Gita 16.24 Religious tolerance is better fostered by deeper religious adherence than by greater religious indifference

Transcript

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religious tolerance rises with religious adherence not religious indifference in today’s world there is concern that there will be religious tolerance that one religion should not become violent towards other religions whose beliefs and practices may differ from the first religions and how is this going to happen some people feel that the key is secular liberalism that when religion becomes a less prominent purpose in people’s lives then as they become more apathetic about their religion as they become more indifferent then they will not if people are themselves not very serious about their own religion then they will not take very seriously the differences between their religion and other religions and thus they will become more tolerant so here indifference is seen as the as the way to tolerance just like if we don’t really care about what kind of shoes people wear when they come to work then we won’t mind if different people wear different kinds of shoes if there is no uniform in school then we won’t bother about what kind of clothes people are wearing when they come to school so this approach actually essentially counters to atheism materialism apathism apathism is the idea that people are simply apathetic to any higher truth in life that they just don’t care and they simply live for the here and now without bothering about any higher reality now this approach for tolerance centers on importance that means basically religious freedom or religious tolerance it is believed here that when religion itself becomes an important force in people’s life it doesn’t matter what you believe, what you practice when it doesn’t matter then what others believe and what others practice will also not matter however this simply gives way to the religion of atheism because eventually we all live for something or the other and atheism also nowadays aggressively resembles a religion atheists often hurl the kind of invectives and expletives the labeling and the demonizing that was sometimes in the past seen by religious hardliners who demonize their opponents or demonize anyone who thought were threats to their practice and faith so when religion itself is treated with indifference then that means by religion we refer to any system of thoughts and practices that consider so whenever religion itself is made as unimportant then the result is that atheism becomes important and eventually atheism itself becomes so aggressive that it leaves no room for any kind of religion to be practiced as for example we see that in communist countries religion was aggressively persecuted so if there is to be tolerance then there should be tolerance towards religion itself, religious freedom and religious tolerance means tolerance towards religion and if there is an overall apathetic attitude towards religion then that leads to the fostering of atheism so now every religion needs to within its own resources find the rationale for tolerance for example among the world’s religions presently it is perceived that Islam tends to be violent, Islam has spawned many terrorists Christianity although it is now known as a humanitarian religion which does a lot of social welfare work it also has a long history of violence the way it disrupted and even destroyed many native cultures during the period of colonization and the way there were brutal wars between the Catholics and the Protestants all this points to all these are examples of intolerance within Christianity also relatively speaking as compared to Christianity and Judaism, Christianity and Islam the Abrahamic religions which are called Hinduism and Buddhism are known as the gentle religions their track record of violence is very less now this is not simply because of some historical circumstance it is because of their core understanding itself of course we could say Buddhism is ambiguous in its conception of God or whether it even conceives of a God but still it also has a certain set of beliefs, certain set of thoughts and certain set of practices. Now if we move on and consider what is it that makes a particular religion tolerant and another intolerant we could point to its texts, its practitioners and its circumstances that means what are its beliefs or what does it teach in terms of what people should believe and what people should practice what is the kind of people who are believing or practicing it and what is the kind of circumstance that they are in all three are important considerations so nowadays there are two extreme attitudes towards say Islam one is Islam itself is considered to be demonized is sometimes demonized as a religion that promotes violence, critics of Islam do that in contrast apologists of Islam often go to the other extreme and they say that actually the problem is not at all with Islam the problem is with the circumstances that oh people are so poor these people have been so historically exploited abused and sometimes people who are violent of a violent disposition they joined Islam not because of any religious affiliation but because they simply wanted a channel for expressing their own violent tendencies so now contextually this may be true for specific contexts the whole important thing is that every religion needs to find within its own core texts the resources for coexistence and tolerance the Bhagavad Gita for example holds that actually we all are parts of the one absolute and that all people are on the way to that absolute at different levels and that people’s minds should not be disturbed that they should be allowed to facilitate it to progress at their pace from their place without disturbing their minds too much so the whole point here is that it is important to recognize that it is important to recognize that there is a reason for tolerance inbuilt within the tradition itself in the Catholic tradition for example one reason for tolerance that is advanced although Catholics too still believe that their way is the only way to God still they believe that God wants to be adored by people who are free God doesn’t want forced love so people need to freely choose to love and if that is not happening then there is something wrong which needs to be corrected so they cannot use force there are people who do not wish to worship God through Jesus then they have to be given that prerogative that is the conception with which Catholicism tries to provide a rationale for tolerance now this is going inwards to look better to better deal with outwards looking deeper within one’s own tradition to find out how to better deal with one’s circumstance when one goes too much outwards then the result is that one becomes apathetic and apathy towards religion in general can very easily become the means for the hegemony of atheism so the leaders and the practitioners of each religion in the world today will have this challenge of how they can from within their own traditions resources traditions, teachings and examples and precedents find a rationale for tolerance so when that happens then we can have the tolerance that doesn’t lead to importance the religious freedom can be there for different people to practice what they believe without being considered that what you believe doesn’t matter at all the understanding we get from the Bhagavad Gita is that what we believe does matter what we practice does matter but at the same time God is understanding and so different people are at different levels and from their levels they need to be given steps for rising gradually they cannot be expected to rise abruptly and they need to be given the room to rise upwards from wherever they are that providing them the room is the basis for religious tolerance within the Vedic tradition in the Gita wisdom tradition and similarly each tradition by going deeper within can find the rationale for being more tolerant without that is the sustainable way to have religious tolerance without succumbing to religious indifference and then thereby being eventually subjected to atheistic intolerance Thank you