Faith is A Hypothesis, That’s Why It’s Tested

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Mark Twain

It's the beginning of the pandemic and I land on a 2016 video where the great Indian actor Irrfan Khan is debating with some clerics a few statements that had sparked a little bit of controversy. I am watching this after founding out he had just died. It was public knowledge that he had cancer, had gone for treatment overseas but it was still a surprise to learn of his demise because I was under the impression that he had defeated it. 

In the discussion, the Paan Singh Tomar actor was essentially saying that one should not accept any religion blindly but check which parts make sense, test them and that he didn't need anyone to explain the Koran to him. One of the clerics wouldn't have any of this while two others were not only more supportive of the leading man in Maqbool but appeared fairly mesmerised. And probably regretted that Richard Parker wasn't in the studio. At one point Irrfan quotes a dialogue from Life of Pi, the movie based on Yann Martel's award-winning book. 

I Doubt Therefore I Am

Doubt is indeed very important but not only for testing your religion. It's useful in every field. And it's basically why you mange risk. You're not sure about everything so you hedge to an acceptable level and update your beliefs as time goes by. Through better analysis and new information. Think Bayes' rule. What Irrfan told us is not very different from the conclusion reached by one of his fellow citizens, Mahatma Gandhi, almost 90 years earlier. Namely that we need to understand that faiths are true but have errors. These mistakes could arise for example because specific parts have been designed for a particular time period and are not relevant anymore. Plus we humans have so many imperfections and are prone to interpretation errors.

This is What I Found. 

What Do You Think?

This better way of thinking is itself consistent with what Buddha recommended more than 2,500 years ago after making the most of the substantial tectonic dividend India had been enjoying for eons. Indeed the enlightened one encouraged everyone to carefully examine what he found instead of accepting his statements like parrots. Parrots? I just googled up the IQ of parrots. Looks like they are far more intelligent than several politicians so let me rephrase the last part as "instead of accepting his statements at face value". Face value? Wonder what percentage of people understand these words. Let's make the sentence more accessible and settle for blindly.

Advice Taken

Which is exactly what plenty of his followers have done for centuries. Chief among them were the monks at Nalanda including one Nagarjuna, often considered as a second Buddha. They and those that have come after have analysed his observations for so long that they've come up with all kinds of useful criteria to examine every part of their teachings. Like impressive tools to avoid logical inconsistencies but more importantly to move towards compassion for all sentient beings. In the process they have confirmed parts of the insights received over the previous couple of millennia as true while not being so sure about others. 

25 centuries later and one Dalai Lama often reminds us that he starts his day meditating on two things: emptiness and bodhicitta (awakening to be compassionate). He was also unambiguous as to what Buddhism must do with the parts that were disproved by science.

Not every collider has a big carbon footprint.

More Than Just Errors

You also need to examine how much time you mindlessly spend on religion because across the ages beliefs have been used extensively to distract, subdue and control people and to harbour animosity if not hatred against others who have different viewpoints. These have been unsurprisingly pretty bad and bloody objectives. Add to this the many cases of paedophilia recorded in organised religions and you wonder what purpose these middlemen between you and God serve. Something Kabir had already warned us about more than five centuries ago. 

And then last October we found through the CIASE report that these mental disorders among French clerics is at an entirely more massive scale than we had imagined. It's good that other countries are doing a similar exercise. After all we recently learned that Pope Francis had to implore forgiveness from the First Nations of Canada particularly for the evils perpetrated in the residential school system. So you don't want to spend too much time on religion otherwise you won’t have enough to understand what is happening around you, to your community and country which is far more important.

Dalai Lama is Going 

Somewhere Else

The Dalai Lama liked to tease his buddy Desmond Tutu that they would be going to different places after they died. The Archbishop would be enjoying splendid weather for a very long time while #14 would never get bored. Tutu would typically respond that the unfriendly weather his counterpart would get would not last forever thanks to reincarnation. It is always refreshing to hear gems of people like them talk lightly about religion like that. And now thanks to technology we can hear that directly. We don't have to rely on a friend or move to a place of worship to find out. This gets us faster to the truth as far less misunderstandings are possible. Which explains why organised religions are currently under tremendous pressure. 

Meet Designer Religions

It's clear that after the death of distance we are in the middle of a substantial reduction in human ignorance through self-discovery. There's simply too much codified knowledge for this not to happen. People will keep on combining practices and religions. Zen with Islam. Sufism with Buddhism. With yoga and breathing à la Thich Nhat Hanh and what not. It will not necessarily have to be scripture-based but it will definitely be more fact-based. And this will lead us to practice something more important than religion and that too on a very large scale: kindness. 

The quote of Mahatma Gandhi is from the Abridged version of Jawaharal Nehru's book, The Discovery of India, the quote of the Buddha is from a lecture of the Dalai Lama on his official YouTube channel, the one of the Dalai Lama is from dalailama.com, Jomo Kenyatta's is from the internet, the quote from Desmond Tutu is from bbc.com while the final quote from Irrfan is from the 2016 YouTube video.