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God Save Us From Bigotry: Or Will He?

Taking a chai-break from a recent all-religion gathering for peace we attended, my friend Ramesh repeated a question he has asked several times. I first remember him asking it publicly the one time he was on a panel at such a meet. Since then, he has raised it several times, both publicly and to me over our usual cup of chai. He has never got an answer, except the nod and smile of agreement I give him.

His question: Who will speak for us agnostics?

Yes, when you have representatives from every religion getting up to intone pleasantries about how their faith really preaches love and brotherhood and all those nice things, and they all share the stage in a kind of feel-good fest of camaraderie, we agnostics cannot help wondering: who speaks for us? We may be tiny in numbers, but in these days when everybody agitates for representation, where's the agnostic in these all-religion gatherings?

Not very visible, of course. For two reasons. One, we are tiny in numbers. Few people are even aware of us, or think it necessary to ask for our opinions. Two, to those who keep particular faiths who are aware of us, we are probably even further beyond the pale than those from other faiths. I mean, what do you do with people who don't know about the existence of God and don't really give a damn anyway? You keep them off your all-religion panels, that's what.

Not that we particularly want to be up there, let me quickly add. My friend's question is purely rhetorical. It is fundamental to being agnostic that we don't care about God, and thus for religion. To us, every single religion is equally distasteful. We would much rather stay away from them in every form, even all-faith gatherings. And such feelings, I imagine, make us repugnant in turn to those who are fervent about their faiths.

And why do I feel this distaste? Because every way I look at it, religions seem to have no choice but to run down other religions. Despite what each says about brotherhood and love and all those nice things, each must make its faithful feel emphatically superior to those other faithful. So we have bands of religiously-inclined souls running around the world, each complacent in the greater exaltation they possess. In turn, that very complacency infuriates the others. And that can only produce the legacy religion has given us: centuries of hatred and killing.

Quite far removed from love and brotherhood.

I felt this agnostic distaste again when I read what the Vatican, in its infinite Catholic wisdom, pronounced a couple of weeks ago. It came in a 36-page declaration whose English title is "On the Unity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church." Whatever that may mean, because I don't know. (Nor care, for that matter).

But whatever the title may mean, the declaration rejected what the Vatican calls "growing attempts to depict all religions as equal." Non-Christians, it claims, will necessarily have difficulties finding salvation (whatever that may mean). Elaborating on this theme, the declaration says:

The truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out ... the belief that 'one religion is as good as another'. ... If it is true that followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.

Don't know about you, but I'm quite happy if I'm in a "gravely deficient situation", objectively speaking and thank you very much. And I don't even want to know what it means to talk of the "fullness" of salvation. If it means everybody else must remain "gravely deficient", then I certainly don't want to be salvated, if that's the word. But what's even more interesting about this document is that it does not pronounce only other, non-Christian, religions as less equal. Even within the Christian flock, other strains are less equal. While those other churches can know the "significance and importance in the mystery of salvation", the document says, they "suffer from defects." It is the Catholic Church that has in its hands the "fullness of grace and truth." And that holds because "there exists a single church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church."

In other words: my way is the true way. Everything else, yes, everything else, is faulty.

Whatever the protestations about "sincere respect", a document more likely to get people's bile up is hard to imagine. This is precisely the point agnostics make: that religions, by definition, must behave in this ham-handedly insulting way. That's why we want no part of them.

And of course it isn't just the Catholic Church that goes about with its nose in the air. Every religion does it. Consider just this business of tolerance, a quality every religion claims to have in ample measure.

I remember a bright young Pakistani student at a panel discussion we both participated in some years ago. Islam, he told us proudly, is an extremely tolerant religion. "We Muslims", he said, and I assure you this is as near verbatim as I can get after these years, "are willing to live with people of every other faith. We respect them fully. That's the greatness of Islam compared to other religions. Of course, there's only one problem. Islam cannot stand idol worship. So we simply cannot have a Hindu temple near a mosque, because it contains idols."

