"All religions are fingers pointing to the moon.
What's important is to not look merely at the finger"
Religion embraces the universal sphere of relations with the sacred but it involves relations with history as well.
It triggers our curiosity about the Infinite but at the same time comes into conflict with man's weaknesses.
Reflecting on religion means reflecting on man's quest for the Infinite at every period of history and at every latitude. However it also means reflecting on the historical forms of rituals used by the different faiths in pursuit of this Infinite, and clashing with bigotry, error, fanaticism. One chapter of Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov speaks at length about the Anti-Christ when it talks of the Great Inquisitor. Reflecting on religion means reflecting on Christ and the Anti-Christ.
Meditating on religion means being enraptured and amazed by man's relationship with the boundless universe we are part of but, at the same time, being angered by the emptiness of certain rituals that on occasions shut out this very boundlessness they want to contain, mistaking container for content, ritual for God.
Like a
swinging pendulum, reflection on religion leads to the issue of tolerance
and intolerance (considered in terms of acceptance/non-acceptance of
anyone different from myself), touching on their respective extremes.
On the one hand religious faith - being in syntony with the divine -
is tolerance par excellence, religious spirit is unconditional love
for whoever is different from me and for a wholeness that I too am part
of.
On the other hand a certain kind of religiousness is the very height
of intolerance, since it claims to offer the only right path to salvation,
it rejects diversity and it adopts a dangerous and detached attitude
of hubris, going as far as to define anyone or anything different as
'heretical' and deviant, and therefore to be eradicated.
My work on religion sits at the middle point of the pendulum: it reflects on man's quest for the Infinite and on tolerance for every form of creation, but it also reflects on the hypocrisy of intolerance and on the danger of fanaticism.
As a famous
Indian sage once said:
"All religions are fingers pointing to the moon.
What's important is to not look merely at the finger"
