Our gods, their gods

If, therefore, the issue is one of personal belief systems of the troika of Ante Nedlko Pavkovic, Katherine Lynn Pavkovic and Christan Renee Sugar or Operation Save America (OSA), an organisation that has taken it upon itself to back them, we need to look at this incident through the windows created by man. It is about social and religious hubris based on the power of numbers. Let us not bring god into the discussion — for a while.

The troika was protesting the chanting of prayers in the US Senate by Rajan Zed, a Nevada-based Hindu priest. “Lord Jesus, forgive us, father, for allowing a prayer of the wicked,” said one. “This is an abomination,” said another. “We shall have no other gods before You,” said a third. The protestors’ limited view was that there is only one true god, Jesus Christ, and everyone else, including and particularly Hindus, were followers of false gods. As they disrupted Zed’s prayers in a largely empty senate, he ended with, “May your spirits be as One; peace, peace, peace”. All priests, chaplains, clerics, ministers, pundits, maulvis, jathedars and rabbis, I suppose, would in their own ways and views finally agree with Zed’s concluding words.

Not OSA. In a July 12 press release Reverend Flip Benham, director, OSA said, “Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them.”

I feel more strongly about what happened in the US Senate than many, but not because I’m an unapologetic Hindu. I was born into the faith; intellectually I subscribe to its hugely challenging layers; spiritually I feel one with the idea of Oneness and dharma. Above all, I respect the space it gives to each and every individual to fashion his life according to ideas he identifies with, even as he seeks out a higher goal, integral and non-contradictory in its marriage of body and soul.

As a student, I also studied the Bible. Even today, I can recite all the books of the New Testament with as much ease as some of the lines from the Gita. I have enjoyed stories of the Old Testament (Cain and Abel, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath) as much as I have the Mahabharata (Krishna and Kansa, Bhima and Duryodhana, Arjuna and Karna). But as a by-product of one man’s quest to experience spiritual heights and depths, institutionalised religion doesn’t measure up and this annoys me. Worse, as it shares those ideas, society develops fixity and the original seeker’s purifying principles turn into putrefying dogmas that grow into fossilised boundaries — if you step out, you get ostracised. Any attempt by individuals, cults, groups or, as in this case, the US Senate, to bring about religious harmony, acceptance, tolerance or even exposure, meets resistance from incumbents of dying ideas. By putting this troika behind bars, America has shown a toughness that needs to be commended and one that India would do well to emulate when self-styled religious leaders run amok.

Misguided souls like this troika and organisations like the OSA need to understand oneness. They need to be able to see the unity despite differences between Deism that believes religion is rational and Fideism that sees reason as an antithesis of faith, Pantheism that sees everything as an all encompassing god and Heresy that’s always in variance with what’s accepted as authoritative. I could go on, but there are 4,200 known and recorded religions. Hinduism with 900 million devotees is still large enough a religion, the third-largest after Christianity’s 2.1 billion believers and Islam’s 1.3 billion adherents. But what about the smaller ones like Tenrikyo (2 million followers) Rastafarianism (800,000), Neopaganism (768,400)? Are majority religions by the power of their numbers and economic clout going to smother these?

This religious one-upmanship is really a prayer to the god of extinction. The real danger for religious extremists like this troika and the OSA is not that their narrow view of religion is going to be crushed by a mantra or a hymn of another religion but that it’s going to be questioned by a greater force that needs peace to survive: the evolution of man into a cosmopolitan being who can appreciate a Hindu mantra as much as a Christian hymn or a Muslim azaan.