Photo courtesy of UNICEF
Religions are supposed to enshrine our moral values. Hence their sanctified position in any society as the indispensable institution guiding our morals. However, almost all societies have more than one religion and each individual identifies herself with one of them. This seclusion is interesting and merits some reflection.
If all religions contain more or less same codes of ethics which are intended to make people think and behave better, why is society divided along the lines of religion and this separateness so rigid? Despite religions’ function as the moral guide which facilitates peace and harmony, why do they alienate people? This is exciting because generally our moral values have a lot in common. We agree on many things which are generally considered as good and bad despite our firm convictions about our own religion’s uniqueness. Our judgment about what people do and how they behave is broadly consistent. We praise honesty, patience, generosity and kindness, while reproving the opposite qualities – deceit, hatred, greed and violence. We are repelled by arrogance, harassment, cruelty and violence wherever we see it in day to day life.
Yet, despite this broad consensus, a sharp distinctiveness emerges the moment we mention the word religion; we are convinced that ours is unique, the one and only true religion in the world. And this conviction that we call faith is regarded as sacred and nonnegotiable. From our perspective, ours is the one and only of its kind; but when you stand outside the picture to take a telescopic view, there are thousands of one and only truths. This makes the uniqueness of ours sound much hollower than we should like. Further, it is the degree of firmness of our identity with our religion which determines whether we can let go of our learned religious aloofness or not. We have a set of shared moral values transcending our religious identities but this glaring fact takes a backseat in our assertion of the supposed preeminence of our inherited religion, which we are accustomed to call our religion.
Let’s look at the nature of our religious identity. What we call our religion is not our choice but the unavoidable inheritance from our parents or guardians. This begs the question whether the constitution guarantees the freedom to choose and follow our religion or our parents’ religion. Our unquestioning acceptance that our religion is the religion inherited from our guardians shows that even constitutions do not make the distinction between what we consider to be our religion and the one forced on us by our parents through cultural endorsement. The freedom of the individual to choose her religion can come only from the child’s inviolable right to avoid being programmed by her parents’ religion from her infancy. Sadly, the defenselessness of the child against this culturally sanctioned enforcement is conveniently overlooked in almost all societies and their constitutions.
What is the nature of our religious identity? The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book Outgrowing God is spot on about the vague nature of religious identity when he quips, “One of my pet peeves is the habit of labeling young children with the religion of their parents: ‘Catholic child, ‘Protestant child’, ‘Muslim child’. Such phrases can be heard used of children too young to talk, let alone to hold religious opinions”.
This is the sobering reality about the coagulation of our religious coating. It reveals the role of early programming through which we all have acquired our chance religious identity that is armoured over the years through repetition of rituals, narratives, sermons, festivals, music, art, literature and the numerous formalities that weave many important events in life with religion. When we as kids rattled out “I am a Buddhist, Christian…”, we didn’t have the vaguest idea of that inherited religion except that it is a link that connected us with our parents from whom we unconsciously assimilated a set of beliefs and the prescribed rituals that gave further credence to them. It is the same indoctrinating process with regard to every religion with their distinctive narrative, mythological, ritualistic and experiential contents which draw the lines of separation. Dawkins further says that this kind of labelling is as “absurd as talking about a ‘Socialist child’ or ‘Conservative child’”. One’s religious identity seems like biological inheritance but it’s a matter of chance, which is determined by where we are brought up during our early years. A Buddhist who were to find out later in life that his biological parents were Christians would have no instinctive affiliation to Christianity and vice versa.
It is the absence of intellectual engagement with whichever religion a child happens to be immersed in during her early childhood that makes her a lifelong and committed follower of that religion. This acquisition of religion in the child’s social environment seems similar to first language acquisition of a child. Children get wired to any language they are constantly exposed to as babies. They acquire it without consciously learning it and with no cognitive understanding of its rules. This seems to be the case with acquiring religion which happens almost simultaneously from their infancy to adolescence.
According to research, being exposed to just one language is a deprivation while growing up in a multilingual environment is a tremendous gain. The latter makes a child conversant with all the languages she is exposed to and enables her to learn other languages in adulthood easier. On the other hand, a child who has been a monolingual until adolescence finds it more difficult to learn another language later. Although the comparison cannot be pushed too far, it seems that this is true of mono-religiosity, which is ingrained in all cultures. Any hardened mono-religious person – one who has acquired just one religion in her childhood – will develop an inbuilt resistance to other religions that have been on the periphery. Of course, one may learn other religions as an adult with fully developed cognitive faculties but this learning will not affect her faith in her first religion, which is hardwired into her brain in the same way as the first language is. This explains why even those who learn another religion or more as adults hardly change their faith in their first religion. This phenomenon – the firm grip our first language and first religion have on our brains – seems to stem from the same hardwiring process through which we acquire both.