Conflict Between Faith and Conscience
I just watched the most deeply depressing movie every conceived–Deepa Mehta’s Water. But as depressing as the feature film was itself, the DVD special features only made things worse.
Movies as a Source of Knowledge
I’d like to preface this article with a concession to skepticism. I know nothing about India’s culture nor Hinduism. I’ve known a handful of American citizens who used to live in India; I’ve been close friends with zero Hindus. Yet this movie made me boil against some features of that culture.
Or rather, the movie made me boil against some features of that culture as portrayed by that movie. Once, while watching a dramatized police movie, I heard someone mumble after watching a policeman brutally beat an innocent black man: “I can’t believe cops act that way. It makes me sick.” I was shocked that someone could say such a thing seriously. But then I considered that the speaker probably had seen a hundred times more policemen in movies than in real life, and his statement was more understandable (if still wrong).
So, if my impressions of this part of Hinduism taken from this film are fallacious, I’m open to being corrected.
Socio-Religious Tensions as a Source of Conflict
The source of the conflict in Water was familiar–the new, young voices of liberty backed by truth fighting against the brutal voices of social oppression backed by millennia of tradition. An eight-year-old Indian girl is widowed and relegated to the widow’s equivalent of a leper colony for the rest of her life. There she meets the prostitute with a heart of gold who plants the righteous ideals of freedom into the young girl’s mind.
During the movie, I thought how grateful I am to have a faith that calls liberation to the captive, sight to the blind, legs to the lame–that I don’t have to choose between faith and strength.
The “Universal” Conflict Between Faith and Conscience
Having heard that the film was delayed five years due to death threats, mob violence, and government interference, I watched the “making of” special feature on the DVD. The director explained the issues involved in getting the movie through production (including a full re-cast and re-filming in Sri Lanka). She then explained that she never lost sight of her goal to produce this movie, because of the universally-felt strain between faith and conscience.
Everyone, she asserts, is suspended between obedience to faith and obedience to conscience, and this lends her film power and broad appeal.
I stopped cold when I heard this. How could someone make such a statement? I have no strain between my faith and my conscience. It is true that I have no sterling record in perfectly following either, but they do not conflict. They never have. I cannot imagine them ever conflicting.
All of a sudden, I understood the position of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith. I read this book several months ago in curiosity after finding it on a roommate’s bookshelf. For the impatient, I’ll summarize. Sam Harris uses countless historical and modern anecdotes to conclude that religious faith is the root of all evil. Frankly, I found it difficult to discredit him in any particular, but it simply felt wrong. Now I understand why it felt wrong in spirit while correct in minutia–faith, without the inspiration of God, truly is the root of all evil. I stand by that statement without reservation.
Faith begins with God reinforcing the natural conscience of man. Decades of careful diligence and conscientious effort build said faith slowly into the pearl of integrity and decent righteousness. But centuries of conformance to royal whim, scholarly treatise, and imperial ambition wrap the pure kernel of faith in grime so thick that even those who wish to follow their conscience reject faith out of hand–and those who wish to abandon conscience have a worthy object of ridicule.
And here today I see the pitiful conclusion of the wayward journey of one errant faith–a film with wide appeal produced on the premise that religion must be reconciled with human virtue, but cannot be.
How God must weep.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:03 am
I agree that Deepa Mehta’s statement about faith and conscience is incomprehensible, but I’m afraid I found some of yours to be as well. For example, I didn’t understand what you mean by “faith, without the inspiration of God, truly is the root of all evil”. I thought faith *was* belief in the existence of God and in the instructions laid down by this entity for how to conduct life.
I was born a Hindu, and live in India, so I know that the kind of atrocities ‘Water’ shows are perpetrated by people who believe they are following their religion and in doing so, are pleasing God.
Since you mention Sam Harris, you may be interested in reading a very interesting online debate between him and Andrew Sullivan on the subject of God and faith.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/209/story_20904_1.html
It’s long, but well worth the read, and I have to say I am firmly on Sam’s side in this debate.
Arindam
February 9th, 2007 at 11:43 am
“faith, without the inspiration of God, truly is the root of all evilâ€
I meant to explain this further, but didn’t get around to it before publishing this entry. To me, faith *in God* is a belief in the existence of God and his instructions. You can also have faith in a friend, that he will help you. This is not a fundamentally different concept, but does have a fundamentally different effect. Faith in a friend leads you to trust his advice. Faith in any deity leads you to follow the advice that others tell you that deity has spoken.
Great faith can be put in incorrect ideals. Every action we take is motivated by a belief that the result of the action will be desirable. Therefore, at some level, faith that is not motivated by truth results in every evil action. And misplaced religious faith is particularly dangerous in this regard since its nature renders it immune to criticism.
