A Brief History of Disbelief in India
A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011
Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.
A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011
Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.
