The moment one says in response to the question, “Who are you?”, “I am a Muslim / Hindu / Christian / Jew”, religion’s dangerous work is done. There can be no more effective way of dividing humankind than along the fault lines of religion. It is amazing how each religion professes to be different, yet they all teach the same thing which is, superficially, ‘love thy neighbour’ and actually, ‘kill her if she doesn’t follow your creed’!

The goal of having a single religion for the entire world is as futile as the goal of turning every single person into a farmer or a man. Religious leaders and their mischievous political followers refuse to recognise this fact. Their sole endeavour is to bring people into their fold. Why? The answer is simple. Power lies in numbers. The more people there are following a single faith, the more powerful that faith. Religious spread, therefore, is no more or less than the materialistic game of numbers, of market share.

But whereas corporations chasing market share usually follow open methods of advertising and promotional gimmicks to generate more adherents, religions have to cloak their efforts in the mumbo-jumbo of ‘spiritualism’ to increase their spread. In almost every field, competition is seen as a positive, since it motivates the promoter to improve the offering.

Almost all promotion consists of making your product more attuned to the needs of the consumer, creating an innovative design that is in line with the changing times, reducing the price to improve affordability, changing the packaging to make it more attractive. A soft drink might have been sold in glass bottles a hundred years ago, then in tin cans, and later still in plastic containers when plastic’s vast possibilities were unleashed. Now there would be ways to make the packaging more eco-friendly in recognition of the damage that such large quantities of plastic are doing to the environment.

The fables and myths that sprang out of experiences when there were no automobiles, television, mobile telephones and safe birth control methods continue to be espoused even today when life has changed completely. There is no investment in research to make the offering contemporary and relevant. Age-old shibboleths decrying adultery, which might have been a crime in a close-knit tribe but is now nothing more than a passing complexity in an age of quick divorces and even quicker marriages, continue to be churned out. Such contempt for customer needs would logically invite a massive thumbs-down from the consumer. To take care of this possibility, religious leaders have uncovered the perfect formula for loyalty – fear. They use fear of divine retribution as their most powerful weapon in the war to gain footfalls. ‘We don’t want to win you over, we want to scare you into compliance’ is their modus operandi.

Having gained customer loyalty by holding a gun to their heads, they then manage competition by trying to decimate it, an unrealistic stance. While all reasonable corporations, countries, people, sports teams recognise that competition exists but should be defeated, religions question this premise altogether. Unbelievers are scorned and denounced as traitors. Secondly, while in all other spheres, the competitor is treated with respect in recognition of the fact that someday it may emerge winner, religions make no such concession. A Muslim believes that Islam is the supreme faith, while a Christian believes the same about Christianity. Therefore, when the starting point for any dialogue across faiths is that everything other than their own faith is dangerous dogma, there isn’t any starting point at all. The basic fact remains that the different faiths and their more radical adherents treat the other as an enemy, not as a competitor, and seek to vanquish it at any cost. If religions chose to jettison their hypocrisy and declared that every other faith is nothing but competition, and therefore fair game for promotional activities, there would be less violence and more entertainment. The pope and the chief mullah could each appear on TV and declare that Christianity/Islam is better for a number of reasons. But these leaders cannot be seen to be so open in their ends. Also they can’t be seen to be doing anything so human as acknowledging that everyone has a right to follow their own conscience.

Since the various faiths deny to themselves legitimate means to increase their market share, they have no choice but to resort to devious methods. The blasphemy law and the ridiculous debate on ‘defamation of religion’ are the latest weapons employed by the ‘faithful’ to trounce competition. Anyone who is perceived to look critically at a particular religion is to be punished. This is hardly the way to win friends and influence non- believers. But the radicals, committed as they are to the cause of a mono-religious world, cannot see this. They refuse to see what the humblest marketing executive in a multinational corporation can tell them, that one cannot increase market share by ridiculing or terrorising the customer, only by improving one’s own strategy.

The Human Rights Council is, in a way, meant to promote fair marketing practices, that is, it oversees the protection of human rights of all the citizens of the world. It has the responsibility of protecting citizens from coercion of any kind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has clearly outlined what constitutes a violation of the rights of an individual in a bid to protect her from the tyranny of an organisation, whether it is the state or a religious formation. It makes no distinction between religious or any other kind of oppression. In a way, it provides a level playing field for every kind of religious and secular formation, and expects adherence to a minimum level of civility amongst various groups.

But civility is not something that religions can afford to have when it comes to ‘winning’ over followers. They acknowledge that it’s a war out there, and they had better take the maximum casualties, and if that means turning established, modern institutions like the Human Rights Council into a joke then so be it.

While the mullahs and the priests might believe this, fortunately for Humanism, the average human being doesn’t. The soft drink manufacturer knows this. He customises his offering in recognition of the fact that the human being is constantly evolving and constantly innovating. That is exactly what Humanism does. It respects the human being’s desire for freedom. It acknowledges that every individual is in a perpetual quest for truth, and there is no eternal truth or ‘God’. Humanism allows each individual to chart out her own path to ‘salvation’, not in the next world, which of course doesn’t exist, but in the here and now. There is a lot in common between the soft drink manufacturer and Humanism!

The reason why Humanism is going to attract more and more followers is because people are able to see through the hypocrisy of religion, and are getting tired of having a gun pointed to their head. They demand respect, and Humanism gives them that. And that is the final victory.

Sangeeta Mall is Editor, IHN.