Ben Dilts
February 9th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
“Great faith can be put in incorrect ideals”
How are we to decide which ideals are correct and which ones incorrect, if they all come to us through faith? In other words, if person A’s faith is “great” and unshakable, and person B’s faith is great and unshakable as well, on what basis are they to discuss their disagreements? Who will decide which is wrong? Because faith says “I know this is right and no amount of discussion will convince me otherwise”, I can’t see any chance of agreement.
On the other hand, it doesn’t need any faith at all to say that the kind of suffering the girl in ‘Water’ was subjected to was heinous and wrong. If indeed we can use our everyday sense of suffering, injustice, freedom, human rights and dignity to argue and decide such issues, it seems to me that faith (even of the “right” kind, whatever that is) is only an impediment to this debate, and I believe that is what Sam Harris is saying in “The End of Faith”.
Arindam
February 9th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
I suppose the reason we disagree is that you draw a distinction between real religious faith and the exercise of conscience–the same distinction drawn by Mehta that prompted my blog. I believe that the inborn human sense of right, decency, and justice has its source in God; therefore any quasi-religious practice that is patently offensive to the human conscience is a mark of misguided religion. And similarly, any non-religious practice of the same sort should be categorically opposed by any God-inspired religion.
Because I believe that conscience is inspired by Deity, I have no problem conversing on the subject of human rights in absolute terms without setting my faith aside for the purpose of the debate.
Ben Dilts
February 9th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
It feels like we are, at a smaller level, having a debate very like the Harris-Sullivan one I mentioned.
But I’m having some difficulty following your argument again, so perhaps it’s time we defined our terms. I certainly do not see myself agreeing with Mehta in her statement, which I don’t even understand.
My definition of conscience is “a person’s sense of right and wrong, and the desire to do what this sense tells them is right”. Does this agree with yours?
If so, would you say that this sense gives the same answers to every human being? I understand that Water is a work of fiction, as you very clearly point out in your cop example, but I can imagine something similar happening in a particularly backward part of India. Would you say that the people who tormented the little girl had the same sense of right and wrong about their actions as you and I do?
If this sense is not the same in everyone, what do you mean when you say “the inborn human sense of right, decency, and justice has its source in God”? If this sense is different in different people, does God act as the source of this sense in only some people? If so, how are these people selected?
If I seem particularly boorish with these questions and definitions, say so, and we can call off this debate for another time
February 9th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
No, it’s okay. I consider myself very approachable in debate for a religious person. Besides, I’m fascinated that someone outside of my immediate family and friends found my blog
I agree with your definition of conscience. But I do not believe that it is inherently different in different people. The saying goes, “even a child knows that is wrong.” It may be more correct to say that “only a child would know that is wrong.”
Consider the characters in ‘Water’. The child knows that relegating her to the widow’s equivalent of a leper colony for the rest of her life is wrong, and could never happen. The young adult woman is saddened by her situation, but protests against her friend’s invitation to marriage: “That’s just how things are.” The women who spent decades of their lives living in religious oppression accept it as a basic fact of their lives.
When a religion or religious practice requires our basic instincts of rightness to be muffled in order to continue, that religion or practice is running contrary to the good nature God planted in all of us. The practice or religion should then be scrutinized and eventually rejected as manifestly wrong.
I suppose it sounds like we should ask some kids to choose what religion is right. Obviously that would be naive, but I don’t think it would be naive to ask a small child, “Should we hurt this person because our book tells us to? She hasn’t done anything wrong, but her husband did die.”
My measure of success in my own religious life is the tenderness of my conscience. If I do something that dulls my conscience or the feeling of common humanity I share with others, I know I’ve done something wrong. I think that’s a pretty universal measuring stick for any religious practice.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:35 am
I think I understand our disagreements better now, and I don’t think we actually disagree that much. You say that our actions, whether directed by faith or otherwise, should not be considered good or bad because a book says so, but because they pass or fail the test of what you call the “feeling of common humanity I share with others”, and by questions like “do they cause hurt or suffering to anyone?”. To me, this is the core of our debate, and in this you and I are in complete agreement, and so, I believe, is Sam Harris.
Where we differ is in the (to me) less important matter of the source of this common sense of humanity and tenderness. You believe this source is God, and I think this sense has emerged through centuries of human development and progress, the work of great thinkers and the struggle of many brave people to fight for reason and human rights, usually against faith-based dogmas.
I don’t believe it is inborn in children, but that they get it mostly from a good upbringing, where their parents and others aroudn them introduce them to this accumulated sense. As children grow to be adults, and if their reason is not suppressed, this sense also comes through contemplation about cause and effect, about actions and their consequences and about the kind of world they would like to live in.