How can you differentiate faith from superstition? In a way, aren’t all beliefs, including the faith in god, superstitions? It is not possible to differentiate between faith and superstition and hence enable lawful action on the latter by the government. The populace can be asked to use their reason and intelligence. The society and the organizations in it can try hard to spread that message. That is it.
But this does not mean that governments have not tried to do it. Long ago kings would announce that only their faiths to be true and would attack everything else denouncing them as superstitions. In the middle ages, the Catholic Church cruelly hunted down all faiths and practices that existed before them. The Communist party in the Soviet Union, in the same way, hunted down and made inquisitions against the beliefs that existed before them. If one analyzes these persecutions a bit deeper, one understands that none of these were really for rooting out superstitions. In fact, they were meant to replace old superstitions with new ones. All governments which are made conforming to religious faiths and ideological purity will have their own unquestionable belief systems and practices. Also their own anointed saints and undefendable villains.
That is why it is not advisable that governments should take over the belief-superstition debates. Though a lot of governments across the world do identify themselves with particular beliefs, enlightened modern administrations do not attempt to do this.
Reason tells us that astrology, sorcery and giving offerings in places of worship are superstitions. But you cannot bring a law that man should only go to a place of worship and pray and should not give offerings. Whether to believe in astrology or to give offerings, whether to accept faith healing or prayer healing, whether to go for a pilgrimage are all personal choices. Someone with a rational temperament realizes that the people who do these are getting cheated; even some among the believers know that.
But in a democratic system, one has the right to get cheated.
If you exclude the freedom to say whether they have been cheated once in five years, isn’t democracy itself a system in which people recognize that they are cheated continually but still continue to believe in?
It is when beliefs/superstitions supersede an individual’s right to choose and badly affects the society and others in it that law and government have a role to play. Even today we read about people who give children, sometimes their own children as offerings to goddess Kali. We now have laws to arrest them and charge them for murder. But when similar deeds are done in an idealized pretext of religious beliefs, the civil society and the governing system withdraws, not knowing how to deal with it.
There are gods which ask for the blood of some other children from their children. And not just among the ‘heathen’ gods, but among the ‘true’ monotheistic gods too. When one worships a god which asks a father for his son’s life, when one idolizes the father who does that and then celebrates that old story by taking the lives of lakhs of animals, what type of beliefs does that cause to form in someone who sees this happening from childhood. Is that mind then not a place where someone else who says that innocents are to be killed by god’s orders can sow his seeds?
Not even half of the states in India have banned animal offerings. Among these, the state of Bengal, where Communists have been ruling for thirty years is not there. But the state of Kerala is there in the list though that was due to not due to any enlightened government but due to an old king. During Deepavali, celebrated as a festival of lights, the terrible blood laden sights at the Kali temples of Bengal will shock any civilized mind: the cry of the animals which are dragged on in lines and a goddess which drinks the blood of some of her children. When a philosophy which imagines man living in harmony with the whole of the nature around him exists just a shout away, a pragmatic society does not give the dignity it deserves to an animal .
There have been occasions when governments did get involved when beliefs became outrages on humanity itself. Human offerings, infanticide and sati were all banned by the governments of that time. Though most governments have hesitated to protect Women’s rights against religious beliefs.
When the issue is exploiting superstition for financial gain, the government’s role is more clear. Though no less complex and nuanced. That is because fake sannyasis and spiritual commerce did not start yesterday but have a long history. And it did not just happen on a private level. Chanakya’s Arthashastra describes kings who filled coffers by cheating their citizens using fake sannyasis and making places of worship. To instill belief in non-believers, a prisoner, enticed with a reduced sentence, would be asked to denounce the ‘true faith’ of the kingdom. Then he would be killed later by snakes set on their paths by spies of the king. Thus non-believers are also forced to believe in idols. The Karl Rove of his time, Chanakya wrote these in the section dealing with the methods that a king can use to increase revenue.
This is valid for today’s governments too. Many Modern governments encourage religious pilgrimages, aiming to generate revenue. Big Newspapers and ‘revolutionary’ media channels give horoscopes. Many who write horoscopes in newspapers are not even astrologers. They are desk operators who, like the machines which create new Sudoku puzzles, move around the already set results every week. What to say then of the private spiritual businessmen like astrologers and sorcerers. They too just get paid for the work that they do.
Acquiring wealth in itself is of course not legally wrong. Even when it is done by an astrologer, a sorcerer or any other small scale spiritual businessmen to any guru who heads a large organization. The issue is using illegal methods for acquiring wealth. Different departments of the government like Income Tax and Revenue have got both the power and ability to examine whether wealth has been acquired by illegal means. How transparent these so called religious organizations are in their financial dealings though is not known. If they are not, to make them transparent is the job of these government departments.
The illegal and criminal activities which are done under the cover of spirituality are surely deplorable. But these don’t just happen in the name of spirituality. They happen behind the covers of business, politics and even without any cover. Whatever the pretense or the cover, the law should see crime as crime. And enough laws do exist in the country to deal with such crimes. What is needed is that the government officials whose responsibility it is to deal with these infringements of the law, do so disregarding any cover. It is the job of their bosses, the people who are elected by the people, to ensure that these people work in that way.
But what if the elected representatives themselves work under cover? When they are criminals and murderers? The business of spirituality is deplorable. But still more deplorable is the business of politics. Fake sannyasis cheat only those who go to them and those who they manage to entice. The democracy businessmen suck blood from the whole populace.
(2008 June – Mathrubhumi)
Image courtesy – Jose, Twon, Rivo
