WRITERS ON RELIGIOUS THEMES

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WRITERS ON RELIGIOUS THEMES

Whenever I come across a nice  English book on religion, I reflect on the poor situation in India, in Tamil, especially on Hinduism, and feel so sad.

Two types of writers there are: those who are masters of the language, and of the subject.The first type gather all types of information and write well, but they don't help you much. Why is there so much suffering in the world? Why so much pain? Such issues cannot be answered by any amount of learning. It is where the second type of writers emerge better: they know the subject ie they have experienced it. They don't give solutions, but they provide some understanding. 

Then we have two other categories: those who are religious men, belonging to some order like a clergyman, monk, etc,  and those who are lay writers. But in India, none of them write about religious themes in general.

The problem with writers with a religious background is their bias- bigotry. The problem with lay writers is credibility. They may write anything because it sells.

Over the years I  read hundreds of books on religious topics, especially from a Christian angle. Catholic friends recommended  Bishop Fulton Sheen . I found some good essays, but he was mostly dry. You may remember the famous song 'Qe sera sera'  ( whatever will be will be, the future's not ours to see etc) from the movie The Man who Knew Too Much.Bishop Sheen criticised this song and its popularity, as implying fatalism. As a Hindu, I found it understandable and wondered how a westerner could express those sentiments so well! That was the end of my reading Fulton Sheen!

In the 60s there was lot of press coverage for the prediction about the assassination of President Kennedy. An American clairvoyant Jeane Dixon was supposed to have  made the prediction, in 53 0r 55, long before Kennedy's election, and it was covered in a book by Ruth Montgomery. For a time, such books became the craze, though they had nothing to do with true religion but with occult phenomena. But such literature led me to the work of Edgar Cayce who seems to have combined clairvoyance with genuine spirituality. What made his work valuable to me was his insistence on the law of Karma as the basic law of life, and its corollary-rebirth!.  He pointed out many facts about the life of Christ, not covered by the orthodox church. The man was genuine.

Edgar Cayce,1910. Public domain via Wikimedia commons.

Personally, Cayce was a pious Christian, read Bible daily. He never profited from his mystical gifts. He cured thousands by prescribing unconventional solutions. The ideas he expressed in his "readings" did not please the Christians. He said his statements in the readings should be examined and not accepted on faith.  He also said that their final result should lead the recipient to a better life. What shocked the mainly Christian audience was that though he was a practising Christian, his readings revealed the truth of all the ancient religions of the world which Christianity had destroyed! There are nice books on him by Gina Cerminara , Jess Stearn and Thomas Sugrue..

He gave over 13,000 "life readings" for individuals which are still available for research.

Among Christian writers , we have many evangelists who will just promise everything on earth, if only you believe in Christ and have the positive attitude. Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller, Billy Graham are the leading names and their writing is powerful! But over the years, they fall flat.

Christ was a strict teacher. He did not say, "just believe me, take my name, and I will get you everything." He said his Kingdom was not of this earth, and that those who wanted to follow him should sell their possessions, distribute the money among the poor, take up the cross and follow him. They were not to worry about the morrow-what they would eat, what they would wear, etc. Such a world-renouncing religion cannot have a large following. So, organised Christianity changed the teaching. 

The biggest problem faced by Christianity is how to reconcile the pain in the world with a Just or Merciful God. For long things were taken on faith, people believed in a natural and social hierarchy, and things worked. But once people began to question faith and sought to make reason the basis of life, things broke down, leading to denial of religious validity. It became the high cult of the 20th century and organised Christianity could not face the assault. 

G.K.Chesterton.


Just then, two great English writers appeared on the scene and infused faith in the basics of Christianity. They were not clergymen and had themselves been non-believers at some stage. Their writing carried conviction. They are G.K.Chesterton and C.S.Lewis.

Even today, nearly a hundred years after the one and seventy  years after the other, their writing commands readership, though they are not backed by any official agency. Such is the power of genuine writing.

                          C.S.Lewis.
Both photos from National Portraits Gallery, London.

One does not become religious by being born in a religion, or becoming member of a church. One must have an authentic experience, face a moment of Truth or revelation ( not a miracle)which leads to a permanent change in consciousness. This is called 'conversion'- not mere change of faith. I had once met Dom Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine Monk, in Nagpur. I asked him how he became a convinced Christian, how he became a monk. He told me that he was a non-believer after his university days and felt very distressed.Once he decided to spend some time with another friend, cut off from the society. Once there, one day, he distinctly heard the word "retreat" repeated. He did not know about it then. Later, when he came out, he made enquiries and found that 'retreat' was a very technical term of Catholic usage, it meant retiring to solitude for concentrated meditation and contemplation. He became a Catholic and monk later. Later I found it related in his autobiography "The Golden String".Genuine religion is not glib talk.

