Religion in Our Lives

A few weeks ago, a conversation with a few friends drifted into the significance of religion in public life. The comments were predictable – religion has been the source of perhaps the most cruelty and violence over centuries, its ability to incite deep passions makes it an ever-present threat to civil order, the claims of each religion to be the one indisputable source of Truth makes any genuine inquiry through dialogue impossible, etc. – and true! Religions, in this experience, are a crutch that enables people to organise themselves into tribes. If my religion tells me that God speaks uniquely to me in a certain way, how can any other voice be legitimate?

But God doesn't necessarily speak to me in a unique way. In fact, God may not speak to us at all in the conventional sense of saying something in words. It may be more a question of what I choose to hear and say about what is.

The foundational principles of the Eastern traditions, “Ekam Sat, Viprah Bahudha Vadanti” (from Rig Veda, the oldest of the Sanaatan canon), “Anekaanta Bhaavanaa” (from the Jain canon), Maadhyamaka principles and Dependent Origination (from the Buddhist canon), all dispute the very idea of a unique perspective, or one voice of God, even while acknowledging that there is One Truth which can only be discovered variously.

That there “is” – Ekam Sat – and how we can know or speak about what is, are two entirely different problems. The Vedic rishis settled the first in three syllables, and then spent the rest of the tradition on the second: Vipraha bahudha vadanti.

Anekaanta and Maadhyamaka are even more radical. They don't just say, "many paths to the same summit." They question whether any single description can ever capture the summit at all. Anekaanta says every statement about reality is true only from a standpoint, and therefore partial. Naagaarjuna goes further: even "it exists" and "it doesn't exist" are both excessive. Dependent origination means nothing stands alone long enough to be finally pinned down by words.

If you take those seriously, then the idea of God speaking in one unique sentence in one unique language becomes...small. It makes the Infinite speak in a very finite grammar.

Even in the Semitic religions, the idea of the Jealous God may have been profoundly misstated as laying claim to a Unique Truth rather than urging an unwavering and intense devotion to the search for the One Truth. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", read as a metaphysical monopoly claim, leads to crusades. Read as a call to “ekagrata” – single-pointed intensity in the search – it is practically identical to what Shri Krishna says to Arjuna: “Ananyash chintayanto maam, ye janaḥ paryupaasate, teshaam nityaabhiyuktaanaam, yoga-kshemam vahaamyaham.”. “Stay undivided from me and I will take responsibility for what you need to acquire and what you need to preserve”. It is not about denying others' search; it is about not diluting your own.

To me, it is not that religions delude but that people make use of them to delude others. In that respect, they are not different from the worship of currency, of freedom of thought, of capitalism and socialism, of science, of nationalism, and a whole lot of other things that transform from useful concepts to disenfranchising weapons for those who thirst for power and disabling crutches for those who adopt them without love.

But, even then, it seems to me, that there is an important difference between most of them and religion. Religion, if it doesn't turn into a cult, is a source of comfort, togetherness, meaning and hope for most people in a way that most of those other things fail to be. It, most often, binds us by belonging – by birth, death, marriage, mourning, harvest, festival, song. It is the only one that stays with us in a hospital waiting room at 2 am. Science can tell me what is happening in the body. It cannot tell me how to hold the hand of the person who is leaving it.

I have often been deeply touched and impressed by what I have seen at Kirtans - large gatherings of people who come together simply to sing or chant. They are infused with religious fervour and are very public spaces.

If someone is in any distress, whether physical or emotional, it is extraordinary how quickly and without any calculation, people gather around to support them. I have often thought that, based on what I know of them, these are the same people who, if they were to see the same person in distress on the roadside, might drive right past them without a thought.

There seems to be something in that getting together, in that religious ambience, that makes a selfless connection possible. I have not seen any other force which makes a similar connection possible among human beings so consistently.

The interesting thing is: these people feel highly agentic in those moments. There isn't the sense of disempowerment, isolation or helplessness that one sees so often in today's world, where religion and togetherness have given way to widespread hyper-individualism and loss of contact which, in turn, seems to lead to a sense of societal irrelevance, loss of social trust, little confidence in institutions, an unstable future, and an inability to really affect anything. (See the recent (51st) Harvard Youth Poll (51st Edition - Fall 2025 | The Institute of Politics at Harvard University). It is a scary indictment of the atmosphere that our young are growing up in.) I am certainly not saying that being religious would rescue them – there are too many and too complex reason for where we are – but I do have a suspicion that a century of demonising religion may have had something to do with where the society is today.

As Voltaire said, "if God didn't exist, we would have to invent Him". It is not that we need a lie, but that we need a place to put our love, our fear, our gratitude for simply being – a place larger than ourselves that does not ask for a subscription fee.