• Valson Thampu

We do not know how the war on Hamas was launched. Did the Israeli War Ministry initiate it preceded by prayer for the victory of that knotty campaign. Was a prophet -of the pedigree of Balaam- brought in to ‘curse’ Hamas and to tilt the outcome in favour of Israel? Was the prophet thus inveigled ‘bribed’ as Balaam had to be? It would be interesting to have answers to these questions.
Now consider an instance from the Indian context. When the five much-touted Rafale fighter jets arrived from France and were being inducted into the IAF, a nationally-televised religious ritual was conducted. Priests from various religious traditions were invited to bless and baptize the state-of-the-art engines of violence. I was amused and astonished to see a Christian priest in comprehensive priestly costume in the menagerie. To pray for the safety of the killer machines? Or, to anoint them with the spirit of Jesus who ordered peremptorily, ‘Put down the sword’!
This incident struck me as funnily symptomatic, though I kept quiet about it for a good reason. You never know these days what will be deemed anti-national and worthy of special attention under the draconian provisions of the UPA. I now venture to declare my mind on the matter, given that a similar pattern has surfaced closer home in the first religious extremist event in Kerala: the IED-ing of the Jehovah’s Witnesses convention in Kalamassery.
Had he lived long ago, Dominic Martin, Kerala’s first-ever sectarian bomber, would have had appealed to God to intervene on his behalf to the detriment of the custodians of his sect. He would have prayed, and prayed his heart out, till fire from heaven descended on them to far greater retributive effect.
It is significant that Dominic Martin chose a different means to quell the bee in his desh-bhakt bonnet. He tried first, as he claims, the way of persuasion. After all, humankind’s progress from barbarism to civilization is marked, as Will Durant argues in Our Oriental Heritage, by a renunciation of violence as the dispute-settling mechanism. Violence gave way to persuasion and litigation. Till then, differences of opinion were settled with brute force. Might was right. The idea that issues can be settled via persuasion is a late-comer in the history of our species.
So far, so good. But, when the art of persuasion failed, Martin took the next fatal step: problem-solving via the technology of violence. He failed to persuade the sectarian bigots. God wasn’t going to do any better. If anyone could help, it would only the God of modern culture: technology. God as power belongs to the dim, distant past. In our brave, bold world, technology rules the roost; especially, the Technology of Violence.
The irony here is too obvious to be missed. The Jehovah’s Witness sect is known for its abjuration of modern sciences, including the benefits of medical sciences. Reliance on them is tantamount to distrusting God’s sovereign will and authority. If medicine can take care of your needs why bother to pray to God? When short-cuts offer instant relief, why take the long route?
As a member of the religious sect, Martin would abjure science and technology. But, as a self-appointed reformer of his sect, he will lay his faith entirely in technological remedies. The technology of blood transfusion that saves life is out of bounds. But the technology of spilling blood is ready to hand. It is not clear if blood was transfused into any of the ‘critically injured’ victims of the serial explosions by the doctors who battled to keep them alive.
Do anachronic dogmas subject individuals to violence and drive them, as Martin claims, to desperation? (Impliedly, can Martin be tried without also putting in the dock the authorities of his sect?) Are there other factors, besides the coerciveness of dogmas, that aggravate the tension that believers endure for being insiders? Is a sect or cult obliged to mind the predicament of its individual believers? Where does church end and cults begin?
Under pressure of the COVID pandemic, churches in Kerala did compromise one of the key dogmas all Christian churches and denominations hold as foundational and inalienable: the bodily resurrection of believers. Cremation runs counter to this dogma. However, cremation was allowed in the days of COVID, provided it was done under priestly authority. This necessarily means that dogmas can be responsive to the exigencies of the human condition. As Jesus said, ‘the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath’. A statement more anti-dogmatic than this cannot be imagined in the Jewish context.
The reason for such open-endedness needs to be recognized. Whatever exists in time is a mix of the fixed and the fluid. Freedom involves both. Freedom as the sphere of the fluid alone, hitched to individual whims and dispositions, opens the ood gates of confusion and disorder. Freedom of this kind breeds instability. With that we come up with one of the core conundrums in the religious predicament of our species: dogmas limit as well as safeguard freedom. Pure freedom is a chimera. It is as foolish to bomb that chimera out of existence as it is to assume that Truth Divine is no more than the sum of man-enunciated dogmas, no matter how time-tested they are. Commitment to truth not quite the same as dogmatic orthodoxy. Jesus is ‘living water,’ not a pool of stagnant water.