Pop religiosity

From Ajwa date to dust of the holy lands and halal dating on the web—every notion is couched in the commercial idiom

The onerous challenge faced by every commercial entity in consumer capital era is “staying relevant”. When thrust for relevance takes over from excellence to keep pace with highly complex and rapidly perishable resource-base, everything is commoditized and tailored according to fit mass-demands to win the race. Religion, despite its otherworldly claims, never sits idle during these highly testing times but moves forward, with the help of merchants as its base-force, to attract disillusioned youth with the commoditized package of pop religiosity.

Pop religiosity follows none but only one heavenly pattern and that is of turning star into a black hole. When a star dies, after having consumed all of its energy it becomes a black hole. Similarly, when religion dies it becomes pop-religiosity to devour sense and sensibility. To meet popular demands of quickly digestible religiosity, it cares for nothing but exterior formalities and turns into such a clumsy mixture of dogma, doctrine, creed, church, business and patriotism that one fails to tell one from the other. Pop-religiosity is a sophisticated way to have and, concurrently, conceal collective madness.

Pop-religionists have no religion but unflinching belief in an ancient Persian proverb that says, “If you want your one generation to be rich deal in goods but if you want your seven generations to be rich, deal in religion”. Secret of pop-religionists’ success lies in their right diagnoses that people want nothing but a well-packaged deceptive significance. People want higher powers to be spokesperson of their false egos, so it is sold like hot cake.

The relationship between pop-religiosity and popular media is of sea and salt nature. Both of them depend on each other to flourish. The commercial media puts pop-religiosity on sale for it satisfies the demands which are more of commercial than of non-commercial and otherworldly nature. Both of them, in the guise of saintliness, work for the ideal of “organized greed” and politically exploitable hatred.

So, the billboard and screens never aim to produce original scholars but only religious snobs who can serve snobbish religiosity. If one has good memory and “goes” pop, one can mug the whole wisdom up in a few days and win lots of water coolers in a quiz program like Neelam Ghar. One can become a millionaire (even billionaire) if one can store more data and has adequate ingeniousness to present ignorance as knowledge—“this book chapter number that; that book chapter number this”...

This is how the miracle of in-depth shallowness is created.

Playing God-God in every issue, profoundly superficial interpretations of religion mingled with militant piety and nationalism make selling ingredients of pop religiosity.

Moreover, to gain massive popularity, pop-religiosity erects the pillars of a queer art—camouflaging gunpowder in jam—brining baser emotions and basic instincts into action under holy rags. Without nourishing basic instincts, adding sacred ornaments to erotomania and apposite amount of nationalism, producers fail to produce rag-to-riches story of their own.

By speaking to egos and muscles, under the guise of “transcendent” nationalism, pop-religiosity desensitizes humanity to whatever makes a human a human being. It aims at dispiriting people to find ways to share this planet with the people whose worldviews and beliefs slightly differ.

To bring the absurdities to further extremes, pop-religiosity strives to bring about a kind of “metaphysical-standardization”. “Only those who use correct proper-nouns can evoke divinity otherwise how would true God know that the worshipper is calling Him?” All this is done with the utter neglect to common sense that religion, if categorized, would fall in subjective domain and seeking standardization in people’s personal world is nothing shorter than ignorance. People in similar faith systems conceptualize divinity in the light of their own experiences. Two persons may be uttering the similar words but the impressions and experiences conjured up by these words would always be highly personal. In this exceedingly private province, one’s personal experience of sacred does not exhaust alternate possibilities. In short, religious-standardization is and would remain a fool’s complacency until some pop-religionist invents a faith-meter—only expected invention on the credit of faithful.

Pop-religiosity is fattened by dangerous doses of complacency which makes everyone, who goes pop, take no time in claiming, "I have all the answers" and delegates him/herself to speak for God. Above all, pop religiosity is replete with doctrines of apocalyptic nature. Because of its inherent evil-centeredness, it declares certain states and ideas to be evil.

This dangerous approach wears striking resemblance with medieval Christianity which was more interested in Serpent than god. What makes pop-religiosity stand apart and known is its being evil-obsessed and consequently, it can produces nothing but evil because “one becomes what one constantly sees”. In other words, it takes you there where your gaze rests.

Why this infatuation with evil? Because all that pop-religiosity does and performs is nothing but an expression of suppressed evil. Whatever is suppressed goes deeper into one’s being to make one hypocrite.

Pop religiosity encourages people to ask only pointless, rather bad, questions and warns them not to seek the answers for themselves "Never think by yourself, I am here to tell you what to think and what to ask!" None of the pop-religionists, however, is ready to take the responsibility of popular actions and the havoc they may bring. I have never seen any pop-religionist being asked, "How can I be held responsible before God If have no individual freedom?"

Pop religiosity is apparently world-denouncing but in fact highly worldly. It uses denouncements as sacred masks to hide unquenchable lust and greed...

Everything, in this realm, has a price tag. From Ajwa date to dust of the holy lands and halal dating on the web—every notion is couched in the commercial idiom. Catch any televangelist pop religionist and ask, “last night, in your show, you presented us with wonderful data about reward of good acts as naiki. By doing this you win 100 virtues, and by doing that you win 7000, I just want to ask as what does the word or term naiki or swab means?” “Virtue is in fact currency for the hereafter. In return for that you can get anything at divine shop in the heaven”, you would be answered with a mercantile grin.

In the light of above, we can call it “mercantile religiosity” as well. Merchants, like gamblers, have to appease higher forces in the hope for big catch. When Faust sells out his soul and starts dealing in illusions, he becomes a pop-religionist. Buying and selling being dominant motif of it, pop religiosity flourishes less with the profits and more with the loss. It is not like purchasing Momin’s [faithful’s] life and property for heaven but purchasing God to safeguard one’s property and life.

Merchants perceive business in everything including God, beauty and arts.

It is said that once a businessman invited Faiz Ahmed Faiz for a dinner. The man was so influential that Faiz had to accept his invitation. The business man received Faiz in his palace with open arms saying that he was a great fan of his poetry. In surprise, Faiz asked which piece of his poetry impressed him the most. On this, the businessman said:

“Chalay bhi au kay gulshan ka karobar chalay (Come so the business of Garden may go on). You are the only poet who talks about business (karobar), so I like you among all those who don’t know the importance of commerce”…