Faith and Society

We live in a time where we hear about communal and religious violence every day. At the same time, the number of people who call themselves atheists and campaign against religion is on the rise. In such a time, I will be making a stand in defence of religion—not in defence of communal violence, mind you, but in favour of the idea of religion.

It is easy to mistake increased news of religious conflict for a move toward global chaos. But this can be a result of improved global communication, not necessarily because there are more extremists in the world. If anything, extremism has shown an overall decline since medieval times. We may be moving toward more peaceful religions on a broad time scale, although there can be temporary periods of radical behaviour.

I do not need to justify the importance of religion in promoting human values. All of the world’s major religions advocate treating others with love and compassion. They are also a source of hope, since they create an idea of a better future. The concept of karma is an essential fiction to prevent human society from falling into anarchy. Religions also teach a route to long-lived happiness: overcoming one’s desires, something modern psychology has also justified.

These positives of religion are accepted by everybody, even atheists. What atheists argue against are religious practices and rituals—the random baggage that can accompany these values. Do we really need those parts of religion? I think we do. A majority of people lack either the time or the inclination to comprehend these values in the abstract. They need rituals, legends, myths, statues, and religious sites to ground the values. Understanding high virtues and principles independently is resource-intensive. People also need the social aspect of religion—a million others following the same belief system—to reinforce it when faith in those values is shaken by a negative experience.

Throughout history, religion has played a bigger role in uniting people than in dividing them. Humans love stories; fiction captures their imagination. A shared fiction—a religion, or money, nationalism, communism, capitalism, basically any ism—unites people and makes it easier to trust or distrust someone one has never met. This helps form larger societies and enables industrial progress through long-distance trade, which is difficult without trust.

Sadly, for all these feathers in religion’s hat, it comes with humanity’s greatest flaw: the tendency to dominate and impose oneself on others while believing it is for the better. This missionary behaviour has appeared in all of the world’s large religions and fuels conflict. If people of different faiths could understand that their religions are only a thin veil over the same underlying values, that would lead to huge progress.

It is wrong to claim that religion has only done wrong in the world. Its historical achievements and role in cementing human society largely outweigh its divisive effects. If we blame religion for the conflict it causes, we should look at our own nations too; they were not formed without eons of imperial ambition and genocidal wars. We should accept religion for its past, its role in shaping today, the shared fictions it creates, and the hope it provides for social stability. At the same time, we must make sure people understand the underlying virtues of their religion, so that whenever their fictions and rituals clash with someone else’s, they can reason about those virtues instead of fighting over narratives.