[nukkad] A secularist speaks

[zaverirm <>]

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I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. 
-Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)
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Hello,
Shashi Tharoor, an eminent writer and a secularist gives his personal
reasons for believing in the faith of his conviction.

Quote :

I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen
times in his working life) always had a prayer room, where paintings and
portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with
fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from
the incense burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his
bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer room wrapped in his
towel,
his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never
obliged me to join him, he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an
intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of
your maker you choose to worship. In the Indian way, I was to find my own
truth.

Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am a believer, despite a brief period of
schoolboy atheism (of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality
and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations - and with the
realization
that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no
answers). And I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not just
because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other
reasons,
though faith requires no reason. One is cultural : as a Hindu I belong to a
faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for
lack of
a better phrase, its intellectual "fit" : I am more comfortable with the
belief
structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of
which
I know. As a Hindu, I claim adherence to  a religion without an established
church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to
reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any
visible
sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific
day
or time or frequency of worship. As a Hindu, I subscribe to a creed that is
free            of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be
shackled to the
limitations of a single holy book.

Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that
does
not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be
able
to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the
conviction that I am embarked upon a 'true path' that they have missed. This
dogma
lies at the core of Christianity, Islam and Judaism - "I am the Way, the
Truth
and the Life, no man cometh unto the Father (God), but by me" (John 14:6),
says
The Bible. "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his Prophet,"
declares
the Koran - denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of
salvation or paradise. Hinduism, however, asserts that all ways of belief
are            equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and
the sacred objects,
of other faiths.

Unquote.
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Rohit Zaveri.





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