the practise of fundamental divine attributes—love, compassion, truth and justice—in daily life.
Serving hands, as Mother Teresa said, are holier than praying lips.

All this is obscured, and in its place a cobweb of hypocrisy, custom-designed to perpetuate the hegemony and profit of the priestly class, is erected. This is a disservice to the people. Those with a modicum of common sense will expect aberrations of every kind to abound within religion of this kind. Mediocrity is the mother of criminality. Religion may or may not be the last resort of a scoundrel, but it is an ideal hiding place for many who answer that description.

Valson Thampu

Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi

Email: vthampu@gmail.com

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