When Spirituality Gets Hardened Into Religiosity
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
17 August
2022
“Spirituality is a simple thought. When this
thought gets hardened into religiosity, it becomes a religion and every
religion is an inveterate ideology. The degeneration of a thought into an
ideology, esp. a religious ideology, is the tragedy of mankind because when you
entertain an ideology, you think it to be the best and all others being
subservient to it. "
-Turkish poet and thinker Nazim Hikmet
When some
ignorant readers criticise me for condemning all religions and gods, I just
tell them that I don't want to carry unnecessary burden of an ideology because
any ideology, however exalted it may seem or sound, is a specialized prejudice.
We tend to judge people through the prism of
our religious ideology and that wreaks havoc. I left all faiths and ideologies
and dispensed with my father's Hinduism (my mother had no religion; an
exceedingly rare phenomenon for a woman to have no faith) because had I
remained a Hindu, I'd have subconsciously and unwittingly judged other
religions with respect to my Hinduism. Somewhere, I'd have believed that my
Hinduism was the best. I'd not have been able to study other religions
dispassionately. I, therefore, dumped all in the dustbin of time and history.
With
ideologies come judgements and judgements cloud our perceptions. Your
nationality, religion, sect and all those frills are fixed ideas or ideologies
that you carry the way Sindbad the sailor carried the old man on his shoulders.
They become so intrinsic and integral to your existence that if you ever try to
get them off, they refuse to relent just like that old man, perched on
Sindbad's shoulders like a dead albatross.
Samuel P
Huntington's ' The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order, '
warns us of this Ideological Troglodytism mankind is afflicted with since the
beginning of human civilization. Noam Chomsky also believes that humans are
still unable to shed their feral past when our ancestors started living in
herds and the lowest denominators of survival were their most rudimentary
beliefs that brought them together. Those primitive beliefs graduated to
becoming ideas and ideas hard boned themselves into today's host of ideologies
for which humans are killing each other like beasts.
You've the
worst ideology of religion and god. Together, they've become a scourge of
mankind.
You're
killing and antagonising people just because their (religious) ideology is
different from yours. What a prehistoric notion!
Until we
all drop our outdated beliefs and remain holed up in the matchboxes of our
futile ideologies like religion, nation, province etc., we shall not be able to
rise and call ourselves to be completely free individuals.
But for the
ill-evolved and god-terrified humans, there's still a watered down solution:
Continue to believe in a Supreme Being or a Transcendental Reality without the
'help' of any man-made religion and its otiose scripture. Don't give a name to
this so-called divine power. Don't call it a god or Allah or Bhagwan. Just
believe in it and don't tie yourself to the apron-strings of any religion, sect
or 'holy' book. But then, you need to evolve considerably.
-----
A
regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative
religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to
world's premier publications in several languages including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/spirituality-religiosity-religious-ideology/d/127726
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