"Apart from this," he said with a satisfied smile, "Islam is very tolerant." And I was left to wonder at the man's profound ignorance of the very concept of tolerance. Apart from all else, it is precisely this brand of ignorance that fuels hatred between Shia and Sunni that plagues not just this student's own country, but other Islamic countries as well.

Take Sri Lanka, whose tragedy owes much to the utter perversion of the ideals Buddhism teaches. By some accounts, it was Anagarika Dharmapala, in the early decades of the 20th Century, who most spurred this perversion. The scholar Gananath Obeyesekere writes that in turning Buddhism into a political weapon, this man reaffirmed the Buddhist identity, treating Christians and non-Sinhalas as alien outsiders. ... [He] identified non-Sinhala[s] ... for attack: the Muslims, Borah merchants and especially the Tamils, whom he referred to as 'hadi demalu', filthy Tamils ... [All this laid bare] the dark underside of Buddhism without the mitigating humanism of the Buddhist conscience. ... [M]onks are equally vulnerable. Many condone violence against Tamils and some would openly say that the solution to the ethnic problem is to kill Tamils.
(Quoted in Rajmohan Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation).

The result of feelings like these, stoked for years? The world's most vicious civil war, with no end in sight. So much for all that the Buddha taught the world. Tolerance included.

And of course, we've heard it said more times than we can count that Hinduism is a "very tolerant" religion. Must be one reason why caste depravity is a hardy survivor in every corner of the country, even in these dotcomming times. It's being "tolerated", no doubt. And the same tolerance, I suppose, must account for the statements of men like the VHP's Ashok Singhal. Last year, he told Outlook magazine that Christians and Muslims are "like the fox, a symbol of cunning" (yes, paint those guys from the other faiths as sly beasts), and what's more, they have "extra-territorial loyalties" (yes, call them traitors too, why not?).

The agnostic like me looks at all this and says: well, what do you expect? This is only what religions do. This is what they have to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

In his thoughtful My German Question, the historian Peter Gay writes about growing up as a Jew in Nazi Berlin. But Jewishness sits so lightly on his family that they are more properly agnostic. In one passage, he describes an incident with a rabbi and says:

My father saw [the incident] as just one more proof of the incurable hypocrisy and unmitigated absurdity of all religion. The triumphs of form over substance and greed over reverence were my father's abiding themes when sacred matters came up. In spite of all protestations, he said, religion, every religion, failed to make people less cruel or more moral. Quite the contrary, it provided alibis for egotism, bigotry, hypocrisy and the release of aggressive impulses.

And we know all about the tidal wave of bigotry that engulfed Germany soon after.

Yes, give me agnosticism any day. Maybe nobody notices us, but at least we would have to manufacture bigotry on our own if we wanted it. Not have it handed to us on a platter by our very own faith.

Tailpiece:

A couple of notes in response to my friendly fellow-columnist Varsha Bhosle:

1. I saw Fiza too, some days ago. Could have been tighter, shorter, less frivolous, better acted all around. But be that as it may, Varsha B asks in her review of the film: "Why was the Hindu politician so obviously inferior to the dignified Muslim one?"

The question is a strange one. The Muslim politician is certainly a calmer, smoother man than the Hindu one. But only in that slick, glib, smarmy politician way. The kind of fellow whom, after meeting him, you want to run home and wash your hair and hands and mouth out. With industrial-grade detergent. That's superior? To me, both figures were equally repulsive.

2. This article was to be about Chenchu, the teenager sentenced in the Staines trial, but I find Varsha B has beaten me to it. (I know nobody's going to believe me, but that's the truth). So I scrapped that and brought forward what I was planning to write about next week.

Whatever his crime, it disgraces us that this boy has been handed this enormous sentence. Activists I know -- and they have been discussing it -- are sure the sentence will be toned down on appeal. In particular, there is no way the judge's order that Chenchu be incarcerated in an ordinary jail will be allowed to stand: the laws about juvenile offenders are clear.

"Our courts dispense injustice, not justice", someone commented to me about Chenchu's sentence. True, because I cannot agree that a 13 year old -- which means he was closer to 11 when the crime happened -- must be punished in this fashion. Yes, however horrifying his crime.

Dilip D'Souza