Abstract
In a recent conversation a Professor of Comparative Religions put forward the opinion that current controversies over religious extremism and fundamentalism were more or less closed disputes between the non-religious and the three religions of the book. Since he lives and works in Bosnia, a European country which used to be a stronghold of Judaism, and which has both Christian and Muslim populations, there was some reason to listen to him. However, he went on to cite the open and non-doctrinaire Eastern religions as positive counter examples. Well, maybe. You’d need to know a good deal about the faith of the Jains, Parsees, Buddhists and others to judge the accuracy of his assertion. However, the surviving Muslim victims of communal riots in Gujerat during 2002 might take a less positive view of the opinions and conduct of some of their Hindu neighbours. Only a fool condemns a complete faith and all of its adherents on the basis of tendencies and incidents that might well not reflect mainstream belief and practice. However, if you can identify essential aspects of a religion that consistently produce negative outcomes, then there is some sort of case to answer.
Take caste, for example. Discrimination on the basis of class and race is everywhere in the world (not least in that self-described bastion of democracy, the United States). However, what is different in a number of Eastern religions is that caste structurally embeds discrimination in belief and life. Ancient divisions on the basis of occupations (priests, soldiers, craftsmen, farmers, etc.) have been made rigid by heredity and in-marrying. The social gap between an Indian Brahmin and a Dalit (untouchable) is massive and to many believers unbridgeable. This is an absurdity and an injustice in its own right, but it leads to further dismal consequences. For instance Indian government figures suggest a level of over 100,000 violent incidents per annum against Dalits. What percentage of the true incidence of the open persecution such figures represent is impossible to judge. Also more difficult to pin down is the way that caste facilitates the manipulation of information access as a means of social control. Occasionally, however, studies do reveal these mechanisms. For instance, a study of the transmission of official agricultural information in Nepal revealed that the richer, higher-caste farmers on the good valley-bottom soils were disproportionately well-served by upper and middling caste government extension workers. In fact, the poor, low-caste farmers of the less fertile valley slopes were almost entirely neglected.
The case in favour of caste is hard to imagine, but its defenders do surface in unexpected places. In Britain, for instance, at the time of their 2015 General Election, Trupti Patel, the President of the Hindu Forum, sought to rally Hindu voters around the Conservative Party. What was her reasoning for this? The Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties supported legislation to ban caste discrimination. In a web posting, she told Hindus that “Only the Conservative Party has stated that if they are in a majority government, then this piece of unwanted legislation will be repealed. In these elections, the very honour of your faith is in danger of being undermined.” The honour of a faith, especially one that defends caste, is a curious concept. To an outsider, not committed to one religion or another, it might even seem that religion as such is a fundamental hindrance to knowledge-led social progress. Historically, religions have held fast to central truths and defended these against argument in a way that has seriously hindered the progress of science and evidence-based systems. Maybe the Professor’s attempt to associate the monotheistic religions with offences against the modern knowledge society, and defend the pluralistic, theologically open Eastern religions, has some plausibility. But a closer examination of the beliefs and practices of any religion suggests they are also deeply complicit in a faith-based project against progress.