I was just sitting around and contemplating sectarian and religious violence today... This was after i heard news of Benazir Bhutto's death... I know that religious violence and her death are not directly related... But news of her death started me off thinking, albeit tangentially, about disputes between India and Pakistan... And that's when the irony of it all hit me... You see, there is no particular set of beliefs which can rightly be called Hinduism. The word "hindu" originally referred to people settled around the Indus River... a name given us by visiting arab traders... Hinduism then came to include the whole body of pagan beliefs of the people of the Indus Valley civilization... The irony ofcourse is that Pakistan separated from us on the pretext that if they stayed the Hindus would oppress them, however, their main source of water, their lifeline so to speak, is the very River to which the hindus owe their name and, some would argue, their existence as a separate religion.
Now, the reason this is important to me, is because of my interest in the psychology of people. For instance, if ever this post were to be widely read, there would be widespread debate by very ill-informed people on the veracity of my claims... What interests me is this... These people obviously know very little about their own religion, and much lesser about other religions and next to nothing about historical reasons for the flourishing of any religion... And still, they're strongly motivated to protest, to disrupt and generally make a nuisance of themselves at the slightest provocation. Why??? Granted there are some who do it for political power and some who do it for money and some who do it for both... but this still does not account for the ridiculously large number of people protesting this, that or the other on the world's streets and marketplaces everyday... What is it about religion that makes people want to go out of their house and hurl stones and burn things?? It is common for us to blame politicians for inciting the masses, but then we must also acknowledge the abominably low ability of the masses to rationalize their actions... Are we, as a race, that stupid??
This also brings us to the law of large numbers. Will we ever stabilise?? and what would stability, if ever it is reached, mean?? It could mean, for instance, a world consensus is reached on religion and everyone converts to this new world-religion. Or, it could mean that a few major religions become dominant and practitioners vow never to fight each other again and the situtation is frozen at that (unlikely, i know). Alternatively, the mean intelligence of the human race increases and we stop bothering about trivial and irrelevant things like religion... Or, we just kill each other and some other species becomes the dominant life-form on planet earth... Unless ofcourse we're already at the stable state, that being that a certain percentage of the population will continue fighting for exceedingly dumb causes and the remaining section will try, in vain, to leave all this behind.... Scary...
Cheers,
Adi
