http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/this-i-believe/?apage=19#comment-80279

Judith, the confusion and the angst of the mixed religions is a familiar story with our generation

As a Hindu and an immigrant, and a parent of two teenage boys I struggle with the concept of religion and the religious legacy I am leaving behind for my children and other progeny of our generation

In India you are a Hindu by osmosis and the rituals while comforting have no express meaning. I am not sure if the rituals are based on fear or faith.

Our parents sent us to catholic schools, and while religious, also attended Mass on Wednesdays at a local church.

My kids are enrolled in Sunday school at a local Hindu Mission - an attempt by my wife and I to teach and give them a religious foundation and moral values.

But my generation teaches the kids based on what we know and how we perceive Hinduism based on our experience growing up in India

I worry those teachings have no relevance in our children’s lives here in the US - unless we learn to adapt our religious education to embrace the philosophical values so eloquently espoused in religious texts and focus less on rituals it is inevitable that the next generation will belong to an hyphenated religion - call it a amalgam of Hindu-Buddhist-Moslem-Jewish- Christian faiths

maybe the world will be better place when that happens

after all if all gods are the same then the hyphenation makes perfect sense and is probably the dawn of a unified world religious order where all faiths are intermixed

What will the terrorists do for a living then?

— Mahesh Shetty

Faith, Proof and Relics

Excerpt from Peter Manseau's article in the Wall Street Journal on the mystery behind the shroud of Turin (April 11, 2009)

(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123940218130209621.html)

This is not to say the puzzle has been solved. Even if it was created by an artist or charlatan several hundred years ago, as of yet there has been no explanation how such an ingenious rendering could have been created with the technologies of the day.

But maybe so much focus on explanation misses the point. Belief -- any belief, whether in God, the Resurrection, even the Force -- requires a partial abandonment of the rational. This does not mean that faith is irrational, only that it involves a recognition that there are some things that can be explained only through acknowledgment that proof is not always the highest good.

Faith fashions itself as a challenge to our assumptions, our expectations -- and relics are an embodiment of that challenge. As the early Christian author Tertullian said in defense of his belief that Jesus rose from the dead, "it is certain because it is impossible."


As much as it is a tradition passed down through the generations, an inherited vocabulary for describing the inexplicable, belief is also an act of the will. Despite scientific investigations, the beliefs that make phenomena like the Shroud relevant are not something required by the rules of logic. There is no rational need to write a poem or to paint a picture, and there is no rational need to believe, which is to search for something meaningful in the enigmatic markings that define our lives.

Yet the tension remains: the will to believe, the need for proof. Perhaps this is what the Shroud is really about: our divine aspirations bound up with our mortal concerns.