Impossibility of the end of religion

A society free from religion is inconceivable. Confucianism, Buddhism and Socialism which have no regard for God are also portrayed as forms of religion which bind together all those who believe in them. Some variants of practicing Buddhism eventually developed the notion of gods and goddesses also and even idol worship. A communist is linked to Karl Marx and the red flag in the same way and as intimately as a member of Arya Samaj to statue of Swami Dayananda and the flag containing the symbol Om, or a conservative Hindu to idol of Lord Krishna and to flag containing symbols from the Krishna cult. As long as the world is marked by birth and death, sickness, poverty, inequality, injustice, natural disasters, traumas and suffering, uncertainties and anxieties, there will remain religion. Real man is more than the ideal type of rational man as portrayed in Weberian and economics literature.

Several of the early thinkers on the subject, notably Comte and Durkheim, thought that industrialization and development of science and technology will lead to secularization in the sense of fall in religious values. Looked at from one angle, we find lot of empirical evidence for this: in the West church attendance is falling; and other institutions of society stand widely separated from religion. Political institutions, education, family values, and economic organization are no more governed by religious injunctions. Yet, at the individual level religion has survived and is a major source of meaningful life, subjective well-being, commitment to work and moral action.

Thus the issue is not to fight religion because it contains a few undesirable elements or because institutionalization of religion has created conflicts of identity, political conflicts and communal violence but to revolutionize the prevailing representations of religion to suit the requirements of humanism and equality. Using Gandhian notion of Sarvodaya, we need to develop a new shape of religion in which the idea that the interest of the self lies in serving the interest of all is the basic guiding philosophy.