Fr. Bede Griffiths.
From You Tube.
Copyright status not known. Acknowledged with thanks.





(Care: later, he adopted many prctices such as living like a Hindu monk, calling his place an ashram, using Sanskrit words in Christian worship, experiment with yoga and calling it 'Christian yoga', inter-religious dialogue, etc. I doubt the genuineness of such measures and their motives.)

Genuine religion or spirituality is not about dogmas or theories. It is a sense of wonder or bewilderment about the world we live in. Science is supposed to have advanced so much, but no good scientist claims to know everything! Take the astrophysicists who are investigating the universe. They are careful to say "the observable universe". They are aware that the great universe is beyond our capacity to observe or comprehend fully. The nearest star that we see is 4.3 light years away. Work out the distance yourself, with light travelling at 1,86,000 miles per second!We are seeing it as it was 3.5 years ago, not as it is now!At a constant velocity of 60,000 km/hr, it will take 76,000 years to travel that distance!  And how many billions of stars and galaxies like that! It is such awe that is the foundation of the religious feeling-as Einstein said. But most scientists are just of the tin horn stuff.

A picture of the "observable Universe" - its diameter is 93 billion light years.
By Azcolvin429 (Own Work) CC BY-SA-3.0 (http:://creative commons.org/licences /BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

However good a writer my be, he is only as good as his subject. Any philosophy or theology can be justified up to a point- that is why so many views flourish. But they fall in the end if the truth cannot be experienced.

 Christianity teaches man that he is a sinner, that his only salvation lies through Christ, who is the only son of God. Thus from the beginning it robs man of his self-worth and makes him dependent on the priest, the church, the dogma! This is actually a kind of neurosis! And look at the foolishness ! It condemns the whole of the human race, except a few, in some corner, in the last two thousand years! How even able writers like a Lewis or Chesterton could rescue a sick religion? Christianity like Islam is so aggressive because it is so sick and hollow at bottom. Do we not see how mad men go about disturbing the world? This is what Christianity and Islam have done ever since they were founded.The history of the world in the last two thousand years is essentially the story of how the Christians, and then the Muslims and then the two together fought among themselves, fought each other and then fought every one else in the world in the name of God! And this they call Western civilisation! Surely, wars were fought in the past, but no one deliberately destroyed whole civilisations, millions of people, in the various continents , like the Christians and Muslims did. This destructive spree is still on show!

A 16th century engraving of Spanish massacre in Cuba

A mass grave being dug for the 150 peaceful Lakota Indians killed by the US Army in 1890, at Wounded Knee.

Earlier, Col John Milton Chivington ot the US Army deliberately killed Indians of  other tribes, over two thirds of them being women and children, and he said: 

Damn any man who sympathises with Indians...I have come to kill Indians and believe it is right and honourable to use any means  under God's heaven to kill Indians....Kill all and scalp all, big and little;nits make lice.

Incidents like these clearly show that it is not just these men who were devilish, even their God was the very devil! The Bible was the greatest death warrant for peaceful people all over the world. The Quran, as it is interpreted, is the permanent fatwa against all other people.

Care: This does not mean that there are no different or sober voices among Christians and Muslims. In fact, thoughtful people are rejecting Christianity in Christian lands, as revealed by surveys. But in India, it is the old, proselytising type that is still active.

Most Indian writers are not well read- and they do not read the original sources. We have not developed a class of discerning readers. Our popular journals spread some information at low levels. And there are few journals dedicated to serious thought. So, our writers churn out the old stuff endlessly. While there is much writing on religious matters, most of it is just muck.

There is an additional problem with Tamil writers. After the Dravidian parties came to power, there is an attempt to force their way of speech and writing. This does not matter to most of us because we do not really depend on Tamil sources for serious knowledge! But when it comes to religious matters, it becomes ridiculous because in their blind prejudice against Sanskrit, they make ridiculous translations. The tragedy is when even some orthodox sources succumb to such trends. The height of foolishness is reached when Veda is written as 'Vetha';Vaidika is written as Vaithika; mantra is written as manthiram' ; Rama is written as Irama. But I do not feel sorry.. A people who do not know the value of their heritage and who do not care to defend and preserve it do not deserve it.