Political Theology: Political monotheism and religious polytheism

As the title suggests, this is an academic paper, and to be taken seriously, it has be humid, tasteless and annoying. A lot of effort has been put on jokes, very little on findings to ensure these remain unfunny. All in all, this is what religion is to academicians and what academia is to religious zeal.

Emotions are the adhesive to the world, and intelligence an adhesive to the multiplicity of emotions. If we are the 3-eyed consciousness, peeking simultaneously into the past, present and the future, our life then is not the stone adjoining past, present and the future, in which we carve a monolithic structure through our problem solving skills, the adhesive to our emotions, furthering the adhesive to the world. Our lives are not near to these, but precisely the same.

 Rama, the metamorphosis of Vishnu, today, is the preserver of monotheistic faith. For an idea like the Hindu, monotheism is the prison. The prison of past present and the future, very akin to the stillness of the stone, very akin to our lives, as real as an idea can get, as political the reality can afford to be.

But the idea of Hindu, if the idea must manifest; the sheer suffering the idea must bear to be real, the shreds of spiritualism, imagination, mysticism, all of them must part to be real, to be the common faith, to be concrete, to unite in a monotheistic structure.

I am all for it, make an idea a religion, kill the reason for some, kill the jokes for many, subject it to the burden of manifestation, to the monotheistic view every eye could penetrate, mould it into the subsumed idea of faith, far more simpler than faith over an idea.

As an anti-thesis to monotheistic faith then, appears the air of polytheism, manifesting as the patchwork of anti-thetical sanctum sanctorum, the multiplicity of faith, intelligence, with the adhesive of emotions. The idea that crowd and mobility is not the political end, religion ought to be the means to.

Faith then should be viewed from the natural lens of polytheism. Religion consequently, becomes an end in itself, the path to general introspection, co-existence, co-operative fluidity, and not the brick, stones, mortar and concrete through which monotheistic faith seeks any political end.

The vulnerability of religion then, to fall prey to the confinements of its own unambiguity, is its ultimate fate. Religion is then the only failed idea that owes its propagation to its failure. As much as (non-religious) cynicism would allow the (religious) cynicism to succeed, it is failing to make a joke out of itself; it fails to build an aesthetic around nonsense, around unfounded belief, around non-essential manifestation. Conclusively, what academic sanity lacks is curated madness.

To put a difficult joke then, amidst all the serious findings of a research paper, comes as good news to 1,500 to 2,000 stonemasons, whose abstract labor would lead to manifestation of Ram Temple, and to the crores of beggars who can now find employment opportunities in or outside the premises, if the administrative board if Ram temple (controlled by VHP) allows.