Category Archives: Losing my religion

Why I can’t be a Christian

01 Monday Apr 2024

Posted by in Losing my religion, The blue bride

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I mean, apart from the fact that I don’t believe in God. It came to me while I attended Easter mass, because yeah I went to church for Easter.

I’ve always wanted to for Christmas and Easter, but fell off the wagon in Hong Kong. This Christmas, I went with my parents and I really enjoyed the service, even though we were sitting outside the church on plastic chairs. My parents weren’t impressed by the church because architecturally it doesn’t hold a candle to our parish church in Bombay, but a good choir can make up for all manner of shortfalls.

In December, the kids agreed to go with us to church, and they didn’t find it too bad, but this time around, only Mimi expressed interest, and then she backed out at the last minute. I wasn’t keen on forcing church on anyone – I think Mimi’s shortlived enthuasism was motivated by her history teacher asking her if she had gone to church (because this being India of course anyone and everyone is into your religious business) – so I went alone.

Anyway, at the start of the Easter service, the priest went on about how the resurrection is the foundation of Christian belief – which I already knew – and it came home to me that not only am I not convinced of the plausibility of the whole thing, I’m not even impressed by it conceptually. People really seem to need to believe there’s something after this life – and I don’t.

I’m quite happy for all this to end, after I’ve discharged my obligations to my parents and my children. The idea of eternal life – of going on and on sounds exhausting – no matter how wonderful it’s made out to be.

It seems like the reward of paradise in the hereafter is needed to motivate people to be good in this life, whereas I feel ethical behaviour should be an end in itself. Be the best person you can be and then die – that’s my credo.

The other thing about church is how banal the homilies are. One of the things that always strikes me when I listen to some of the gurus who have attained fame in recent years is how simplistic they are. I’ve rarely heard a good sermon in church. Most priests keep ranting about something or other, not very profoundly. But maybe this kind of homespun “wisdom” is what appeals to the average person. We used to have a priest who did the most amazing, aphoristic two minute sermons, but apparently, these were beyond the understanding of many people.

Which reminds me of one of my pet peeves. Why don’t they teach philosophy at school? What could be more important learning how to think and the history of thought itself? I’ve often heard people making pronouncements as if they’d come up with some original insight, when if they had just done a philosophy 101 course, they would have known that their idea had not only already been aired, but debated, possibly even dismissed.

I was just going to suggest that priests study philosophy, but apparently they do. It doesn’t seem to show in most sermons though. I wish they could do away with the homily only, and just let the word speak for itself. Always find myself rolling my eyes in the middle of the mass.

What on earth was I doing there, then? Well, there’s something meditative about performing a ritual you’ve been doing since childhood, discounting the 20-year-break. And that’s the crux of it. I realised that I feel so moved by the mass today because it takes me back to a simpler time: a time when I was less jaded, happy, secure in the love of my parents, when I believed that I had all the good things ahead of me and it would all work out, and yeah maybe believing in a God who would right the wrongs and grant my prayers helped.

It’s hard facing the randomness of the universe, the sheer Sisyphean plod of life, dead on, but once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Mass, for me, is an attempt to revisit the innocence of the believer and the child.

God knows

27 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in just read, Losing my religion, The P Diaries, Uncategorized

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One of the consoling facts for both V’s and my parents when we decided to get married was that despite our cultural differences, we shared a religion. Never mind that both of us had stopped going to church regularly by then.

Unfortunately for them, instead of bolstering each other’s faith, we progressively lost it. Nevertheless, I planned to raise my children as Catholics as I was convinced that it would give them structure and community.

However, as I increasingly came to see belief in God and religious rituals as anything more than quaint practices as being as silly as unflinching belief in Harry Potter, I found it would be quite hard to answer “yes” with a straight face questions such as “does God really exist?”.

So, much to our parents’ dismay, religion fell by the wayside.

The result, though, is that my children have been exposed to a much wider set of mythologies than they would have had been insisted on belief in one faith. They never quite took to the Bible, instead been drawn to Hindu mythology. Reading those stories to them, I ended up educating myself and becoming a fan of the sheer fantastic quality of imaginative storytelling. I can see why the Judeo-Christian tradition paled in comparison.

