The Hindu Business Line : Religious delusion

Inspired by the picture of the planet earth taken from four billion miles away in space by the Voyager spacecraft, Carl Sagan, wrote with poetic awe and exhilaration in Pale Blue Dot, about the infinitesimally small size of our planet against even the known universe. He pointed out that almost everything we had ever learnt, known, fought over, won or lost, was inside a tiny fraction of that little dot, set in a scattered array of light rays. Here was a p icture, if ever there was one, to give us a sense of proportion about ourselves in relation to all of creation.

Sagan also wondered: “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded: ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say: ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way’.”

Religious sentiments

These thoughts crossed my mind when reading of the storm raised by the reference to the historicity of Rama and his bridge, in the affidavit filed by the government in connection with the Sethusamudram project. All sorts of religious sentiments appear to have been violated; and the government immediately went into a hastily conceived disaster recovery mode amidst much finger-pointing.

Lost altogether in the process was any sort of debate about the economic, ecological and social repercussions of the project going through. Instead, all attention was focused on the fact (and I use the word advisedly) that the truth about the legends of any religion cannot always be proven. The ancient texts are almost impossible to deal with through the standards of evidence applied in courts of law. That realisation should have put paid to all discussion about Rama and his helpers in the legend of the bridge built to recover Sita from Lanka. Alas, it did not.

On the other hand, as Richard Dawkins says in his book The God Delusion, if only every religion, old or new, were flexible enough to appreciate the magnificent revelations of modern science it might be able to draw forth enormous “reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths” about the unimaginably wondrous entity that our universe is. His case for a rational understanding of nature through science is a sophisticated form of atheism. It is fairly straight-forward but made complex mainly by the emotions raised by the mention of the subject.

Truly there is little in the lives of men and women that is more sacred to them and less easily subject to public exposure than the nature of their religious beliefs. Yet the fact (again a fact!) remains that differences between faiths, religious orders and schools of thought cannot be resolved by argument. This conundrum alone ought to persuade any reasonable person never to make religion a centre of a dispute, let alone a war.

Sense of balance

However, it is increasingly the name of this so-called faith that causes the greatest explosions of violence and terrorism all over the world. If any religion can actually make people believe that killing and maiming of innocents can be justified, then surely it can certainly be brought to serious question by every right- thinking human being.

Yet the uproar that accompanied the publication of Richard Dawkins’s book showed that somehow we lose the much-needed sense of balance when it comes to the existence of God, as conceived by orthodox religion. A highly eccentric and extremist streak in the political sphere of the country does not make matters easier. It is time we left religion to the priests and kept all policy debate to the strictly scientific, rational realm.

S. RAMACHANDER

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