It’s time to stop generalising religious beliefs

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, Swéta Rana argues that religious labels have become dangerously oversimplified.

In Hinduism alone, there are many different denominations and schools of thought. Photo: Flickr/Natesh Ramasamy

There is a school of thought in the world which declares there to be one God who pervades all. Everything in existence subsists of this God, from plants and animals to weather and ethics. Followers of this school believe liberation is achieved through intense meditation, after which one experiences a merge of their consciousness with God, eradicating all distinctions.

There is an opposing school which deems this belief utter bullshit. They use the same texts to argue that the world and God are two completely distinct, separate entities.

Some use the same texts to support their views of monotheism. Others, polytheism. Others, atheism. Others reject these texts altogether, declaring that truth is found through conscious experience or contemplation. Some believers perform rituals. Some rely on meticulous logical principles. Some revere mysticism. Some abstain from meat. Many monotheists maintain the almighty Lord is a benevolent, kind preserver; others see their ultimate deity as a fearsome destroyer. Others still claim the realm of the divine has no traits comparable to humanity.

There is not a single unifying factor among these many philosophies, bar one: they all originated in India. These Indian schools were, understandably, prone to some disagreement or antagonism between faiths. Famous proponents of various creeds wrote extensively on why they believed their path was the correct one. But the situation never escalated into a social or political struggle to assume majority control.

When British anthropologists studied India in the 19thcentury, they were baffled to find this myriad of theological schools in harmonious coexistence. No widespread war, no bitterness, no fierce attempts to dominate or convert. Scratching their heads, they marvelled: “This cannot be! We so rarely have this kind of tolerance in the west. There needs to be some overarching force here. There must be a dominant school, like Christianity. Ah, fuck it: if they’re not bickering they must all essentially be the same — let’s call it Hinduism.”

Humans seem to have an instinctive compulsion to classify the things we encounter. From Aristotle’s extensive classification of all things to prototype theory, we cannot help but admit that things are much easier to process and understand if we are able to categorise. The modern category of “Hinduism”, though, is not a triumph of this process but a crude simplification of it. Labelling the theologies of India under a single term is akin to taking all of your complicated, important paperwork, shoving it into a desk drawer and declaring it successfully filed away. It may be a total jumble of unrelated matters on the inside, but at least it looks neat from afar when you close the drawer.

It is this utter lack of nuance which is damaging our existing conversations about religion. There are sects and denominations within all religions. To say “Christians believe…” or “Muslims follow…” or “All Hindus…” results in an extremely risky, and usually incorrect, statement.

Our reluctance to make distinctions has led to some very simplistic discourse, especially in the wake of the recent Charlie Hebdo attack. Richard Dawkins and Rupert Murdoch are among many who claim the attack can be blamed on the entirety of Islam. Mosques have been attacked in France.

It is a grave indictment on humankind that some of us have indulged in this hysterical Islamophobia. Are we truly so dense that we cannot see a difference between lawfulness and crime, peace and violence, widespread Islam and fundamentalist Islamism?

The Charlie Hebdo attackers may well have claimed to follow the Qur’an. But their beliefs and actions are so utterly removed from the majority of Muslims that it is obscene to place them within the same bracket. It seems humans cannot help but categorise, but this can all too often lead to obfuscation of facts and restricted understanding. Unless we step back and actually acknowledge the distinctions that we see right in front of us, a crime perpetrated by extremist Islamists can too easily lead to the false culpability of anyone regarded under the label of “Islam”.

Originally published at abstractmag.com on January 14, 2015.