Why I am a Hindu - and not a Christian, Muslim or Buddhist

Well I resume my blogging after a long gap and at the very outset I would want to warn my readers (if there are any still left) that the contents of this post are likely to discomfit some, though at no point will they be shrill.
It all started with me picking up a copy of Richard Dawkins' latest book - "The
God Delusion". The book comes straight from Dawkins' heart and touches upon a topic with which he has ruffled a fair number of feathers - the rejection of the idea of God and the attendant fundamentalism that he attributes to the almost innate human need to attribute their trials and tribulations to the supervision and plan of an overarching Grand Creator/Controller. I won't go into a detailed review of the book, but Dawkins is at his vitriolic 'best', spewing venom, contempt and ridicule at the Semitic conception of God - an anthropomorphic, omniscient, omnipotent being, intervening constantly in human affairs. That's the good part. He proceeds to describe Yahweh - the Semitic God of the Jews and by extension the Christians, and his Islamic alter ego - Allah - as tyrannical, homophobic, violent and bigoted. His derives this view from the Stalinesque personality cult that this particular 'God' has built up. He demands subservience, he brooks no dissent and is extremely jealous. There is no Right way apart from His. He is not particularly merciful and is in fact quite capricious - in the words of Marge Simpson - 'He is always smiting this and destroying that and turning people into pillars of salt' - hardly the benign influence on human existence that the clergy make Him out to be. Therein lies the crux of the book, it is a no holds-barred spectacle of Dawkins vs. God - the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and all his foot soldiers of the Church Militant (an ironic nomenclature which would at least prove that the Cosmic Lawgiver - if He exists, has a dry sense of humour). Dawkins spares no holy cows in demolishing firstly the earthly representatives of Yahweh and then takes on the Big Man (woops) Himself. He invokes science and scientists to firstly show how ridiculous the concept of a personal God is and how evolved intelligences have invariably discovered that God the Accountant does not exist. It is a particularly brutal display of reductio ad absurdo. He ridicules the late Pope John Paul mercilessly. After surviving an assassination attempt at the hands of a Turkish anarchist, His Holiness credited our Lady of Fatima for having guided the bullet away from his more vulnerable parts of his body. Dawkins with what I assume would have been a poker face and a mischievous glint in his eyes proceeds to ask why the Good Lady did not feel sufficiently benignly inclined towards the Supreme Earthly Representative of Her Cosmic Overlord to guide the bullet away from him altogether. He also wonders if a few words of thanks to the team of surgeons who operated on him for hours and hours straight did not at least merit an honourable mention alongside the more divine agents that made his survival possible.
All in all, the book till this point resembles a theological Jerry Springer show with accusations and rebuttals flying all around (or to be more fair to Him, only in one direction, He is being denied air time so far). However, the weakest point of this book is the fact that Dawkins himself adopts a fundamentalist posture, coming across as an intellectual anti-theistic terrorist, with a shrill you are either with us or against us rhetoric all through his relentless tirade. He describes theism narrowly - an unquestioning belief in God the Accountant, a God who keeps score of sins and virtues, rewards good deeds and punishes wickedness, demands unflinching loyalty, interferes with human existence, by at times coming down to the realm
of the mortals, or sending his Child/Prophets amongst us, bends laws of the natural world at his
convenience, performs miracles such as guiding bullets away from the bodies of the virtuous. He
reserves his most acerbic barbs for the American Conservative Bible thumping Right Wing with their crude theory of Biblical creation and its more refined though equally facetious cousin -
intelligent design.
Dawkins is pretty impressive all the while he tries to argue for the non-existence of God through his aggressive dismissal of standard theological arguments for the existence of God (how ironic that He has to depend on humans to affirm His existence - how the Mighty have fallen - one wonders why He just doesn't send across a thunderbolt to destroy Dawkins and settle the argument finally - wait, that's because He loves all His children - but then again,
there are devout dying in the Holy Land while Dawkins seems to be doing quite well - but wait He only inflicts suffering on those He truly loves - that's what makes Him truly Glorious, doesn't
it?). However, Dawkins comes across as decidedly absurd when trying to prove the non-existence of God. He refuses to espouses the humility that greater scientific intelligences have demonstrated in trying to judge the existence of a Higher Power. Einstein doesn't help, he did believe in the Deistic conception of a Higher Force responsible for creating the Universe and everything that it encompasses though even he was clear that God the Accountant is highhly improbable. Dawkins riles against all scientists who are more cautious than he is in discounting and ultimately discrediting God. What he fails to appreciate is that science cannot do so precisely because of the principles it espouses, namely, that of proof. Even if the existence of God - in whatever form - is improbable, science cannot categorize it as impossible while remaining internally consistent. Science is not a revealed Truth, it is just a coda of human thoughts about causal relations that explain a majority of human observations and all through its history, it has had to be modified. How can you judge with a set of axioms that are not themselves fixed? Science had long since realized its own limitations and conceded a dignified space to religion to conduct itself.