When the government declared schools closed this month, one of the unforeseen side effects was the lack of books. Due to a lack of space, I’ve pruned our bookshelves and relied more on the school and public library. However, even the public library has shut down, so we were forced to turn back to our bookshelves.

And we found Muezza and Baby Jaan, a collection of stories from the Quran by Anita Nair. It had been rejected in the past for being too wordy and having too few pictures, but it seems to have caught on this time (it is a tad worthy and could do with at least one illustration every couple of pages).

While my knowledge of Hindu mythology had been sketchy, my knowledge of Muslim mythology was pretty non-existent, save for knowing the background to some of the festivals and the difference between Sunni and Shia. I tended to fall back on the idea that since the Muslim Holy book shared many stories with the Bible.

Muezza and Baby Jaan tells its religious stories through a series of conversations between a cat and a djinn that takes the shape of a camel. This nesting of stories within the narrative makes it a little complicated, but the kids enjoyed the Muezza-Baby Jaan conversations as much as the Quranic stories, possibly more, so I can’t complain. They also surprised me by remembering some of the common biblical stories, so I guess they aren’t as devoid of Christian mythology as I had thought.

Despite V and I being quite open in our lack of faith in the existence of the divine, our helpers are believers and have done some amount of indoctrination. Mimi, by personality, is more drawn to spirituality and insists she believes in god, though which one keeps changing.

At some point in Muezza and Baby Jaan, Muezza said that when he gets angry, he recites the ninety-nine names of God and then the book proceeds to list then. I read a few and can see the point of this recitation as it has a calming effect as such recitations tend to.

Mimi surprised me by deciding she would read all the ninety-nine names (her reading skills are actually poor, so I was not optimistic about her getting through the Arabic names but she progressed further than I would have expected). She knows she has a tendency to fly into rages and I think she wanted some divine intervention to help her calm herself.

While I have no objection to her reciting the ninety-names of God, I think it would be easier to teach her the Hail Mary and Holy Mary. Apparently, both my children are familiar with the rosary, thank to our helpers. I suggested Mimi could say these prayers when she needs to. Despite my own lack of faith, I can see the value of prayer for a restless child and I have already taught her a nightime prayer (which she seemed fascinated by at the time though I’m sure she’s forgotten now).

The next day Mimi had a fall on her scooter. Suddenly, she said: “I know why. It’s because I fought with you.”

“What?” I asked.

“I said the ninety-nine names of God and said I wouldn’t be angry, but I fought with you. So God punished me by making me fall.”

I was gobsmacked. “That’s not how it works. God – if he exists – doesn’t punish,” I told her.

But then I realised that all the stories we had read recently were of God punishing people. The idea of a vengeful God is so powerful that even children who have never been exposed to it take to it like fish to water almost as soon as they encounter it.

Perhaps to them it is comforting to think that someone out there is controlling things, even our misfortunes. But it is also deeply flawed.

In fact, Catholic catechism has sort of outgrown this idea even before I left the church. The vengeful god of the Old Testament, we were told, was not as important as the forgiving God in the New Testament.

It’s been a long time since I heard the words “God will punish you”. Ironically, the last time I heard it was at my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary mass, where for reasons unknown, I volunteered to do one of the readings and to my horror ended up having to stand before the community enjoining wives to submit to their husbands. I considered coughing over that part, but settled for a smirk.

Maybe the priest heard that in my voice because he decided – to my surprise, because in fact obedience has been left out of wedding vows – to stress that point. Perhaps he saw that his audience was rather unresponsive to his message because he ended with a menacing, “if you don’t, God will punish you!”

Snort.

 

 

 

 

On identity

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Amazing Insight, Losing my religion, Pet rant, ruminations, Uncategorized

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Listening to this podcast, I was transported to my childhood, to a geography of bakeries – of freshly baked bread that earned my community the moniker ‘macapao’ to more hybrid offerings – springs rolls doused in crimson Szechwan sauce that no one in the Sichuan I visited this summer would recognise and the most perfect salted wafers. More than the food, it was the cadence of speech that called to me in the podcast, the tangential telling of stories, the “I tell you” and “men’.

