By Tarun Bhartiya
I quaked with fear when I read Wandashisha Laloo and Darity Wahlang’s letter (ST 20/08/20) ‘No Nation for Atheists’ and their burning fear of Terrorists called Atheists. As an ageing atheist (I prefer Secular Humanist), who counts deeply religious people as friends and family, I was worried. I started looking for any terrorist weapon I may have accidently forgotten in my closet. I found a slightly dog eared Christopher Hitchens, a turmeric stained Carvaka, heavily underlined text of Jaspers/Bultmann debate and my favourite, Why I am an Atheist by Bhagat Singh, a book he wrote while waiting to be hanged by the British. I was reassured. I even started looking for my passport fearing the imminent exile they were advocating for the Godless like me. Then I realised that Laloo & Wahlang’s letter is a panicked expression of a group who see their world and ideas moving into the dusty corner of historical irrelevance and their frustration at not being able to pray their insignificance away. I felt sorry for them because their letter acknowledged that Shillong is no longer the religion/god obsessed place it used to be. There are growing groups of Atheists, Agnostics, Secular Humanists, for whom churches, temples, mosques, Jesus etc. no longer make sense and they have the confidence to publicly raise questions about the theistic view of the world. So confident in fact that, one or two of them even build crazy educational castles in the air!
I talk to the terroristic godless/sceptical bunch (some of them just out of Sunday school) and they point me to almost hilariously deluded view of history and civilisation the authors of the letter seem to hold. If organised religiosity was the driving force of civilisational change, then we would be stuck believing the Geocentric notion of the solar system, immutability of caste hierarchies, second class status of women, and mass killings of LGBTQ people. If theists continued to run the world, we would have no democracy, judiciary, medicine and yes even Seat Belts. There would have been just sovereignty of the divine and beautifully sung hymns, qawwali and bhajans.
But we have cars, string theory, democracy, understanding of evolutionary processes, Korean pop, televangelism, online prayer requests etc. And all these came about not because god obsessed religious bhakts ran the affairs of the world but because people, both theists and atheists, questioned religious orthodoxy. These believing and non-believing heretics shared a healthy dose of scepticism towards the closed-minded fanaticism of orthodox theism. Many of these ‘terroristic’ people faced the wrath of the theists, Giordano Bruno was burnt, Galileo silenced, Kabir beaten up. If the Nation was without Atheists (or blasphemers and heretics) as Laloo & Wahlang earnestly wish, the civilisation would have been ’static’ and ‘unchanging’. You need blasphemers and heretics to drag the Civilisation forward.
Human history is not just a history of godly belief but a struggle between those who would have humanity constrained by godly fear and those who would rock the boat. Non-belief and scepticism is not a modern vice but an ancient human pursuit. Like Lokayata thinkers in India who questioned the divine origins of Vedas or the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who said:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
But Laloo & Wahlang’s panic is not just about the reality of the Creator or her actions in the world, the worldview of panic-stricken theist is also underpinned by the idea of the ‘correct path’ to that creator. The exclusivist view that sectarian religion inculcates in their followers, Jesus good, Muhammed bad, Vishnu powerful, Satan bad, has led to wars and genocide. Closer home the frothing Hindutva fanatics fantasising about the abolition of mlecchas or some Christians in Mylliem stopping the cremation of the people of indigenous faith, the liturgical litany of the faithful is littered with the judgementalism of the faithful. The faithful will have you saved, have eternal life, or escape the eternal cycle of Karma only if you believe in their preferred idea of god. For them, their god is true God and all other gods are the false ones. Atheists just take the notion of false god, one god ahead. For the atheists, all Gods are false.
I wouldn’t trouble Laloo & Wahlang with deep theological questioning of the mythological divine that Christian theologians like Bultmann have subjected the faith to or lead them onto to the debates on the existentialist invention of God but point them to what Pope Francis said about the meaning of an honest life. He said that it is better to be an Atheist who intervenes in the course of history to question consensus, alleviate pain and achieve justice rather than a religious person who leads a double life.
Growing up an atheist or a secular humanist in Shillong for us is no longer a lonely affair. So many young people are choosing secular reason and scepticism. Religion with its deadening rituals is becoming less and less important. As a member of a decade old Shillong Humanists (facebook.com/groups/shillonghumanists), it has been heartening to see that COVID19 has brought in more members per day than what we have ever had in the past. It is moving to see that there are people not jumping at irrationalism or prayers in this global crisis. Shillong Humanists are an eclectic group – theists and atheists, sceptics and contrarians but all committed to rational discussion, civil discourse and sometimes blasphemous humour. We welcome atheists, agnostics and religious people from Shillong who make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values. We take responsibility for our actions and base our ethics on the goals of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment. We seek to make the best of the one life we have by creating meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together. We defend a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.
Unlike Wandashisha Laloo and Darity Wahlang, we would never say that there should be NO NATION FOR THEISTS. We would defend their right to irrelevant belief and their right to express it freely. And anyway my personal enjoyment of religious music and art would be thwarted if the Theists did not exist.
(Tarun Bhartiya makes films and photographs and writes Hindi poetry. He is a member of Shillong Humanists and enjoys Bach and Bulle Shah. The author would like to thank the members of Shillong Humanists on the first draft of this essay. Email: [email protected])