Religion brings dignity, creativity to struggle for equality, scholar says

From the Herald of India.

By Professor Ashis Nandy

No one thought that religion would re-emerge from the shadows to occupy centre-stage at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many wrote obituaries of religions as early as in the middle of the 19th century.

Since then, it has been the triumph of one secular ideology after another, though steep decline or ignominious fall has usually followed the triumph. Religion has re-emerged at the end of what could be called an age of ideologies, not in its pristine form but bearing the imprint and, sometimes, even the garb of the age of secular ideologies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, religion is a phoenix that has risen from its own ashes and wears the ashes as a sign of its new triumph.

This may or may not be an enigma. The attempts to banish all mystery and spirituality from life, the increasing poverty of the individualism that envelops lonely crowds in fully developed consuming societies, the steady growth of violence, often gratuitous, the decline in the sanctity of life that finds expression not only in wars, machine violence and torture but also in assaults on the environment and the life-support system of the coming generations, widespread use of the Enlightenment values as justifications for new forms of dominance and despotism -- they all have contributed to the erosion of the easy faith in the age of reason and the unlimited power of human reason.

At the same time, the religious worldview is a worldview after all and like all other worldviews it, too, carries a baggage. After the crusades and holy wars, the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, slavery and colonialism sanctioned by powerful sections of the Christian church, and the more recent rise in religion-based terrorism in the Islamic world and the blatant secular use of religion in South Asian politics -- where Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism have been periodically used to mobilize hatred -- we are left with no alternative but to admit that the world of religion parallels the secular world and can be as much a domain of gratuitous violence, paranoia and sadomasochism.

It is true that one look at R.J. Rummell's data and some rough arithmetical manipulation of them reveal that in the last hundred years fully secular states have killed at least forty-five times as many people as religious violence and fundamentalism have killed. But then, as Charles Long likes to say, "secularism is a hidden religion for which no one has to take any responsibility." It is probably safer to presume that given opportunities, people will kill, rape and plunder in the name of religion as happily as people have done in the name of secular statecraft, nationalism, progress, revolution and development.

Only two things have changed. First, whatever may have happened in the past, the violence that religion now sanctions cannot compete in range and depth with the violence that modern states sanction in the name of secular ideologies.