Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

I went to the bookstore the other day to buy a hotly debated book on religion.  Oddly enough, there was no religion section for me to browse through.

"Excuse me," I said approaching the nerdy-looking woman who was working behind the counter.  "I can't seem to find any book on religion?" I ended with that questioning tone that is how we seem to talk these days?

The eager-beaver worker that she was, she offered to take me to the shelves.  Turned out that she led me straight to the classics/fiction shelves, and boy there were plenty of books on religion!

She left me in peace, while I scanned through the books.  But, there was nothing on Scientology, which is what I was looking for.

Well, back to the counter, and back to that woman.  "There is nothing on Scientology?"

"Oh, we have plenty" she said.  And took me to the section titled science fiction.

Of course, this never happened.  Who goes to the bookstore anymore--that was a dead giveaway ;)

I have merely pieced together a number of such jokes that were often sprinkled into discussions on religion through my graduate school days and during the early years of life after the doctorate.  One friend who was an anthropologist repeated his favorite over and over again  at dinner table conversations:

Question: What is the difference between a religion and a cult?
Answer: Two hundred years!

Every religion provides stories on how all these came to be, and what happens after death.  I suppose humans started conjecturing various hypotheses the moment we, unlike other animals, sensed that we die at some time and that we won't be around after that.  One minute the kid is all playful swinging from tree branch to tree branch and the next minute he falls and he is motionless.  While playfully fighting, one delivers a sucker punch and the friend does not breathe after that.  Parents died. Everybody seems to die.  Even the most primitive humans, I am sure, created stories of birth and death in order to make sense of this randomness of existence.

Along the way, many such stories have been thrown out.  Once, not too long ago, Zeus and Thor were all too powerful gods in Europe.  Could those powerful gods, too, have died?

Seasoned politicians know that they cannot and should not engage too much in the public about their religions because that will mean reminding the audience about the stories that are integral to their faith.  Seasoned politicians, that is.  The novices, on the other hand, commit the Kinsley gaffe, which is what happened to Ben Carson.  He said this about the pyramids in Egypt: "My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain."  Yes, the biblical Joseph.

Carson, a famed neurosurgeon, is no stranger to controversy. He has made a string of incendiary comments in recent years. Carson has claimed that homosexuality is a choice, evolution is an idea encouraged by the devil

As one who does not believe the religious narratives that explain everything in this cosmos to the faithful, I work with evidence and know that there is no devil behind evolution.  The pyramids of Egypt vastly pre-date the biblical Joseph.

Any religious believer needs to think twice before laughing at Carson because their respective religious stories are full of myths as well.  Hinduism, which is the religion that I was born into and later exited from, has all kinds of strange stories that the faithful believe in.  Those stories then lead to a number of religious celebrations, like Deepavali that is coming up in a couple of days.

Tyler Cowen notes about this Kinsley gaffe:

What Ben Carson has done is to commit the unpardonable sin of talking about his religion as if he actually takes it seriously.

And, hence:

But what I find strangest of all is not Ben Carson’s pyramids beliefs, but rather the notion that we should selectively pick on some religious claims rather than others.  The notion that it is fine to believe something about a deity or deities, or a divine book, as long as you do not take that said belief very seriously and treat it only as a social affiliation or an ornamental badge of honor.
Bully for Ben Carson for reminding us that a religion actually consists of beliefs about the world.

Imagine if the faithful always spoke in the public about their faiths!

The (Chinese) gods must be crazy!

As a graduate student, I never said no to any fellow Indian student asking me whether I wanted to go to the Hindu temple.  Not because I was a faithful believer, but because it was at a scenic spot, and the drive was scenic as well.  And, of course, there was good food.

Not only the temple priest, but the sculptors were also imported from India.  Of course, it was not new.  That's how these things are done.  But, if Hindus could cross the seas, which was traditionally prohibited, and could thus settle down in lands far, far away, then how much are traditions, well, traditions?

In the tradition, worshiping god is not in the abstract manner but by praying to idols and paintings.  One needs to only look at abandoned temples in order to theorize that a worshiped god no longer exists in that very idol that was worshiped for years, even centuries.  The same idol when under the care of the government's archaeology department becomes a mere artful sculpture that attracts mostly only foreign tourists.

Non-believing foreigners go to visit the god-less idols in abandoned temples.  What if non-believing foreigners created images of gods for the believers to worship?

Sounds intriguing?  The Hindu reports:

Mr. Zhao’s shop, the Zhejiang Yiwu Yijie Crafts company, displays from its walls images one would not expect to find in officially atheist China: on one corner is a collection of beautifully rendered images of the god Krishna as a child. There are, on the shop’s walls, framed photographs of half a dozen gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon: images of Ganesha, Hanuman and Saraswathi on a lotus.
From this small shop in Yiwu, these images will find their way to homes and offices – and possibly even places of worship – across India.
More than a hundred Indian companies buy Mr. Zhao’s products, supplying and distributing them across India – often without making their customers aware of the fact that the images that adorn their prayer rooms were all put together by Chinese workers in a factory in Zhejiang province.

"Without making their customers aware."  Caveat emptor, indeed!

If the customer is informed about this, will the god become any less a god to the faithful who worships the image?  

A few years ago, Thomas "master manipulator of metaphors" Friedman noted that practically every statue of Virgin of Gualalupe that was sold in Mexico was manufactured in China.  Maybe I ought to watch out for his pointless pontificating on Ganesha from Guangzhou.

Anyway, The Hindu adds:

There are at least three other companies that have factories producing images and statues of gods and goddesses for the Indian market. Most of the factories are located in Cangnan, a county close to Wenzhou – a thriving port city in Zhejiang that is famous for being a centre of entrepreneurship. Some of the companies have listed annual sales of 10 million Yuan (Rs. 10 crore); they also render a range of Christian images for export.
Zhang Daofeng, who runs a factory in Cangnan, said his company’s “Indian gods series”, which included posters, three-dimensional images and statues, were being sold across India.
Mr. Zhang was one of the earliest producers of images of Hindu gods. Today, he estimates, there are between 30 and 40 companies in China doing the same, even as they struggle to stay competitive as wages across China rise year after year. “Many of the new factories offer poor quality, but the Indian customers are very price sensitive so business is down,” he said.

Of course, the faithful shall also be bargain-hunters!  The god-crazy India combined with the price-shopping behavior means:

“It’s still easier to order from China,” one trader said. “Everything is produced in bulk, and the trade is very organised. Where am I going to find such factories in India?”

How interesting that a country with 800 million Hindus have outsourced a good chunk of their god production to godless China!

The gods must be crazy!

A woman saint in India, and it is not Indira Gandhi!

Of course, I am kidding around. But not without reason. During the 1971 war with Pakistan, Indira Gandhi was compared with Kali. Senior leaders often said, "India is Indira and Indira is India" that reminded people of the French king noting that "I am the State".

Given that it is a land of a zillion gods and gazillion saints, hey there is one more to add here. But, it is not in Hinduism. Over to BBC:

A Catholic nun, Sister Alphonsa, has been made India's first female saint, at an event presided over by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
The canonisation was greeted with delight by Christians in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where Sister Alphonsa lived until her death in 1946.