For it is true that no religion has had to face as much ridicule from its
own adherents as Christianity. The Church in Europe is an emasculated force, surviving as a vassal of rationality and modern thought and that is why it is quick to adopt defensive postures whenever accused of over-reaching itself. No clergyman in Europe will come out into the mainstream to oppose evolution or support the existence of possession by evil spirits. It is no fun to kick an opponent who has acknowledged defeat. It is obvious that the true target of Dawkins' ire is the loony right of America which supports creationism and the Supremacy of God in the worldview of mortals. Dawkins is moved to do this for he views this intransigent blind faith the source of much conflict in the world today, whether it be George Bush's Joan of Arc type visions from God telling him to wage war in Iraq to squads of misguided and not very intelligent young men killing innocent Jewish civilians in the hope of entering paradise to cavort with celestial virgins.
In this manner, Dawkins hopes to lead a counter re-awakening to help people
escape from the clutches of religion. However, his mission is incomplete for it only seeks to take
people away from their current beliefs and not towards a different creed. For him, the opponents are also defined narrowly, the proponents of Yahweh. He respectfully declines an all out war on religion and beliefs, in particular he refuses to draw Buddhism into the debate for he considers it a philosophical system, not a religion. Thus it is evident that his view of religion is limited only to the extent that it seeks to make people subservient to a higher Being and impose rules of behaviour that are to be obeyed unquestioningly. All those who don't subscribe to this 'brain-washing' in his view are 'atheists'.
Which is where I have my objections to Dawkins. Belief, in particular religious
belief can come in varying shades. In my view, it is primarily driven by humility of the human
condition to realize that it does not have all the answers and often not as much control over
itself as it would like. I believe that the origin of religion lies in the desire of humans to feel
reassured that there is some Grand plan that governs there existence and they are not completely responsible for everything that happens to them. Complete freedom is a terrifying prospect to face, which is why mankind is so receptive to governance structures, be they theological or secular (governments and legislatures, kings, overlords).
My own spiritual journey began with exposure to Vedantic
thinking in my 4th year at IIT. It continued in IIMA and then in past year or so with my growing interest in Buddhist thought. Thus I admit that I now do not believe in God the Accountant, I do not believe in divinely distributed material rewards for faith and virtue, no punishment and suffering for evil behaviour and no faith in targeted prayers. I still go to temples but now I never ask the presiding deity there for any thing. I just go there to ask Whosoever holds any kind of reins of the Cosmos to try and give me inner strength and wisdom to tackle problems that arise in my life. I do not ask God to remove my problems, got I realize that is something I have to do myself. God has better things to do with His time.
One of the main reasons I reject Christianity and Islam is their
insistence on intercessionary powers vesting in certain humans - past and present - for stoking
favour with an Omnipotent God. I do not believe that Christ and Mohammed were anything more than wise and enlightened teachers who gave wise counsel to people around them, worked to alleviate the suffering of those around them and gave them hope. I do not believe that either of them were of Divine origin, they were ordinary human beings. I do not believe that Jesus was the son of God nor that he was born through Immaculate Conception, he was born just as all the rest of us are born, of a man and a woman. I refuse to believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Similarly, I refuse to believe that Mohammed was visited by the angel Gabriel (or Jibreel) who made him recite the message of God. I refuse to believe that the Meraj actually happened, Mohammed did not magically fly on Buraq through the skies to reach Jerusalem and then ascend the skies to participate in a gathering of prophets past and present. Most importantly, I refuse to believe that either Islam or Christianity are the 'One true faith'. That pretty much rules me out of ever being a Muslim or a Christian. I admire many of the moral codes that these two great teachers laid down but that's about it, I do not agree with any thing they said or implied about the origin and the functioning of the universe.
I think I made the final break with Christianity when I read about the first
crusade when Pope Urban proclaimed that all rapists, murderers and thieves in Europe would be forgiven their sins if they fought to reclaim the Holy Land for Christ. It made God sound like a petty warlord, unethical enough to break with His own principles for gaining control over earthly land, that too from other human beings who He supposedly created Himself. God as Charles Taylor?
