Let's keep the faith..

I think it was 2012 when I finally read Richard Dawkins’s 'The God Delusion', a book that had been gathering dust on my bookshelf for lack of serious reading time (for over a year) that was needed to read such an important (so I had then assumed) piece of work – lest one misses out on the subtleties of a scientist’s dry humor or the audacity of his premise, in trying to skim through in a hurry.

While I had never been a big fan of Dawkins , I thought of him as a brilliant ( in an academic way) man with a no-nonsense pen that very few possess. A deep-seated worshipper of science and reason (though he might object to the word worship, the staunch atheist that he claims he is) and a devoted disciple of the Darwinian school of scientific rationalism, Dawkins has written some pretty okay books. One of my favorites is ?'The magic of reality', a simplified explanation of the universe and almost everything in it (all in a small paperback edition that can be read , understood and enjoyed even by a fifth grade child), right from the origin of species to dinosaurs, rainbows & earthquakes, to explanations on destiny and luck (he even quotes Sangakarra and Dhoni in the last section). I ?recommend that you read this book if you haven’t yet, and also have your kids read it.

Coming to ?'The God Delusion' – a book that has fetched Dawkins a deserved amount of flak from various religious fronts and has also a share of lavish praise from the intellectual community who had gone overboard in hailing it to be a great book, it would be an understatement if I say I was deeply disappointed with it.

Mainly ?because I always believe that intellectuals need to be change agents for the society, unlike publicity-hungry authors or C-grade filmmakers . In today’s hyper-connected world where even ordinary mortals cannot claim to be living in isolation, it becomes very important that men & women of influence be extremely cautious of what they say or write or tweet, because the repercussions thereafter are not going to stay limited to them, but spread through expanding spirals in the larger society & cause irreparable harm to common people. ?When I saw someone like Richard Dawkins write such a provocative book, I got worried because I knew that he really believed in what he was writing and I was ?concerned about the potential harm it could bring to impressionable minds with unformed opinions.

When someone of Dawkins’s stature and arsenal of scientific knowhow embarks upon a merciless mission to decimate ?human faith and God with his venomous pen, it becomes a serious matter. It threatens to rock the whole cart from the core. Somewhere I was thankful that more people in the world have read our religious books than those who have read Dawkins’s book where he systematically attacks the very crux of human faith and dismisses every religion and its associated rituals as some form of a juvenile joke. To be fair to him, Dawkins had put together a well -researched book where he benevolently quoted the gaffes from the world of believers and made a mockery of each of them while he very subtly downplayed and lightened every reference that his school of atheist heroes (from Darwin to Einstein) have ever made and which might be construed as some kind of affiliation to some kind of faith . He minced no words as he strode into sensitive terrain and slaughtered the entire fabric, sparing not even the highest of names . He argued passionately and attempted to distance morality from faith, claiming that morality with roots in faith is actually subject to & dependent on policing, and hence, is pseudo-morality. He kept rattling data about atheists having negligible criminal urges and doggedly battled to establish that the root of all evil in the world is man’s dependence on faith.

While I am not someone with outspoken religious views, I have my personal sense of a spiritual calling like any ordinary human, a calling that gets put to test with time and my circumstances. I am a neutral observer of religion as on display around me and I respect each & every religion for its good aspects and I attribute the associated unrest in our world to the misinterpretation & misrepresentation of religion by man – which I consider to be a failing of man and not of religion itself. I am a student of science and an engineer by vocation. I have a rationalistic bend of mind and generally need the power of reason to satiate my intellectual indulgences.

But once science gives me answers to my questions, I still fail to interpret certain aspects of life and this universe in general, questions which are open-ended in themselves. There I start leaning towards my personal philosophy, which is a by-product of the sigma of my knowledge, my experience, my reading and my social connections. This philosophy accounts for the way I talk, behave and associate with this world and which is then responsible for the image I am known by. But when I head back home to myself at night after my battles of the day, I need to turn to something beyond my science and my philosophy to look at. I need to face and answer the quest of my soul . No matter how much I feed it with science and philosophy, it refuses to bow to anything less than a Higher Force. Yes, for me the larger consciousness might not be a bearded man sitting behind the clouds who has a magic wand in his hands and with which he performs miracles or punishes me, depending on my conduct ( Dawkins’s stereotype for the human interpretation of God), but yes – I know that something exists behind my eyes & the same ‘Something’ permeates through this Universe & lives on forever while forms go through cycles of birth & death. That spirit could be me in my best avatar that I must strive to become in my best life, or that spirit could be a collective ?Universal Consciousness that merges into one and conjures the serendipitious conspiracy of life as it unfolds. Yes, I do have my fall-outs with my personal faith. I sulk, I go for days without being nice to Him (or Her). But I never let go of my rituals, no matter the relationship status between us. The rituals keep me connected, humbled and grounded in discipline. They keep the beast in me chained and defeated. And I have seen that my Faith always comes back to hold me together.

Faith is the most important aspect of human existence. Faith keeps us going when everything else fails. Faith holds the world together and is the prime-mover for billions of people who just surrender themselves to it and keep going on and going right. While it might be fashionable to quote a few fundamentalist individuals and stereotype someone’s religion or faith as a cause for strife – it should not be forgotten that the same faith gives purpose and courage to good people , the same faith keeps billions of people on the right side of their morality and prevents them from getting back to their barbarian instincts. Not everyone has the luxury of high end fancy education. There are millions and millions of people around the world who cannot even afford basic school education. For them, faith is their educational institution and their window to rights and wrongs.

If you take out faith from this world and make a joke of faith, whether your own, or someone else’s, ?the world would be a pretty empty place to live in. We will neither be able to trace a purpose from our origins, nor a calling for our destination.

The whole of humanity is recovering from the worst pandemic of our lifetime. Billions of people have been deprived of basics. Our planet needs us to come together to get itself out of this existential crisis. Each one of us has a role to play in it and how we conduct ourselves now will define the world we will leave back for our future generations.

There is too much collective & pointless hatred out there today that is getting amplified by the lazy & easy buttons of digital super-connectivity. There is a section of people among us who are exploiting the rest us for their short-term & selfish gains because they understand that any publicity, even the cheapest form of publicity, is good for their shop. Let’s not give them this luxury. Let’s refuse to participate in this mindless ‘Us-Vs-Them’ discourse. This is OUR planet. ?You and I need to sort it out and keep it safe & beautiful.

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