I have often prided myself on my rationality, sometimes to the point of overweening arrogance. Till a few years back, I never saw this arrogance for what it really was. It seemed to me that it came from a genuine concern for people who waste their time, money and effort on mindless ritual and superstition. I did not see my vocal atheism as a kind of science- based elitism because I felt that I was sharing my knowledge with folks that I felt were keeping their eyes closed, sealing their ears with their index fingers and going
“lalalalala” when it came to trying to see the world through the eyes of Newton, Einstein and Darwin.
But I find myself changing a bit. I now cringe everytime a celebrity atheist browbeats a creationist or laughs at a fundamentalist Islamic cleric. Of course, these charlatans deserve to be laughed at. They represent a fringe element within most faiths. In a sense, it would be like aliens discovering earth and laughing at all of humanity after just meeting George W Bush. Does this mean that I am suddenly seeing something valuable in the institution of religion? Hell no. As an individual, I am still pretty clear about the intellectual harm that religion does (and has done) to humanity as a whole, but it’s what I’m learning about human beings in the process that’s giving me pause.
Even if I restrict myself to India, there’s close to half a billion people who are still struggling to meet basic needs like food and shelter and on top of that, they deal with the vicissitudes of life with no bandwidth left to think about the way they think about things. I mean, I have the luxury of spending time pondering about how I ponder and I have the bandwidth to understand physics, probability and evolution, the three subjects central to viewing the world through the lens of
rationality (and not predestined fate, karma, heaven, hell etc). But when you look at mankind’s history, it wasn’t till a few decades ago that the Industrial Revolution finally put us in complete control of the planet and gave a few of us at the top the leisure time required to realise that breaking a coconut for Ganesha does not actually directly cause us to score better in an exam.
Blind faith and ritual, I now realise, are an integral part of human nature, and I’d even venture to say that it even makes evolutionary sense (in the past, kingdoms bound by divine faith tended to overrun more individual-minded groups). Apparently, some recent research on chimpanzees provides us the insight that human babies tend to follow instructions blindly while chimps tend to work things out, reinvent the wheel so to speak everytime they face a problem.
In short, I get this feeling that religion, superstition and ritual are natural (albeit harmful in a modern context) side effects of simply being human, so what we need is a little more sensitivity in how we deal with faith when it comes to ordinary people.
Fundamentalist clerics and fraudulent swamijis on the other hand can be laughed at for sport.