Religion won’t let peace prevail

Sumit Paul

Acouple of days ago, my septuagenarian agnostic Muslim friend, Haroon Abbaas, from London mailed me, and seeing the religious unrest in India and across the world, ruefully quoted Jonathan Swift, ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.’ This got me thinking. Instead of making us love one another, religion seems to be teaching us to hate. Derived from the Latin root ‘religare’, that means ‘to bind’, religion is ironically doing just the opposite. In fact, it is making us ‘blind’ rather than ‘bind’. Now, it has become veritable opium of the masses, as Karl Marx famously called it. Pakistani Urdu poet Abdul Hamid Adam put it succinctly, ‘Aaya nahin insaan ko ab tak jeena/Seekha faqat mazhab ke naam pe khoon bahana’ (Humans haven’t yet learnt to live/What they’ve learnt is to shed blood in the name of religion). It is what we’ve been observing for a long time that in the name of religion and an imaginary god, ill-evolved and religiously inebriated humans have been killing each other and spreading bad blood. This is indeed unfortunate, nay condemnable.

Religion has robbed us of our innate reason and we all seem to be behaving like irrational creatures. When the whole world, particularly India, is facing a raft of problems like hunger, ecological imbalance, wars, economic disparity, global warming, unemployment and what not, we’re wasting our time on religion, god and shrines and looking for hidden shrines inside a shrine! This is utter indifference. An IAS topper of this year has tellingly said that the objective of the youth should be employment, not religion. She also said humanity should be the only religion. A hungry man’s religion is bread. This apposite adage speaks of the futility of religion. Whether it was the Partition, Holocaust or Operation Bluestar, the root cause has always been religion. Philosopher Carl Popper rightly said, ‘Humans don’t need religion and god. What they need is the evolution of their mental faculties.’

Alas, this evolution of mental faculty hasn’t yet happened at a collective level. That’s why we’re still sparring over things that have no significance. We must remember that it’s religion that has created all sorts of differences, divisions and discriminations. Yet, we cling to it as if it’s our saviour and dearer than life. If humankind is to survive, we must get rid of the spectre of all man-made faiths and their concocted gods. Until that happens, we shall continue to turn this world into an abattoir, a perpetual slaughterhouse.

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