Preaching Peace, Waging War by Swami Agnivesh & Rev. Valson Thampu

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PREACHING PEACE, WAGING WAR

 

THE TIME HAS COME to tell the truth. The truth is that peace is a

blessing dreamt by religion and destroyed by the religious elite.

Religion is born out of our thirst for peace: peace with God and,

because of that, peace with the rest of creation. It is a thirst that

can be assuaged only with the water of love: love especially for the

enemy. For millennia, however, we have been made to drink the hemlock

of hate in the name of the God of love. This was never the work of

God, but of the self-appointed guardians and custodians of gods.

 

God's benediction on the human family is peace. Islam, for

instance, is literally the religion of peace. Om Shanti, Shanti,

Shantihi is the emphatic Vedic blessing. Jesus greeted people with

the gift of peace, " Peace be with you. " The absolute emphasis on

compassion and ahimsa in Buddhism and Jainism is the quintessence of

peace. Human beings receive this gift of peace and turn it into a

cult of cruelty for each other. The manipulation of devotion has been

the foremost strategy in this context. Some human beings are

religiously conditioned to behave unthinkingly. It is a great danger

to mistake the will of the religious establishment for the will of

God. This spiritual illiteracy is packaged as devotion. This explains

why most people express their religious devotion by hating and

hurting people of other faiths, and not by loving them. God's

will is that we love one another, because we cannot in honesty love

God if we do not love each other.

 

ALL WARS AND CONFLICTS have been fomented and fermented through a

misuse of devotion. The pseudo-religious elite propagates and

prostitutes the unique human faculty of devotion. All forms of

nationalism — the most potent secular religion — have

exploited the faculty of devotion most abominably. Nation is to

nationalism what God is to conventional religions. In times of war,

the distinction between patriotism and nationalism vanishes. As the

violence spreads, the boundary blurs between loving one's country

and hating the neighbouring country. People pray to their gods for

victory over their enemies, being convinced that their enemies must

also be the enemies of their gods. At the same time, the scriptures

say that all are God's children, equally. It must be difficult

being God, because God does not practise partiality and yet has to

heed and obey the partisan entreaties of both parties!

 

Religions have forfeited the right to preach peace by rejecting peace

among themselves. This has happened as a result of losing the ability

to live with differences. Religions differ from each other, especially

in terms of customs and practices. It is in the nature of love to

acknowledge and transcend differences. Religions preach love, but they

have seldom practised this kind of love. Instead, they have

conditioned their followers in the art of hating, even as they

preached love. What drives the religious elite is not a culture of

love, but one of organized vested interests. The first step towards

peace is to call the bluff on this universal hypocrisy.

 

The conclusion is that religion as we practise it today is a catalyst

of war, not of peace. This is because of the divorce between religion

and spirituality. The core of spirituality is the discipline of loving

God and loving our neighbours. Spiritually, the quintessential human

right is the right to love. Depraved religion has robbed us of this

basic human right.

 

IN HISTORY, SECULAR leaders have done more to define and defend human

rights as well as religious freedom than the preachers and keepers of

religions. More often than not, religions have served to legitimize

various forms of injustice, as in the case of the abhorrent caste

system. Religious leaders have had far less respect than secular

leaders for religious freedom. The most authentic proof that we are

committed to religious freedom is the willingness to respect and

safeguard the religious freedom of those who do not belong to our own

religious fold.

 

Although love is assumed to be the archetypal religious paradigm, in

fact it is power that has driven the chariot of religions. This is

most evident from the attitudes of the religious elite in every

religion. Though religions differ from each other in their specifics,

the religious elites share a common agenda. Though they insist on the

incompatibility of religions, they have identical views and goals. It

is because they are so similar to each other that their followers

fight in order to perpetuate a spurious aura of difference. But the

real enemy of religion is the consumerist-materialistic culture.

Hardly any religion is engaged in combating it. Instead, religions

themselves are becoming increasingly consumerist.

 

The key to the healing of religions, which is a prerequisite for

peace, is that the people should refuse to accept the hypocrisy of

the religious elite, who, very often, treat them badly. An example of

this is the apathy of the religious establishment for the development

of its community. In India this is most pronounced in the case of the

Muslim community. The Muslim leaders should have to explain why so

many of their followers are illiterate and underdeveloped today.

Quality of life in this world should not have to be sacrificed for

the sake of some hypothetical compensation in the world to come.

 

Wherever people have been empowered to attain quality of life they

have preferred peace. As long as the worth of human life is

compromised through crass poverty it has been possible to whip up

mass frenzy for war and lead the poor into battle. Poverty and

peacelessness go together: it is hypocritical to pray for peace

without waging war on poverty, illiteracy and underdevelopment.

Poverty degrades individuals and robs them of dignity and worth. It

is easy to drug people in such a state with the opium of spurious

patriotism and make them offer their lives to the gory gods of war.

The rich, who value their lives, are rarely persuaded to die for

their country, though they are the loudest in recommending suicidal

patriotism to the poor. The religious elite, too, romanticizes

poverty while it wallows in luxury.

 

THE BASIC PEACE AGENDA has to be the reformation and spiritual

revitalization of all religions. The first step to peace and human

rights is the establishment of peace between religions. Religions

need to be rescued from their present framework of conflictive

relationship and relocated in a paradigm of mutual co-operation. The

second step is the acknowledgement of the equal value of every human

being, no matter what religions people profess. The third step is the

restoration of the lost balance between faith and reason in

religions, and a vigorous critique of the idea of religious devotion.

The fourth step is an uncompromising commitment to social and ethical

development. Such development holds the key to the appropriation of

the full worth of every human being. The fifth step is the

democratization of all religious establishments and the exposure of

the hypocrisies that flourish within them. Religion must become a

domain of truth and justice. Until this happens, religions will

preach peace and wage war at the same time. •

 

PREACHING PEACE, WAGING WAR

Extracted from an article in The Hindu, December 2001.

http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/agnivesh213.htm

 

Swami Agnivesh is a social activist. Rev. Valson Thampu is an author

and peace activist.