As regards Islam, it is too regimented and regulated a religion and it does not
allow me the dissenting space that I need to think for myself and challenge conventional wisdom. It must have its positives but for me, Islam is simply incompatible with my beliefs. I believe in a
God who exists everywhere, I do not need to bend myself in one particular direction 5 times a day to seek Him.
All that then brought me back to Hinduism and while it does have many of the same
features that I described above, there are some important differences. For one, Hinduism as it is supposed to be practiced, thrives on continuing enquiry and doubt. There is no authority that can prescribe one particular belief or affiliation that needs to be made in order to be a Hindu.
Secondly, the philosophical depth of Hinduism is immense and the concept of Brahman, the all
encompassing yet indescribable consciousness that envelops everything that is and isn't is
identical to my conception of God and I suspect to the Einsteinian one as well. We all arose of it
and perhaps we shall never know what it arose of. The question itself is illogical if we think
about it. How or when does the beginning begin? When I read the hymn of creation, an epiphany happened, I had a moment of blinding clarity, one which reconciled all science and theology for me. It goes something like - "how did the world arise, how did being and non-being come
together..................... only the all knowing knows, or maybe he doesn't". In that one last
line is contained all the wisdom that subsequent centuries of human thought has been unable to
improve. I once had a conversation with a manager of mine, who is very religious about the utility of going to temples. He told me that he feels closer to God when he goes there. I said, I have never felt the presence of God ever but I go to temples to experience and celebrate the noble human sentiment that is represented by the act of going to a temple, the sentiment of humility, self realization and of carrying forward a way of life that has sustained itself and countless others for millennia.
The Hinduism that we associate with everyday life, the one
which has rituals and intercessionary invocations to God is more a collection of diverse cultural
practices, that have enriched the lives of people of this country and are important to celebrate
a remarkable way of life that has survived longer than any other. Yet if one were to read the
Vedas, one would realize that these Gods are far from omnipotent, they are just a few steps of
enlightenment removed from human beings. Lord Rama for all his virtues, was a mortal, he could not fly, walk on water, turn water to wine, had a wife and family and was tormented of his treatment of Sita and spent his final days in remorse over how he treated the woman he loved immensely. If you argue that Rama was an incarnation of a more Supreme God in the mortal realm, the multitude of stories associated with Lord Shiva prove that he had moments of human weakness, his relationship with Parvati was tumultuous, filled with love, estrangement, regret and numerous reconciliations.
All these ultimate Gods were superseded by the reality of the Brahman that not even they
comprehended, they just lived in the reality, manipulating/controlling it to the extent that they
could, just as the humans that worshipped them did to a lesser extent.
So that leaves the question of why I am not a Buddhist. Well no easy
answers to that, true Buddhist thought is quite similar to Advaitic Hindu philosophy. However,
Buddhism as it is practiced widely today is hardly the pristine wisdom that the Buddha himself
propagated. I spent 2 months in Sri Lanka and traveled to numerous Buddhist shrines. The Buddha has been elevated to the status of a God, something that he vehemently argued throughout his life that he was not. He just sought to empower people to eliminate their sufferings through their own actions. However, the people who follow his philosophy decline to do that, they would much rather raise him on a divine pedestal and seek favours from him, something which he conceded he ccould never do. Thus, Buddhism as it is practiced today is merely ritualistic Hinduism with a different deity. As such, I don't think there are many true Buddhists in the world today.
In conclusion, it would seem that more than any religious
text, the innate desire for human beings to seek God and prophets was captured perfectly by the writers of Monty Python and the Life of Brian. Brian finds himself reluctantly accorded the status Messiah by a populace hungry for symbols to believe in. Exasperated, he tells them (much like the Buddha) that he is no Messiah and that they should all think for themselves. The crowd roars in agreement and parrots faithfully - "Yes, we must all think for ourselves. What exactly should we think of Messiah?". At his wits' end Brian tells everyone to 'fuck off' (quite unlike anything the Buddha ever said). The crowd once again agrees rapturously - "Yes let us all fuck off!".
And as for science, I respect science and the scientific method,
but every time some one speaks of the irrationality of religion and the perfect rationalism of
science, I just remember a discussion I had with a professor in IIM Ahmedabad. He was trying to provoke the class into a discussion by saying how arbitrary religion is and why can't anyone show him or prove to him the existence of God. For all my 'atheism', I hate to see God not being able to defend himself. So I said - "Sir, is the concept of infinity scientific"? He answered yes. I asked him "Can you explain to me what infinity is using a real world observable example? If science is so systematic, can you tell me why a-a = 0 for all a but infinity - infinity = infinity?" To his credit he conceded the point I was trying to make and we proceeded to have a very interesting discussion. And that to me is the true purpose of religion, to teach humility. That is all.