Religion a tricky minefield
ONE OF the most perplexing challenges for me, as a parent, was religion and I secretly envied other parents who schooled their children in their religions from a young age.
They must have been convinced that the way they found and practised was right for them and their children.
My parents hardly discussed religion with us as we were growing up and pretty much allowed us to follow whatever religion we chose.
They didn’t mind either if we chose no religion. I suppose the freedom allowed me to take my time to weigh up my options.
It was not unusual for me to join my Christian friends and sit through a Sunday service without thinking that I was being unfaithful to my parents or whatever gods they chose for themselves.
My parents prayed and fasted every Friday. My mother would clean the lamp, arrange fruit on a tray and place it in front of pictures and sculptures of Saraswati and Krishna.
Saraswati, as many know, is the goddess of knowledge, music, arts and nature. I could understand why my parents would have chosen her but I’m not sure why they chose Krishna. I was, and still am, intrigued by Krishna and the many stories that describe a somewhat mischievous child, a naughty young adult, a passionate and faithful lover, a fearless and wise soldier and a loving God.
It’s not that I didn’t want to know more about my parents’ religion but it was difficult to get a straight answer to my questions. I did ask my mother why we prayed on a Friday and she told me something to the effect that my sister had swallowed a curtain hook and was choking.
My mother then lit the lamp and told God that if he or she didn’t save her child then she would not believe in them anymore. I think she also told God that she would rather pray to the doctors because they would save her child. My sister coughed up the curtain hook and, because it was a Friday, my mother started her own tradition.
A few years later, I plucked up the courage to ask a priest a few questions. I mean, if anyone would know the answers, it should be a priest. I had no idea what he said because he spoke in a thick Indian accent and his head swayed as he spoke. He wasn’t even from India.
Over the years, I have been grappling with questions about life, death and God. I suppose it might be easier to just “believe” but my sceptical nature always prevents me from believing before thinking. I suppose I can blame my parents for that because they introduced me to Goddess Saraswati. After all, I couldn’t believe in the goddess of knowledge, arts and nature by being ignorant.
Neither, for that matter, could I believe in Lord Shiva and be ignorant because the famous sculpture of Shiva Nataraja shows him doing the cosmic dance and even he is trampling the malevolent dwarf, Apasmara, who symbolises darkness and ignorance.
It seemed clear to me that I didn’t know enough about my parents’ religion to be confident enough to introduce it to my children and force them to follow it.
I didn’t want to be the parent who, when my children asked me questions, scolded them because I didn’t have the answers. All too often I have come across parents who force their children to fast but cannot provide a reason why they have to fast except to scold them and ask them not to question their authority.
To top it all off, some parents tell their children to light the lamp and pray to Goddess Saraswati before they write an exam.
The more I find out about religion, the more I am afraid. To be clear, I am not talking about the belief in God but the institutions that proclaim that they are God’s representatives on Earth.
My belief in God is personal and difficult to explain. I don’t need the institution of religion to help me with my relationship with God. Neither am I going to fight with anyone who believes differently nor would I expect them to fight with me.
But, as comedian George Carlin once quipped: “More people are killed in the name of God than for any other reason.”
The claim might be funny but it is not necessarily true because wars are sometimes fought for other reasons such as greed and nationalism. Still, religious wars accounted for many deaths.
The crusades, for example, is estimated to have caused between a million and three million deaths alone. I wonder how those parents felt sending their sons to war over a difference in belief systems.
Religion, unfortunately, has become an industry and a business in its own right.
According to The Richest. com, the richest religions in the world are the Roman Catholic Church (a value estimated in trillions of dollars, and, Islam (estimated to be worth $1.6 trillion).
The US religious industry is valued at $104 trillion (R25 trillion) annually. Researchers at Georgetown University put the religious industry in the US in 2015 to be worth $1.2 trillion which, as they point out, is more than the combined revenue of the top 10 technology companies combined.
Yes, religion is a richer industry than the revenue of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon combined.
God has become expensive and rich. I wonder what God does with all that money. Perhaps God gives it to those who pray for it? Well, the National Catholic Reporter says the Catholic Church in the US alone paid out about $4 billion to settle sexual abuse claims from 1950 to 2015.
To top it all, I read that the Gupta family are reportedly building a R200 million temple in honour of their father in Saharanpur, India. Of course, they are not the first people to build temples and somehow include themselves among the gods; the famous Second River Temple in Cato Manor has sculptures of the donors among the sculptures of the deities across the dome.
Perhaps my parents were wise not to force me into any religion and I’m happy to worship knowledge, the arts and nature.