Holy cities--the cure for religion

by Alex Buchan

So-called "holy cities" always make my head spin, but they do serve a very useful, if ironic, purpose.

I recently visited the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, built on the banks of the sacred Ganges River in northern India. Most Hindus believe that the weary cycle of birth and rebirth can be avoided, and instant access to heaven guaranteed, if they die in this sacred city or at least are cremated here. Thus, the smoke is always rising, as bodies are constantly being burned.

Hygiene is minimal. Dogs with festering sores grab partially burned human limbs from the open pyres. The narrow streets run with raw sewage, while all around pilgrims chant, temple bells clang, and the cloying smell of incense mixes with hashish used by the holy men to aid meditation.

Ranaji, one of these holy men, clad in a saffron robe and with a brass pot as his sole possession, showed me his fist. At first I thought he was deformed, but he told me proudly that he had held his fist tightly balled for 14 years, so that the skin had grown into a stump, obliterating the fingers. His thumbnail had grown all the way through his palm up through the back of his hand. The pain must have been excruciating for years.

"Why?" I asked him.

If I was expecting some sophisticated Hindu doctrine, I was to be disappointed. Philosophical Hinduism--the form most Westerners encounter--is followed by less than 2% of India's nearly 800 million Hindus. Most profess a much more basic and ancient form of worship.

He said, "You have to disdain the body, because it is an illusion, and offer what you can to the gods." He looked at my puzzled face, and added, "The gods are capricious, you see; they can deliver you one day and kill you the next, so you just have to keep on appeasing them in the hope that they will be favourable."

India's 25 million Christians do not encounter primarily the Hinduism of Mahatma Gandhi or Ramana Maharishi, but the fearful appeasement rituals of Ranaji and others like him.

I remembered an earlier visit to another so-called holy city, Jerusalem. Its narrow streets, noisy hawkers and chanting pilgrims charging into churches in an undignified mass are somewhat reminiscent of Varanasi. When I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1980, a Coptic priest manhandled me to the ground, sloshed incense over my hands, muttered a prayer and then held out a grubby hand saying, "Your donation please." When I refused to cough up the required shekel, he got so mad he hitched up his robe, exposing a pair of thick hairy legs, and chased me in terror from the church.

In both cities, the air was tense with a spectre of religious violence and persecution. In Varanasi, soldiers nervously guarded the great Muslim mosque, which stands right beside the Golden Temple, the most venerated site in popular Hinduism. Hindu militants have threatened to destroy the mosque, as they did a mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. In Jerusalem, I witnessed ultra-orthodox Jews spit and shout abuse at Palestinian Christians.

A friend of mine once said, "The only cure for religion is to go to a holy city and see what goes on--the oppressive rituals of the faithful, the incitement to war from the elite." He might be right. But then, as Christian scholar Peter Cotterell points out, "The Bible itself is consistently opposed to religions," because religion substitutes ritual for relationship. The great Christian theologian Karl Barth was more direct: "Religion is unbelief."

Religion so often is a mere set of rituals designed to manipulate the favour of God. To put our trust in the rituals is the very idolatry God is so sternly opposed to in the Christian Bible. "Don't perform for Me," He thunders. "Get to know Me."

How ironic that it should be the role of these "holy cities" to show us how dangerous religion can be!

It's no wonder, then, that God used persecution to kick the early Christian church out of Jerusalem (you can read about it in Acts in the Bible). Cotterell again says, "[God] knew that if the church stayed in Jerusalem, it would be suffocated by religion." People like me--and perhaps you--can be saved only because Christianity escaped its holy cities and focusses on our relationship with God.

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