If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or jihadi movements, and “Christianity” to the Catholic Church’s latest concession, or refusal to concede, to shifts in contemporary public opinion. This is much as we might expect; it is easier for news outlets and polemical pundits to talk about social and political issues, which is after all what they do in general. One can hardly expect them to talk about atman and moksha, or taqwa and the hadith, or grace and the Trinity; their minds are simply not cut out for metaphysical ideation, and theological niceties don’t generate clicks.
The important thing for any believer in any of these religions to recall is that these accusations—which seem so reductionist and misrepresentative to anyone living and practicing inside the religion—didn’t emerge from nowhere. There is no denying that India’s caste system interlocked for centuries with Indian Hinduism, or that movements within Islam are violent today in a way that one doesn’t see in other religions, or that the Catholic Church has said, done, or condoned some pretty unmodern things in its day (to put it respectfully). These social and political negatives do exist, and are, in part, this-worldly expressions of the religions in question.
These social ills, in fact, dovetail with the metaphysics of each religion. They arise on the principle of inversion—that is, the dominant metaphysical idea of any tradition will result in its opposite effect in the society where that religion dominates.
The Upanishads offer the most radically egalitarian approach to life of any religious tradition. Not only are all men and women embodied “souls” (Sanskrit, atman); so are all animals, plants, insects, and so on. Each soul (atman) transmigrates, species-switching, but each soul is in its fundamental being the same aliquot of the divine (Brahman). This is egalitarian in a way that the deep-rooted hierarchies of all Semitic monotheisms aren’t (viz., believers > infidels, Chosen People > idolators, Christians > heathens). Yet it is precisely the religion of the Upanishads that coexisted with the Indian caste system.
One of the meanings of “Islam” is “peace.” There are very strict and clear injunctions against killing (fellow Muslims, that is) in the Qur’an—and yet the largest number of victims of Islamic terror and jihadi violence are themselves Muslims.
Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek, and how wherever two or three gather in his name, he was with them. Yet it was Christianity that gave rise to a vast Church hierarchy of priests, bishops, cardinals, Pope. It was Christians who engaged in the largest-scale extermination and conversion (I mean of the natives of both Americas) in recorded history, far surpassing Arab Muslim imperialism of the 7th century and after.
It seems that a religion prompts its followers, en masse, to betray its own highest ideas and ideals—that is, every religion has a specific theme to the social ills it causes, and the worldly manifestation inverts the philosophical vision.
This holds true of secular ideologies as well. Soviet Communism’s vision of a leveled society led to a hierarchical Party structure and the “ideologically pure” versus “ideologically impure” dichotomy familiar to us from monotheism. American democratic capitalism, meanwhile—with its gospel of everybody getting an opportunity to succeed, and all men being created equal—coexisted for a hundred years with slavery; and has coexisted, for over twice that long, with racism and drastic wealth inequality.
These inversions are not merely, in my opinion, hypocrisy. That would imply some degree of conscious deception. I believe these beautiful and elegant concepts are deeply treasured by many people in the society—the same people who, utterly unawares, by some obscure mechanism, betray what they hold dearest on the largest imaginable scale. A dualist might blame Satan, that perverter of the good, and claim that the evil we see relates to the original good idea in this way precisely because the evil originated in the good idea, which the Enemy switched the polarities of, which he twisted out of shape and into history. A humanist might simply blame—human beings.