Religion has been reduced to superstitious imitation in the age of scientific revolution. The birth of materialistic science through thoughts and experiments of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, etc., has been instrumental in knowing systematically the outer world through reason, experiment, and critical inquiry. Undoubtedly, the evolution of scientific methods, from Aristotelean teleological method to know the cosmos to the development of quantum world, from mythology, literatures to the development of history and sociology, has proved to be a progression to know the world and control the phenomenon through scientific experiment. But what has remained stagnated in all these developments is nothing but human's psyche and their reliance on rituals, faiths, and believes. Nobody can claim with certainty that one doesn't rely upon belief at all. A Marxist, a Freudian, or a Darwinian like Richard Dawkins cannot ignore the role of belief in our life. Every step of human's life is a gigantic "leap of faith" (Kierkegaard); that faith may be religious, mythical, scientific, or conventional.
Marx's claim that religion is a "opium of masses" came from his experiences that religion was nothing more than an institutionalized form of dominant power exercised by powerful over powerless. It was flourishing at the cost of superstitious and dogmatic rituals of masses, harnessed by clergymen, priests, or kings to let them live in a state of "inner retreat of citadel" (Isaiah Berlin), so that, hegemony of a few could be established without being disturbed by masses. The aristocratic character of institutionalized religions fundamentally endangered the spirit of freedom of inquiry and engendered the slumber, the unfathomable abyss. Many thinkers, philosophers, theorists were persecuted in name of heresy or blasphemy. Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo are a few known theorists, who were persecuted for their heretic scientific ideas. Power as an emancipatory potential (Upendra Baxi) couldn't find a place in a worldview dominated by repressive power of institutionalized religions.
Self-knowledge is quintessential as the foundation of every form of knowledge. The Bible rightly says,
"What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul"(Matthew, 16:26)? Buddha emphasized to be a light of its own without being relied upon any authority. Religion may be treated as a "tradition of authority", which has got its secularised version, imposed or adopted in the most part of the world. It may be treated as a "tradition of self-knowledge". The meditation to know the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious to realise the substratum of human's experience, human's fantasies, and human's imagination. Religion may also be treated as a "tradition of logos". No human can survive at the premise of absurd conclusion. Everybody is interested to know with a sense of certainty, what's happening around the world. Jerome Frank finds a child psychology, which is predominant throughout life of a human being to make things certain. Meaning making abilities of the human's species are very crucial for the reliance upon the religions as a way to provide answers to the most crucial questions, such as life and death. Heidegger rightly asserted that the birth of philosophy is possible due to humans' anxiousness about their own "finitude". Religion was developed as a "faith-system" to provide transcendence from the finite cacophony of the so called most rational-animal of the planet Earth.
Religion is mostly treated as a "tradition of identity" in our polarized world. The essence of religion is reduced in such a tradition around the rituals or practices. The whole religious conflicts emanate from the premise of similarities and differences. Similarities are welcomed, in such a tradition, at the cost of persecution of stranger or unknown ideas. This is the reason why the necessity of tolerance is felt under the Constitutional culture of a liberal/social-democratic set up, which normatively demands from the citizens to practice tolerance with respect to diversity of rituals, cultures, or ways of life. Religion as a "tradition of culture" appears to be a twin sisters of the "tradition of identity". Culture has a fundamental role in fixing the identity. For example, the Constitutional cultural in India has established citizenship as an identity of the more than a billion of Indians. Religion can find its most suitable expression only in a culture of knowing and contemplation. Science is useful for knowing the world. But religion has potentials to be a guide towards the path of self-knowing of dogmas, beliefs, and fantasies. Without self-knowledge, the technology of science is nothing more than a progression towards destructive mastery over so called brute nature, which leads nowhere except self-bafflement.
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