Religiology is study of religions, their importance to human societies, forms of religion, and their relative merits.

Religion

There is a lot of misconception about religion. Religion gets blamed, rightly so, for a lot of evil in the world. Yet religion has this immense driving power, it gathers followers. Followers who are willing to sacrifice their lives, endure all kinds of hardship, and at times go crazy enough to harm and kill others.

There is no point in just rediculing or blaming religion, this power of religion of religion has to be understood and accepted. And then may be we can use it for our grater advantage.

The interesting thing to note is that totally disconnected civilizations, from most ancient to most remote tribes in deepest jungles of Africa, all of them have developed, independently, some form of religion. These religions can be seen share a lot of similar traits, comamndments, come kind of god, concept of judgement etc. Why is this? Why is religion so powerful and automatically evolved almost everywhere where human civilization evolved?

What is religion?

We are human beings. We love to live in groups. We form tribes, villages and states. The ability to form group and specialize skills is the ability that gave us all the advantages over the beasts of the jungle. We must live in groups.

When we live in groups, our actions start to affect each other. Some of them are good for the group and some of them are bad. A group that ignores this is bound to perish or become weak eventually, compared to another group that recognizes this and encourages behaviour that is good for the group and discourages whats bad. This self descipline makes the group stronger.

The problem is, its not easy for an individual to understand which actions of his are good for the group and which are bad. If I am hungry, and there is food on the next guys kitchen, its not immediately obvious why it is wrong for me to just go and eat it. Some actions take generations accumulated wisdom, for example why is inbreeding wrong, no individual on himself can come this conclusion that inbreeding will lead to weaking of gene pool.

If we assume that its difficult to self analyze consequences of ones action, the society will have to develop a code of conduct for its memebers to follow. This code of conduct will have to be enforced too.

This further becomes complicated by the fact that a lot of time, an action by an individual may be beneficial for him, but may harm the society.

By some luck, most actions of this nature, helping individual but hurting society, also harm the individual in long run. This is not mere luck, the very fact that we are still living in society implies we accepted, that larger good of society usually triumps individual's short term good.

So we have two problems. First comes earlier, too much reliance on an individual to understan whats good for society will lead to individuals taking greedy decisions and societies will go into chaos. There is a mistake in this notion that I will adress later, but be with me for a while.

The second problem pertains to society exerting too much control over individual based on what is good for society alone. This problem is addressed in most modern civilizations by adopting inaneable human rights.

Lets go back to first problem. The watchers of the society, the elders can't be looking at your actions all the time, so they have to inculcate a fear in you. Or at least this is what a certain set of societies tried to do. They formalised the set of guidelines, and then created fear for not following those guidelines.

There must have been much evolution in these ideas. Initially the humans must have come together and formed a band to help each other and formed tribes. But soon those tribes without any guidelines must have splintered, and fragmented dues to individual excesses. Some other group must have been formed a little later when they would realize that the individualism must go, and they must descipline themselves a little bit in order to maintain group intigrity.

May be they learnt it incrementally, or may be they followed the more chaotic evolutionary pattern where some group with higher level of descpline than other must have become more suited to control the resources in the area, and survival of fittest may have prevailed.

One way or another, we moved from individual animals to human societies, and the binding block was those guidelines, and the success of our ability to maintain a society depended on effectiveness with which the guidelines were enforced.

Now here comes the problem, individual interests often conflict with group interest and the guidelines, so at some point during the evolution of societies, they must have started punishing the individuals who does not conform to group guidelines.

A very famous experiment comes in mind, a set of monkeys were put in a cage, and there was ladder that can be climbed to get fruits from the top. There was group, and incentive on individual to take some action. Soon scientists added the angle of "individual action wrong for the group" by sprinkling cold water on the rest of the group everytime one of monkeys started climbing.

Soon the monkeys learned and they started beating up any monkey that tried to climb up the ladder. Now those monkeys do not understand why it happened, but they learned pretty quickly, and the notion of punishing the individual for not following the group guideline emerged in primates.

But this is not that simple. The previous example worked because all monkeys were in the same cage, can see each other, and always keep an eye on the ladder. What if they could no do so? Either they would have to figure out a way to make sure no one climbs the ladder or they accept the cold water.

The action done by monkeys imitated, or rather showed signs of policing, judging and punishing. It succeded because judging was trivial, anyone on the ladder is wrong, and policing was easy becasue they can always look at who is going up the ladder, and finally punishment was easy, they can just beat up the "criminal".

This was simplistic and starts to fail in more complicated societies. Policing requires resources, and you can not watch all individuals all the time. Even if you can police, premature jumping to punishment with proper judgement will lead to false punishments, and society might break up due to this. And proper judging requires further resources. Till few centuries ago we were all living in primarily agricultural societies where every hand has to cultivate, we just never had enough resources to put a police force or indulge in the luxuries of jury and due process of justice.

