Losing my religion

Religion fascinates me. The stories, the imagination, the faith that people are able to put into books that are very very dated — it’s mind-blowing.

I grew up as a fairly religious kid.

When I was 8, I went to a school run by the Hare Krishna folks in Bombay. I remember questioning a few things in the text, things like vegetarianism, reincarnation, karma, etc — but I largely believed them to be the word of God. I believed in a higher being and would pray regularly — especially when the Indian cricket team would take to the field.

Then, at 12, I was sent to one of the strictest Christian boarding schools in the country — St. Peter’s Boys School in Panchgani. My transition from a devout Hindu to a fairly pious Christian was effortless. I went from reading the Bhagwad Gita to reading the Bible — various versions of it, I’m pretty sure I also had a copy with Jonty Rhodes’ own experience of religion. And given that Rhodes was already God-like for me, it was pretty easy to take anything he said as hard fact.

As an adolescent, I didn’t care that the Hindu Gods were not mentioned in the bible and vice-versa. Or the fact that the Gita talks about vedas that lasted hundreds of thousands of years. I simply saw religion as religion. To me, Hinduism and Christianity were more or less the same thing — they taught the same morals, both warned against similar sins and had a justice system in the form of heaven and hell. In fact, at the boarding school, a whole bunch of us (from Hindu families) would attend church together and simultaneously pray to Jesus, Mother Mary, Krishna, Hanuman, Ganesh and Brahma. As far as we were concerned, all of them were supposed to be looking after us.

Then, a year in to boarding school, the school’s chaplain organised a bible camp. At the camp, we sang old and new hymns, enjoyed our bible reading time, tested each other on the verses and had an absolute blast — until the last night that is. At the last supper, we were asked to reflect on our time at the camp and what we had learnt about Jesus. A bunch of us had similar answers — “the Son of God died for our sins”, etc. One kid, expanded on his answer and mentioned something along the lines of feeling very lucky to have one more God to pray to in addition to the Hindu ones he already believed in. At this point, he was hastily interrupted and sternly corrected by the supervisor:

“Yes, but there is only one true God, the one mentioned in the Holy Bible. The others are fake Gods that fake religions have made up”.

The silence that descended on the room at that point is burnt in to my memory as a defining moment. While I didn’t realise it at the time, and mostly brushed the supervisor off as being a strict teacher, but that statement certainly stuck with me for weeks after. I remember starting to compare the two religions and looking for differences in them. For the first time, I had begun to question religion, God and the truth in what I was reading. And although I believed in God for many years after that, I remember slowly losing my faith and interest in religion.

Around the time I started university (at 18 years old), I started forming stronger opinions on faith, atheism and agnosticism. I was hungrily trying to reason against my upbringing, the friends I was hanging out with and the books I was reading. I wasn’t ready to call myself an atheist, but being an agnostic felt like sitting on the fence. And I still don’t call myself an atheist — I just don’t think one has to pick a label on this topic. And when I’m pushed by folks to pick one, I tell them about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Around six years ago, my mother sent me to see a Muslim scholar in Ajmer — while she’s a Hindu, she was hoping that the learned fellow could at least bring me back to religion. This was another defining moment in my life. My (ex) girlfriend and I visited him reluctantly, even telling our rickshaw driver that we’ll be back in a few minutes. He was a couple of years older than me and was on his way to becoming an influential teacher of Islam. We got straight to the hard questions. The role of religion in wars and extremism, the lack of proof of God, the absurdity of basing one’s life on words written hundreds of years ago in books that are full of dated ideologies. The guy was calm, told us a little bit about himself — he was running for the youth chapter of the Congress Party, loved going to the gym, would immediately apologise to God if he checked out a girl. Ha also answered most questions by quoting various verses from the Quran (I don’t remember his specific answers), but then he got to the really interesting part. According to him, there were two paths to God (in his case, Allah) — first one is that you follow everything that The Quran says to the letter. Be a devout Muslim: pray five times a day, look after your community, fast during Ramadan, make the trip to Mecca if you can, don’t drink alcohol or eat pork — the path that he had chosen.

The second way had nothing to do with religion at all. He said:

The second path to God, is to live a life of passion.

Whatever you do, do it with utmost conviction. Don’t do anything half-heartedly and make as much impact as possible with whatever path you’ve chosen.

We were dumbfounded. Here sat a religious scholar who was telling us that you don’t have to follow The Holy Book in order to get to Heaven.

We spent around three hours talking to this guy — the rickshawallah was not happy.

I am still not a religious guy and I still don’t believe in having to choose a label to describe where I stand on religion.

Today, I enjoy talking about and discussing religion in a fairly objective way. I am overwhelmed with old religious monuments and can understand how their scale would have made a believer out of the biggest sceptic back in the day. I’m thankful for my experience with religion as a child and am very lucky that the incident at the camp prompted me to ask questions although I’m sure my mother wishes that had never happened. I think religion as a community and organisation can do wonderful things for people as long as it teaches love over hate, acceptance over division and uses it’s power for the good of the larger population.

But I’m most thankful to my mother for exposing me to religion in the first place and then unintentionally facilitating a life-changing moment for me. I don’t believe in a God or any particular faith, but I do subscribe to a life of passion. My hell is a life of mediocrity. So although I “lost my religion” at a young age, I have found more purpose in life through my experience with it.

What has been your experience with religion? Do you identify with a certain label? Talk to me.