As I ponder the question of belonging and the irrelevance of nationalism except for the most prosaic and political purposes, I realise that, new yuppie cafes and restobars notwithstanding, it is this corner of the world, this suburb where even the grocer spoke to us in English, is where I can claim to somehow forever belong to. At heart, I am a citizen of Bandra.

***

I sent a message about dance classes for the children to the wrong member of the Indian ladiz whatsapp group of my estate.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“C, from the Indian whatsapp group,” I replied.

“C is not an Indian name. Are you Indian?”

“Yes.”

“But were you born in Hong Kong.?”

“No.”

“Which tower do you live in?” As if I would fake being Indian to be a member of this whatsapp group.

Isn’t it curious how the people who demand patriotism from minorities never also fail to other us?

***

“Where are you from?” My children are asked.

“Hong Kong.”

“No where are you really from?”

They name the suburb of Hong Kong we live in.

My children’s geography of taste is also different. When they are in India, they tire of the local food and ask grandma, “can we get siu mai?”

***

I read that Portugal is one of the few European countries soliciting migrants.

“Hmmm, maybe I should apply, then at least I don’t have to explain my name.”

“Who do you have to explain your name to?” my Indian colleague asks in surprise.

I roll my eyes. The idea of India has grown smaller and smaller.

***

I listen to this podcast and learn that middle-class Muslims in India are thinking twice about giving their children Muslim names to avoid the inevitable bullying on the playground.

This is what we have come to.

***

Hong Kong was where I lost both my religion and nationalism (nationalism to my mind is a kind of religion in the “opiate of the masses” sense anyway). I recall reading about an artist who was invited to participate in the national pavilion of another country and her saying that she accepted the invitation expressly because it was not linked to national boundaries (I believe it was Dayanita Singh at the German pavilion of the 2013 Venice Bienale but I can’t be sure). I remember thinking that this was a sensibility I aspire to, even as I struggle not to root for countries at the Olympics and World Cup.

Five years ago, I wrote about how my sense of nationalism has faded. What has changed since then or while my affinity to the idea of the nation has eroded, ironically at a time when the idea of Hong Kong nationalism has been floated, my sense of belonging to certain places, my safe places – one dot in the corner of India’s west coast and one dot on China’s southern coast – has solidified.

Mythologies

07 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Losing my religion, The P Diaries, Uncategorized

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Although we are not bringing up our kids within a particular religious framework, I do not want to deprive them of the fabulous stories that religious mythologies offer. I think familiarity with these mythologies is a cultural and academic advantage apart from their imaginative possibilities. The danger, I think, is taking these mythologies as dogma, which I hope the lack of religious framework will prevent.

Since I was raised Christian my childhood was steeped in Christian mythology, with other religious stories being deliberately excluded, and I felt this lack later when I was fuzzy on even the basic Hindu stories that are so intertwined in the cultural life of India. On the other hand, at least I was familiar with one mythology.

When it came to my kids, I had no particular preference in terms of the order in which I introduced particular mythologies to them, but I would have assumed that I would have started with the Christian one. Instead, it so happened that we got started on Hindu mythology, following the Amma Tell Me About … series. I think it may have started when I borrowed from our local library, no less, for a presentation on Diwali at the kids’ kindergarten and they really enjoyed the story. I was also reading up on Hindu mythology myself for the PhD so our interests dovetailed nicely. The library had several of the other books in the series, on Krishna, Holi, etc. and we went through these too. Finally, the kids got me to order the whole set of 10 books for them.

