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Life, the whole of it, is the epitome of uncertainty. The direct repercussion of uncertainty is fear. Fear is the hallmark of the human condition, its distinctive peculiarity. An unavoidable part of being human. Fear itself is of various levels, of differing hierarchies. Basic survival ones to complex ones of an unfulfilled life, and then many in between; a whole spectrum. Fear of survival, of rejection, of failing. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of loving too much, fear of loss. Fear of remaining unloved, fear of speaking the truth in the face of authority. Fear of death, fear of hell. Fear of life itself.
All of us seek a system of thought, a philosophy, to make sense of this uncertainty in our lives. A model; some basic assumptions, some rules. We try to test all our ideas, our conceptions in the framework of this theory. We acid wash our experiences in this model to come up with a more robust logic, a dependable one. A manual of kinds, our personal rule book. All of us do this, irrespective of our backgrounds. Irrespective of our cultures, education, intelligence, inclinations or our professions.
Calling out religion for its inanities is an easy thing to do, but evoking one’s compassion enough to find out the motivations for adopting religion is not. Unwittingly, or not, fear is the foundational impetus, the primary motivation for adopting religion as a philosophy of life. This is not to say that religion in itself has absolutely no merit. It could. However, in its current form, as a tool for preying on weaknesses and fears of the existential kind, it is far from benevolent.
Fear has become the weapon for evangelism, and the motivation for belief itself.
Such evangelism must be as ungodly as anything can ever be. God will come to you through these brokers, gatekeepers who must be oiled, these officious consultants. Do this else God will punish you, don’t do this for God will punish you. Keep your balance sheet clean for judgement day. Lead a pious life here for a fabulous afterlife. Manipulating fears of the intrinsic unpredictability of life and of its other unexplained aspects has become the foundation of modern religion. There is mortal repercussion for apostasy, and societal rejection for non-conformity. Fear as a weapon takes the ugly forms of blasphemy laws, fatwas, terror attacks, honour killings, the inquisition, and many more such.
It seems the keepers of religions are either deluded from fear themselves and pass them on in ignorance, or else, they misappropriate power not due to them by building fear among others. To preserve the sanctity of an important body of knowledge is one thing, but to presume power by making it exclusive is another.
Dr. William Lane Craig must be the world’s foremost Christian apologist today. Not only does he argue for God with considerable philosophical acuity, he argues for Christ as the only true God with unshakable conviction. To his merit, he debates with tremendous depth of knowledge, both of the Christian scriptures and the atheist’s atomic bomb of weapons; Science.
He unequivocally declares we are all sinners in the eye of God, and must therefore hope for nothing more than what he gives us in life. We should be obliged that he has decided to love us, and in his infinite compassion promised to save us from our sin-riddled destinies. Dr. Craig might sincerely believe that we deserve nothing from God but his rightful condemnation. He quotes from the opening chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans –
All men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written:
‘None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands, no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong;
no one does good, not even one’. (Ecclesiastes 7.20; Psalm 14.2-3).
We all therefore find ourselves under God’s condemnation and wrath.
According to Dr Craig, Christ died on the cross to atone for our sins, and as different theories of atonement suggest, there was a debt to be paid. Debt owed either to the devil which Christ paid in order to free us from Satan’s hostage, or an infinite, unpayable debt to God.
The Hindu conception of karma as understood by the commoner is equally fatalistic, a languid excuse for powerlessness. “It is my karma – I must have sinned in a past birth, so I am suffering”. This self- pitying flap is a rage among Hindus who make a beeline for astrologers and priests to deliver them, through some ritual or mollifying worship. Yes, they think that the angry ‘God’ must be mollycoddled, cajoled by such a peace offering. Their powerlessness will turn to empowerment by this greasy placating!
Don’t you see a slave- master, commoner-king structure at play across all religions?
Debt, sin, atonement. The vocabulary of fear, the language of foreboding and despair.
Even if one were to concede that God’s greatness is such that it evokes respect and awe, this vocabulary of fear and despair is so negative. Does this negative impetus for falling in line, behaving and adhering feel kind? Do humans in general respond best to fear of repercussions in order to comply with rules? Really? Have not all of us experienced self- discipline and structure as positive, and vitally supportive for a goal we wanted to achieve? Did we not revel in the discipline, enjoy the rules, even as we pushed ourselves harder to reach worthy, gratifying goals? The discipline arose from us intuitively, nobody was on our backs with the stick of punishment for falling out of line. Remember?
My question is why does it have to be a punishing God? Is god the gaoler of the prison where we sinners have been imprisoned?
On being questioned about the gory descriptions of genocide and racial cleansing in the Bible, prompted by a wrathful God, Dr Craig replies with a straightforward, prosaic conviction, “You ask, where was His mercy, where did God show His forgiveness and kindness and love as an eternally higher moral being? The answer is that in even allowing the people to exist at all, God was showing His forgiveness and kindness and love. Those people had no more claim than we do to even another breath of life in the presence of a holy God. They deserved nothing but His wrath, but He graciously called them out to be His people“.
So, if I do not believe in a religious God I am condemned. He is an omnipotent being on whose whimsical turns of discretion, my wellbeing hangs. Pleasing, adhering and propitiating could gain me favours. Then I could be safe, for sometime at least. That’s relieving! Without exaggeration, this is the sentiment with which all of us have attended religious functions and taken part in rituals. They re-instill our sense of righteous goodness, of safe piousness. If we are slipping up on our weekly fasts, on our periodic ceremonies, we worry, our sense of righteous goodness slips, our sense of piousness begins to evaporate. The more ‘Godly’ among us are those who observe most holy days, and most strictly. God must be watching them in pleased satisfaction and making notes of their goodness! No exaggeration. This is how most believers think about their religious duties, and duties have become limited to just that. It is just about pleasing a fastidious God, who has rules about how to propitiate and glorify him, and the ones who do it best are most likely to gain favours with him.
So you see, God’s role in religion is malignant, a far cry from any loving benevolence one would expect from him. The conception of loving this God is akin to being grudgingly ambivalent towards a powerful dictator who must not be crossed with. One half humbly awe- inspired by his powers over your life, and the other half, angry and afraid of this control. Given half a chance, and enough power, most of us would not mind toppling him from his seemingly ill-assumed throne.
No wonder then that science is belligerently poised, apparently, on its way to do that. Science condescends all who seek refuge under the wily old tree of religion, calling them irrational. Science will promptly do away with all uncertainties and shine the light of truth on the world. However, what about matters of the existential kind? The fears, the uncertainties that haunt us all, the aches and pains that gnaw us from inside out. Those?
They are tangential, ancillary, incidental.
Are they?
If they had been, a paradigm as inane as religion would not have survived amidst the phenomenal progress of rationality and logic. Religion has a stronghold over the masses yet, not because only the irrational and uneducated are believers, but because science trivializes, and does not provide answers to many fundamental questions about life.
Questions which will not vanish by trivializing and marginalizing.
Could we have a framework, other than religion, which could satisfy our existential cravings, which could not only soothe but help us transcend our existential fears, which could alter our relationship with the sinister uncertainty of life?
Yes, there could be.
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