And yet the individuals had to be stopped. This left with our smart ancestors with only one option: religion. They figured out that they can't always be on each individuals head, so lets put some fear into them. They invinted hell. They invented an all powerful, always watching, always judging god. The god that would punish you with fires of hell if you do not follow the guidelines. This is the genesis of religion.

They had to build all kind of supporting stories, and "evidence", the books and the whole deal, but this got them going, this innovation of theirs, helped them keep the individuals in check, and help societies prosper.

For this reason religion should be respected, if nothing else, then as the first social innovation that made us what we are today.

The Post-Religious Renssance

Religions were immensely successful, and most ancient societies that adopted the religious ideas, and inculcated it in their lifestyle and culture thirived, made much progress and started becoming modern.

But religion has one major flaw. It is based on a lie. That there is hell, there was no evidence to support it, and individuals were always questioning. Our innovating ancestors realizing this flaw, invented the concept of faith, and tried to get their individuals to accept religion despite massive evidence and arguments concerning the absurdness of its basic premise.

This has a very interesting side effect, the more succeful the religion becomes, the more the society grows, but the more the society grows, more people get luxury of thinking, the more they question religion. And when society has grown enough to give most of its individuals an ability to think, they call the bluff on the religion, and whole structure of religion suddenly implodes taking down the civilization with them, for the problem of individual acting against society is real.

After watching numerous civilzation crash into oblivion like this, one civilization said enough, something better has to be done. Hell as the core of religious belief is just not sustainable, either the civilization will die, or they will be forced to refuse development, so as common people never get time to question.

That society had the advantage of being at the peak of religious growth and thus has a wealth of knowledge in the form of guidelines of what actions are good and what actions are bad for society. They refined this knowledge, and discussed it, analyzed it in detail.

And a surprising thing happened. They realized that as soon as you know the concequences of your actions, if enough stories are told to individuals about the good actions and bad ones, and detailed analyses is presented, making it obvious that most of those actions would be bad for the society but may lead to gains for individuals, the individuals do not feel like doing the bad actions on their own.

Our basic nature is good, and contraption like god and hell are not really needed.

This lead to a civilization that refuses to die. That civilization is the Indian civilization.

The Indian civilization codified these findings, and for lack of a better word, continued to call it religion. This "religion" lead to lots of other "religions", China adopted its fruits whole heartedly, and stands as the other ancient civilization still prospering.

These religions chose to believe in goodness of human nature, and rejected the aging notion of a wrathful god, who is always plotting to punish the imperfect creations of his. The post modern religions took delight in being human, they conveyed to us that god celebrates us as his finest creation and looks at us and smile, that we do not have to tell our little children about blood and death and the horrors.

The success is for all to see. Its time the other religions realize that there is a better tool than hell and the hell-pusher, the education, the objective teaching of consequences of right and wrong. We don't don't break signals because we will meet accident or because we will go to hell, but because we understand that breaking signal is going to slow the traffic down, burn more fuel, create chaose and otherwise will be bad for society. Every good and bad can be explained like this. All you have to do it to try.

Hinduism

So far I talked about evolution of religion and the post religious renessance. I talked about the reason a society has to make sure that individuals follow a set of guidelines, and these guidelines form religion.

I also claimed that Indian civilizations, and religions, at some point stopped using fear of hell as the prime tool to make individuals adhere to the guidelines.

They used education, and cultivated a culture of understanding and introspection about the consequences of their action. This is widely known as Karma theory among western study of Indian religions, epsecially Hinduism.

Because hinduism relies on understanding and education, tries to logic and reason, because it asks a lot in terms of training and self control and introspection, as against invoking the primal animal fears of fire which used by others, the journy of hinduism is full with ups and downs.

Since it depends on education and intricacies, and complicated logic at times, to analyze consequences of your actions in long run, its easy to misinterpret.

Another factor that complicates understanding hinduism is the refusal of hindu thinkers to outrightly reject the concept of god, that they initially believed in. They reasoned, and wisely so, that small and gradual changes would be easier for them to feed the masses than voilent proclamation that there is no god.

Gods serve useful purpose, they are revered by masses, identified by them, and any education can be imparted with them as the tool. There is no reason to throw that away.

Then there was danger of ourlash against the religios renessance thinkers, and there was a possibility that masses would just refuse to take them as hindus, and decouple themselves with the new innovative ideas they have got, and continue to live in the dark ages.

The task at their had was enormous, to keep but down play the importance of gods, without appearing to be rejecting them. They had to engineer the psyche and religion followed by a really big country. They had to walk a fine line. And they did it marvelously.

Ask any hindu, and they will tell you there are gods in hinduism. Read any book, listen to any story, and they are full of different gods, and there are words for hell still remaining and stories of the god that accounts for your actions when you die to decide if you should go to heaven or hell.