While these books do a good job of concisely retelling the myths in terms of covering the major aspects of each story and the illustrations are lovely, I think the author falls into the trap of trying to use rhyme and therefore ends up using some unwieldy words. Using rhyme in children’s books is a fine art – it is hard to use age appropriate language and not seem like one is stretching oneself to fit the sentence into the rhyme scheme. Also, the morals at the end of each book reduce the complexity of the myths. For example. Rama is associated with “goodness and virtue”, Laxman with “loyalty” and Sita with being the “ideal companion and wife”. You can see why I have a problem with this right? Sita is, as is typical for women, reduced to being an adjunct to Rama. Which to be fair she mainly is, but the original myths allow for her to assert herself particularly when she refuses a second agnipariksha, a part of the myth that is omitted in this series. In fact, when Nene was glorifying Rama as the ideal, the best, etc. I just couldn’t resist telling him that even our heroes make mistake and mentioned Rama sending Sita back to the forest and putting her through an agnipariksha. To say he was shocked would be an understatement. I’m happy that he got at once that this was less than ideal behaviour on Rama’s part without me having to explain.

***

Once while having lunch with a friend from Mainland China, she brought up religion. She is being increasingly drawn to religion – something she didn’t have access to on the Mainland – as a panacea for what she terms her ‘political sickness’ (i.e. her sense of disgust, sadness, bewilderment at the social injustices resulting out of the political system in China, which have been worsening over recent years).  We are both moving in opposite directions: She grew up with no religion and now coming to it as an adult; I grew up steeped in religion and have moved away from it as an adult.

She asked me: How do you teach children good values without religion?

My answer: Harry Potter.

When I think about where I got my values, it was, yes, partly religion but also my parents’ role modelling and Enid Blyton books. The latter, I think, played an even stronger role in shaping my value system than Christianity did. I had a very Blytonesque belief in honesty, loyalty, “being plucky” etc. While I’m not entirely comfortable with her British upper class assumptions anymore, I believe Harry Potter provides the ideal substitute for today’s children.

In fact, much of the underlying mythology of Harry Potter is Christian but refined for our times. Harry Potter also is remarkable for evading absolutism and showing that every character has shades of grey (making it more like Hindu mythology in that sense).

A while ago, I rewatched the series and the kids tried to watch with me, but it proved too scary. Recently, though, Nene asked me to read the books to him. And so began a new tradition. Every day for the past few weeks, we’ve been reading a bit of the books. We’ve finished The Philosopher’s Stone and are now on Chamber of Secrets. The kids even watched the first movie and enjoyed it because they knew the storyline. We did fastforward past the scariest Voldemorte part even though Nene begged us not to. I’m more ambivalent about Chamber of Secrets, even the book, because the voice in Harry’s head is kind of scary. I probably might stop at the second book, though Nene is not going to be happy.

Still, I’m happy that we have started on this particular mythology.

***

In between, I found that Mimi was getting a little impatient with the Harry Potter story. It is kind of complex for a five-year-old without tolerance for scary parts. She had been asking me Jesus for a while, so I suggested to her that we could read the Bible instead.

In comparison to the exciting happening in the Hindu myths, the Bible stories seem tame and hadn’t caught  my kids’ fancy. I had tried reading to them from a children’s Bible gifted to us but without much success. Last year, during Easter, when they got curious about the festival, I decided it was high time they knew at least the basics, and read them out the crucifixion party. They enjoyed that story, but I think they were more transfixed by the blood and gore aspect of being nailed to a cross than the edifying moral of personal sacrifice. Which wouldn’t come through unless one knew the whole story. Further attempts to read from the Bible did not bear fruit. Then this December when we were in Goa, we visited a mechanical crib – which is basically a large-size crib set up in a compound with moving elements – and I explained to the kids the story as we walked through and they were very fascinated.

So, last week, I decided to skip the Old Testament and start with the Christmas story. So far, Mia has been pretty interested. Again, I’m not 100 per cent pleased with the Bible I have. The pictures are good and the length of each section ideal, but there are some aspects of the story that I’m not sure about, plus it has a tad too much sacred language (well, okay, it’s a Bible, but kids who are not brought up in the faith might be nonplussed at “the Lord God Almighty” type phrasing).

***

Recommendations for mythology retellings appropriate to six years olds are welcome. I’m looking for stories that stick to the major original tales, not reinterpretations for the moment. Though retellings that focus on the women in Hindu mythology would be welcome. Also Muslim religious stories for kids? I remember reading someone has recently done one, but not sure there’s an illustrated version. Of course, we should do A Thousand and One Nights at some point, but that’s a different genre I think.

 

 

 

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