Comment

An item tucked away inside some newspapers said that the Church of England had apologised to Charles Darwin for misunderstanding his theory of evolution, much as the church had earlier misunderstood Galileo, and so on. Fundamentalist Christians then and now believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution removes ‘God’ from the question of the creation of life as we understand it, and therefore has to be wrong. We shall ignore the fact that the Church of England apologised directly to Darwin himself on its website.
Darwin has been deceased since 1882, so the chances of his reading the apology are somewhat remote. The demands that religion makes on rational thinking are, by contrast, much closer.

For this, we only have to look around us. The current upsurge in terrorism around the world from perpetrators who draw their inspiration from Islam is testament to that. They claim various wrongs have been done to them — no doubt some are definitely true — but the path they choose seems to go against the general understanding of ‘God’ as a concept. The recent terrorist attacks in India, also apparently by ‘Muslim’ terrorists, seem also to have taken place partly in the name of religion and partly in the name of revenge for perceived and real injustices.

Then we have our special variety of Hindutva violence. Terrorism is perhaps the wrong word here, because burning people alive and burning down churches is meant to terrorise, but is not an anonymous act like putting a bomb somewhere and running away in an attempt to create public mayhem and destruction. These are acts of aggression aimed at a particular set of people — usually Muslims and Christians — to show them who’s boss.

But in all of these, the same picture of religious obscurantism stands strong. That is, the basic tenets of the religion (say, Jesus Christ’s plea to turn the other cheek or Hinduism’s strictures on renunciation to gain greater awareness of the divine, or Islam’s message of peace) are usually inconvenient and therefore have to be forsaken. Instead, in the name of religion, and to protect the name of the religion from all possible attackers, any act of violence is justifiable. All around you, you will meet people who come up with some absurd reason why they will not eat this or that or cannot wear this or that and then look all self-righteous and pious and say “It is my faith”.

The minute this word “faith” is used, all arguments are supposed to be off. You cannot question them because you then apparently question the very basis of their being. For instance, Sarah Palin, a candidate for vice-president in the US presidential elections, does not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution because it goes against a literal interpretation of the Bible. So if you say that the theory of evolution applies to Palin, you would be attacking the foundations of her faith. If you said that the theory of evolution does not apply to her, you could as well be accused of questioning her existence itself!

The fact that the experiment going on in Europe at this time got so much airplay on various Indian television news channels was not out of any great scientific interest but because of some fears that the world would come to an end.

This fear was tied up in quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo and every charlatan fake ‘godly’ type made the most of his or her few minutes of television fame. Within hours of the world not coming to an end (surprise, surprise), all focus on the experiment vanished. We had moved on to the next nutcase theory.

This sounds funny, but it isn’t. Because when it is taken too seriously, you get the atrocities against African slaves in United States, where the dangers of ‘miscegenation’ were given Biblical authority, just like the surge of violence in the name of Islam and the constant attacks on religious minorities by the Hindutva brigade in the name of upholding or saving Hinduism. Yet, neither religion nor humankind is saved by this bogus application of the God idea. We may well be better off without it.
Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net