And yet, Ram never told us anything about hell, the only mention of hell is that as place with bad people, rakshas, who live their in all their luxury, with a king and kingdom, and no one goes their unless they chose to, even then they may not be allowed. And those who came from "hell" to fight Ram, died in the battle or decided to quit the path of badness (evil is non hindu concept). Ramayana is the most read book among Hindus.

There is no mention of hell at all in the entire Gita, heaven is considered a lowly place, gods are told be to below us, and we are asked to analzye the consequences of our karma, and follow our heart when taking decisions instead of following other people's religions.

What they did was to downplay Vedas, without insulting it as its the most revered book among hindus. Though they succeded in making sure that nobody reads them, as it has got remnants of the medival thinking in terms of emphasis on fear of hell as basis of moral values.

They also realized that the post modern religion of theirs is more suited to schools than temples. Education should be in the hands of educators and not priest who read scriptures. So they made education the biggest duty in Indian mindset. We were asked to devote our first 25 years as students, next 25 as struggling working part of society, next 25 as benevolant elders of the socitey guiding it, and the remaing 25 years are to be devoted in service of god. They knew we would die long before that.

One of the first thing you learn in your school even today in India, is "gurur brahma, gurur vishnu" shloka, which means the teacher is equal to, one version [with pronounciation guruh], brahma, the biggest god among hindus, or teacher is heavier than, when pronounced gurur.

Nearly any literature you read, guru, the teacher is given the highest importance, and not god. We don't do stuff because god told us, or any book told us, we do it because our teachers taught us that that is a good thing.

They also sowed the seeds and then developed the bhakti movement. They understood that people are onto them, that masses still want their gods back, and they gave it to them in the form of chalisas, and bhakti songs. These songs are totally devoid of moral teaching or instructions of any kind, other than the most suprficial ritualistic ones, and full of praises of the god.

The primary education they imparted was though the books of stories, jataka stories and panchtantra, they were full of moral values, but yet devoid of religious sentiments, though they made sure that already established gods played important roles in those stories as characters to please the masses.

They made use of gods in the same way we use superheroes stories today to impress on the minds of young children about good and evil. But they soon go into the gray areas, because decisions in life are never that simple.

One of the very important tools they used was the story of mahabharata. This story can be looked by simple minded people as story of good vs evil, but any detailed study of it reveal it to be full of gray areas. Good guys do all the bad things and the bad guys are so often right. It made us think. To question. There is no absolute good or bad. We are human beings and we are driven by our nature, by our greed, and by our love and other virtues.

At some other time I may go into details of Gita to expand on these issue, but for the purpose of this page, its enough to say that Mahabharat and Gita is full of moral dilemmas, and gita's message is quite loud that self doubt, self assesment, and doing what feels good to ones heart and mind are the right thing to do when taking decisions, instead of wondering if you will go to heaven or hell.

They even used Krishna as the conveyor of this story to further increase the chances that the masses will digest this important change in thinking.

Another very significant tool in their hand was reincarnation. While this idea is as absurd as the notion of a hell, they realized that this idea, one of the ideas advocated in Veda, will totally destroy the notion of hell. How can there be eternal hell when there is reincarnation? Brilliant.

Vedas, like any other religious dogmatic doctrines, with ancient origins, has so many points of views, so many ideas, often conflicting; that by individually picking which ideas to elaborate on and which ideas to downplay, they managed an immensely successful coup, and transformed our religion from inside, taking a complete paradigm shift, without a single of spilled blood.

They understood that religion can only be replaced by a better religion.

Whats the proof of all this? Is this a conspiracy theory?

This clearly is a scholarly research topic. And they probably never spoke about it in open litrature.

Its imparative to understand what happened to budhists and jains in India. They formed along side this renessance of hindus, but they decided to defy Veda, and our traditional gods. What happened to them? They are followed by but a miniscule population in India, Budhists shifted to China, and prospered, there was no long established Veda in China that they were decrying. They also probably learnt from their failure in India that outrightly rejecting the traditional thought is not very smart, and more subtle and synergised way to introduce your ideas gently reaps much better acceptance. Jains just failed.

Another point I like to make is that everything I said happened, just that its not clear if it was their intention to make it happen this way. And since their intention was to engineer a drastic mindset change in huge population, and because they saw the failure of budhists in getting traction with indian population, they realised that if they had to succeed they will have to be very careful.

But this is all speculation. What is the proof? I do not have any, but i just ask myself the question that if there was a set of scholars who only preached, the analysis of ones action, and how action can have long term, secondary and tertiary effect that may not be obious, how can they not have forseen the possibility of minor changes leading to significant shift?

To assume all this was random accident, the credit still remains with hindus in modifying their way, and adopting the new paradigm, intentionally engineered or not.