RETHINKING RELIGIOSITY AND FUNDAMENTALISM  

Hang on, before you point your gun to my head, you who are not a fundamentalist and definitely not of a religious sort, please give me a chance to explain myself. May be you will not recoil in so much horror and may be even spare my life. Please! 

Let me take the religious part first. I am devoutly religious, that’s true. Well, you see, religion for me is something where reason fails to guide me. That is what I understand by “accepting something on faith”, that is, something that cannot be verified or falsified on the basis of reason. Religion for me is not simply pointing to a seen or unseen God, a hydra-handed being or a name without a picture. True, religion is generally defined by a set of beliefs, based often on claims that they come from on high, but this does not capture the essence of religion for me. Religion is also often defined, in contrast to Secularism, as being based on intuition not on reason.  

Well, to tell you the truth, these definitions are strictly for the birds. Not for me, and keep that gun pointed elsewhere, please. 

I am religious because I have faith, that is, I am led incontrovertibly to the conclusion that all systems that guide men to action must ultimately be based on a set of premises that cannot be questioned or validated by reasoning but must be accepted on faith. You see, Secularism for me is a religion because its ultimate underlying principle is based on a blind faith, the blind faith that non-religious sources are the only sources of knowledge. Secularism has its God and its Prophets and its priests; its soldiers as well as its scribes. It believes in the God of all non-religious knowledge. Its Prophets are a vast range of writers, from times immemorial to the present day, whose writings can be found with as many holes as you would care to discover, but they do not claim to be perfect in any case. What is fundamental to Secularism is the claim (based on blind faith) that knowledge derived from religious sources must not be admitted.   

Now that you have put your gun away, not being a fundamentalist as you think you are not, would you like to have a glass of water? Well, in any case I would like to have one, please.   

But why the final underlying premise must necessarily be based on faith, you ask. Well, my dear fellow, this is because all knowledge is imperfect and reason itself is imperfect. Reason, as you know, is a tool of analysis. It helps you in getting from here to there, of finding the best way to achieve an objective, and so on. But reason is dumb in defining the objective itself. Oh, yes, of course, it can average out from human experience and lay out some objectives but it cannot defend them except on blind faith or on imperfect evidence, perhaps on a probabilistic basis. But the probabilistic basis will need to be accepted on faith. Revealed religions do the same, though the process is not transparent.  

So all you Secularists and Communists and Fascists and all ISTS, you are all religious beings. So, I too, am religious. And what is my God, you ask. Well, I pray to the God of PERFECT KNOWLEDGE. I believe that there is perfect knowledge in theory and that man is approaching that knowledge all the time. I am mesmerised by this search. It is possible that there is no such thing as perfect knowledge, but I believe in this God of Perfect Knowledge. I have a hope that mankind will approach it some day, if not in the form of its present day humanness then in the mutations of that humanity – the onward march of evolution is a long drawn out process approaching eternity. 

All you folks out there must admit that the search for perfect knowledge is indeed a very long process and in the meantime we are but in darkness lurching from bend to the next bend whenever a little light illuminates us. The darkness is vast but our search for knowledge is constantly leading the way, imperfectly no doubt and neither with finality, but that the accumulated wisdom over time is something to be proud of. We are a long way from finding answers to the most fundamental why of life, but the search is fascinating. Life is fascinating because of the looming unanswerable questions. May be, life will end if all the questions were answered. There will be no fun left!!! 

Now to the second part: fundamentalist. Well, in reality, I have already clarified when I used the word ultimately. I could very well have used fundamentally. I am a fundamentalist because I like to go to the roots of the matter, both historically and also in the use of reason, where I believe in hot pursuit so that nothing escapes the application of reason until it comes to the blind wall of faith where reason gives up as something out of its territory.  

At this point you will grumble that this is much ado about nothing. What does it all mean, why should you spare my life?  

I just want you to understand that never mind the beautiful facades of different ISMS, at the base of it all, we are all religious and all fundamentalists. The trillion dollar question is not whether we are fundamentalists, but what kind of fundamentalists are we, what kind of God we believe in. Are we the kind that imposes our view of God on others, with violence or, oh, ever so subtly, with a gun or an economic avalanche? The Secularist God has been just as rapacious, just as violent, just as intolerant as any in history.  The God of Capitalism is no less.  

I want you to understand, also, that it does not become you to be so self-righteous about being so rational. Rationalism did not fall from heaven from the days of Enlightenment or any thing of the sort. Reasoning was a tool the first man was born with. Revelations have contributed to the march of knowledge just as much along the way, because revelations are nothing but reasoning with intermediate steps blacked out. They are just as much based on the historical experience as any exercise of reasoning.   

You should spare my life because you should be tolerant to ALL faiths, for in the historical perspective, the God they each paid homage to has contributed some light to the next bend in the darkness on humanity’s path. You should spare my life because your God is also imperfect as mine is and you should see my God as an episode of history not as a monster to slay. You should spare my life because I am only working out the implications of my God and if you are unhappy with my God you are welcome to kill him. In my case, you will be killing the search for knowledge.

Dr. Abrar Hasan, Visiting Fellow, OISE, University of Toronto,

Originally drafted 15/02/08; a version appeared on Chowk; Re-titled: 05/08/09.