The Curious Case of a Jaina Monk

Most of you (if not all) will be more or less familiar with the various naturalist critiques of 'religion', some of which are the following.

(A) The 'Freudian' Critique : When human beings are young, they enjoy the protection of their (physical) father; when they grow older, they wish to have a (supernatural) Father to look down upon them kindly and to keep them under His cosmic wings. So they project the notion of 'God' into the highest skies, and rituals centred around the worship of this illusion develop into the routinised structures of religion.

(B) The 'Marxist' Critique : Religion is the opium that is offered by the richer classes in society to the poorer ones, thereby justifying the gross levels of inequality through the ideological explanation that the latter's misery is ingrained into the nature of reality and will be rewarded in the next life, and that there is nothing that they can do to change this state of affairs.

(C) The 'Sociobological' Critique : Religions are the social mechanisms or systems that further the replication of genes of human beings into the next generation. All human beings are concerned that this propagation be successfully maintained across time, and thereby they develop religious forms of life in order to ensure this continuation.

Of all these critiques, I believe that it is only (B) that comes anywhere near the target; and even (B) is not comprehensive enough to cover all cases of 'religion'. To see why this is the case, consider the following Curious Case of a Jaina Monk.

In 1965, a Jaina monk called Acarya Shantisagar voluntarily withdrew from the world in order to attain liberation (Sanskrit : moksa) from the world by ritual fasting to death.

I would urge you to reflect on that statement for a few minutes before reading on. And now, this is how one can reply to the above critiques if they are meant to be comprehensive ones covering all species of the genus 'religion'.

Counter-Argument to (A) : Though Jainism is not 'atheistic' in the sense that it believes that we human beings are essentially spiritual entities (Sanskrit : jivatman) which need to be purified through the karmic law, there is no concept of a creator God in Jainism. Therefore, a Jain cannot be said to believe in the existence of the jivatman because she wishes for a Grand-Daddy in the skies, and the Freudian critique that religion is merely a longing for a cosmic Protector misses the mark in the case of Jainism (and also, incidentally, for most traditions of Advaitic Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism).

Counter-Argument to (B) : Though the institutionalised structures of Jainism (many Jainas are rich and powerful businessmen) could be subjected to Marxist criticism, (classical) Marxism cannot explain the existence of thousands of Jaina monks (and for that matter, of Buddhist, Hindu and Catholic monks and nuns). If religion is merely a mechanism through which rich people offer a mystificatory explanation of reality to the poor, why do so many religious people themselves adopt a life of near-absolute poverty with no 'private property' to their name?

Counter-Argument to (C) : If religion is merely a system to propagate one's genes, what reproductive success or (neo-Darwinist) evolutionary advantage could Acarya Shantisagar have been hoping for when he fasted himself to death?

So the next time you come across in a book, a magazine, an internet-site or an academic journal a theory that claims to 'explain' all patterns of 'religious behaviour', apply the Shantisagar Test to it and ask yourself, 'Does this theory explain the Curious Case of a Jaina Monk?'