Time for pluralism to win over organized religion

Prasenjit Chowdhury, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

Are we turning progressively secular or fundamentally religious?

The death of a Pope is a momentous affair, so is the incarnation of the new Pope. One cannot be very sure if God has forsaken us making us all the more irreligious or vice versa. If we have renounced God to pave the way for things less amorphous than god, say wealth, we have to keep in mind that the language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous.

There are believers and faith-mongers. There are seculars and agnostics. The voice of religion does speak, if one goes by the space provided to religious godheads, their cult and creed. For religion one can renounce society. For some, it's quid pro quo, God giving only to those who render piety unto him. Inquisitions have taken place as crusades and holy wars are wars of religious attrition.

A joke is apocryphally attributed to Woody Allen: "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition".

Not that we get to hear the voice of God or the Gods (based on a monotheistic or polytheistic belief) but godheads matter a lot. They can soothe, heal, issue a death edict and can make angry prognostications.

It's kind of cosmic brand endorsement.

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Conservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, elected to succeed Pope John Paul II to lead the Catholic Church is the 265th leader of the world's most powerful Christian institution with 1.1 billion members. He is widely viewed as a conservative theologian and a hard-line enforcer of Catholic Church doctrine.

In the 1980s, Ratzinger was a fierce opponent of liberation theology. He strongly opposes abortion, an increased role of women in the church, artificial birth control and homosexuality.

In 2003, Ratzinger's office issued instructions to Catholic politicians to vote against gay marriage. Ratzinger was instrumental in efforts by the Church to block moves by the United Nations for birth control, and as a result, the growth of AIDS, in Africa for instance, where there was not adequate birth control information.

The most vital allegation against him is that Ratzinger has been one who has insisted inside the Church that it is not acceptable to see other religious communities as equally valid ways of approaching God.

Can you consider some of the freak cases of religion, persons like Osama bin Laden. Or Rasputin who at the age of 18 underwent a religious transformation of sorts?

He decided that it was God's will that he should study religion. Some time around 1905, Rasputin found himself on the streets of St Petersburg with a reputation as a "Holy Man".

Rasputin stated that in his kind of religion one had to immerse one self into sin so that one could find forgiveness.

Rasputin's talent for acting got him the job. It did not take long before the religion of Rasputin was the fashion statement in St. Petersburg. There were those though who took a different view of Rasputin. They saw him for what he was. And when Saddam Hussein was caught, there were signs that he might have found religion while on the run.

Personal religion can be warped if people take Saddam, Osama or Rasputin as their role models.

But fortunately enough, no civilized person uses the scripture as the ultimate authority for moral reasoning, choosing, instead, the nice bits (like the Sermon on the Mount) and blithely ignoring the nasty bits (like the obligation to stone adulteresses).

Evidently, we have some alternative source of ultimate moral conviction that overrides the scripture when it suits us.

Take the instance of William Blake. He lived in an age where Deism, a faith which denied any possibility of direct experience with God, had captured the minds of the more intelligent people of the West. We live in an age of doubt.

Certainly Blake's vision of a personal mythology actualizing an individual, revealed religion can offer as much to our society as it did to Blake's. However, whether Blake's offering will save our television-oriented, fast-food, pop-culture society is another matter.

There are people who take to religion, speak on the nobleness embedded in each faith. There are practitioners in whose hands religion becomes a dogma, who spread rumors and heresies pitting men against men or unleashing riots. And there are people who bring spiritual excellence out of human abyss, out of the daily grind of wakeful sin.

Fortunately, as is recorded in 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended thirty years of war and a century of strife, and Pope Innocent X objected to it, Europe paid little attention to his outburst. Political problems, it was apparent, could now be settled without reference to the opinions of ecclesiastics and theologians.

Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is thought to be giving a "lie" to Christianity. Salman Rushdie was "anathema" to Islam; a particular Indian film is "derogatory" to Sikh sentiments.

No believer, wrote William Barrett, could possibly write the Divine Comedy today even if he possessed a talent equal to Dante's.

We no longer need an overarching system of values with the authority of a dogma behind it. Let's face it, modern religious world is a supermarket of different ideas. Therefore, it is time pluralism won over the voice from organized religion.

The author is a freelance writer.