God, Us and the Fear Factor

We all belive in God or do not. We all sometime believed in God and now do not. We all sometime did not believe in God and now do. As a matter of fact, God has been as strange as life itself. Some years ago when I was, I guess, in sixth grade or something, I had gone to visit my brother in Patna. It was this time of the year, I remember. My brother had called me to see (he called it 'enjoy')the madness attached with Chhat Puja. The madness of the faithful. I was quite an atheist then. I still am but not to the extent of being sacrilegious (you migh see me visiting temples, churches, gurudwaras, mosques with friends, even kneeling down as if in a prayer, but 'god' knows how sincere I am). Though, I have no problems with others believing in it. That's their problem. Anyway, while I was in Patna, my brother had a friend called Vijay Thakur. He was quite intelligent, atleast people there thought so. He was preparing for civils. For Biharis it's a national hobby, if you want to know. He was known to be some sort of palmist, at least they believed so. In our society anyone who holds a palm and looks at it carefully with a pensive expression is believed to be a palmist. Anyway, I did not quite beieve in it and asked him, "How do you think it is possible to tell someone's future, present or past by looking at obscure lines on the palm. And what is more surprising is that people believe in it." He smiled and answered, "You don't believe in it, because you belive in yourself. The day your endeavours start failing to produce desired results and success eludes despite best efforts you might start believing in what you do not believe now." I didn't quite agree but I had nothing to argue against so accepted what he said. I still don't belive in palmistry. Not that all my efforts have been yeilding good results and I haven't seen failure. But I believe that he had some grain of truth in what he said. He had appeared for the civils twice and failed to clear. He turned a believer.

Here I am reproducing an article by Hans editor Rajendra Yadav for the sheer power of it. Published in Tehelka, the article traces the existence of God in our fears:

Violence, crime and religion have united in concerted synthesis in contemporary India, and it is not only an urban phenomenon, nor is it an assembly of stray, unconnected incidents. There is an essential unity in these patterns, as it is between god, the market and feudalism. I think a society which lacks a lakshya, an aim, when you don’t think of the future, when future is taken away, people turn desperately towards dharma. Indeed, the person who can laugh wholeheartedly, and when that laughter arrives from the deepest interiors of the soul, that person has no fear of God, nor does he need religion.

This is because God and religion are products of fear; the fear of the present, the fear of the future, the fear of utopia. When a society refuses to fight this fear with a thinking worldview, that is the point when it blindly holds on to the crutches of religion. This is an ideal occasion for the suspension of disbelief and intelligence, for the reassertion of blind faith and superstition. That is why moksha has been sold as liberation, but there is nothing like moksha, it’s fake, it’s a self-conscious farce society inflicts upon itself to escape critical thinking.

Religion pretends to be a thought system, but it is not a thought system. It is blind faith in its pure form, because there is no thought. Superstition is absolute truth, it needs no argument or evidence to prove itself; it is there by the sheer virtue of it claiming to be absolute truth.

How come God allows everything? Rampant anti-social activities, murders, mass murders, rapes, gang rapes, dacoity, cheating, adulteration in medicines, food, essential goods, mass corruption. Everything is condoned by God. Why? The irony is that the man who does all this, is also a firm believer in religion — both the murderer and the victim believe in God. And no one is willing to understand this amazingly transparent contradiction!

There has been a sharp divide between the affluent and deprived classes in India in the last 20 years. That is why all these vulgar celebrations during festivals, with the rich celebrating public exhibitionism of wealth and hedonism, runs like parallel social crimes. These religious outbursts are a kind of fundamentalism of the affluent, and it transcends this or that religion. The rich go through elaborate fasts for spiritual satisfaction but this, as we know, is often hypocritical because they are eating all the time: fruits and milk, if not rice and roti. Besides, they exclude the majority’s experience of pain and accept no social responsibility. They have no concept of the social, in terms of work or ethic or thinking.

In any case, the idea of suffering among the vast majority of poor Indians has been camouflaged by religion. They are told that if you torture your body, you will elevate your soul: this is taught in Christianity, Jainism, Hinduism. It beats me why the communist parties have left the poor in this fake consciousness so that they can enter the fold of the fundamentalists, including the vhp and bjp.

The only thing positive in this new phenomenon is the movement, it can be Chhatt festival, Vaishno Devi yatra or the Kawarias’ long journey. This defies the entrenched logic of sadhus as mafias who refuse to move from one place, who capture land and build temples and become mathadish of all they survey. Contrast this with the activity and movement of the labourers, as they now leave for Bihar to celebrate Chhatt, in thousands. This is also the way they move in search for work. Why don’t the communists reinvent this movement to usher in the struggle for social change? Why can’t they be politically educated in a liberating political philosophy?

The truth is we can’t escape religion in India. We will have to negotiate our way through religious cobwebs. We are in the midst of a mass deception in which both market and God become a deadly synthesis, so that people are in a daze and there is no critical inquiry, no questions, no rebellion, no demand for justice. The seduction of God is also the organised depoliticisation of our society, both urban and rural, where the rich become role models of vulgar exhibitionism and compel the poor to join this farce.

We should remember that Swami Sahajanand and Baba Ramchandra used religion and folk narratives to mobilise the people in the Hindi heartland. Baba Ramchandra used verses from the Ramayana to spread the spirit of rationality and struggle in the 1930s. This is the radical way to break out of this fake godliness of the consumer society where every individual is reduced into a mindless consumer, where women, as in the TV serials, are cajoled to celebrate their own slavery. Why else is this commercial boom now linked to karva chauth?

It’s time to reject the shopkeepers of moksha. It’s time to destroy the violence, crime and religion nexus. It’s time to look back in anger at the bitter realism of India, the India of starvation deaths, and redefine our gaze at the future. Without the fear of fear, or the fear of god.