Hindu groups that are protesting “The Love Guru” should relax, buy some popcorn and enjoy the movie. The fact is that it’s pretty innocuous at worst and actually a humorous, if wildly over-simplified version of some of the most popular teachings that have emerged from Hindu teachers and traditions. Where else can one find a popular film that shares Gandhi’s teaching that a world animated by the spirit of “an eye for an eye” will simply create a world of blind people?

No, the movie is neither a sophisticated rendering of a wise and ancient tradition, nor does it pretend to be one. But there is no more disrespect of the tradition here than there is when similar portrayals of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith are used to make us laugh. In fact, such portrayals assume that we know enough and care enough about the tradition being lampooned, that we can appreciate the humor. Such material only works when that is the case. So this is as much about the popular foothold that Hinduism has established in American pop culture as anything else. And that kind of popularity always makes the purists in any community nervous. But that’s their problem. And it’s not limited to Hindus.

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I give thanks to God for the 21% of atheists who affirm their belief in Her or Him, and I am blown away by the holiness of such people who manage to pray once a week. In fact, I think that I aspire to being one of them (though with a bit more regular prayer).

Of course the quick response to such a finding is that American atheists must not be a very bright group if over a fifth of them say that they believe in God. Don’t they know what the word means?! But in truth, they may be way ahead of many of us who count ourselves among the faithful.

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This statistic and those that were recently released in the second phase of the Pew study exploring what Americans believe (which indicated that over 90% of us believe in some “higher power”), prove that we are a nation whose population is spiritually healthier than the doctors of dogma and custodians of culture who regularly speak to this issue.

One person’s “paranormal” is another person’s religion. The first term is the one we use when we choose to be dismissive or pejorative in our description of a supposedly supernatural experience, or one that goes beyond the doctrines of the faith we follow, and the latter is what we call roughly the same experience which has gained acceptance from a critical mass of people, or those who control a particular religious system. And I don’t mean that cynically, really!

I just think that we need to be very cautious in negatively branding some practices and beliefs which many people ridicule e.g. faith healing, séances, exorcisms, etc. while assuming the appropriateness of those which many Americans practice e.g. prayer to a personal God, claiming with certainty to understand God’s will, the activity of angels, etc.

They are not all equal and distinctions can be made. But the ongoing culture war between radical religionists who insist that they always know precisely where to draw the line between what is and is not an acceptable belief, and the fanatical secularists who mock all faith, is not so healthy for any of us. And it seems that most Americans know that. Perhaps that is why we are more faith-filled than the latter group would like, and more inclusive about that which we believe, than is acceptable to the former group.

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The role of religion in the military is the same as the role of religion everywhere, when working properly i.e. to bring wisdom, decency, meaning, comfort and community to all those who seek it in that way. Why is it that so many of the people who appreciate the first part of that sentence can not accept the last eight words, and the ones who appreciate those last eight words get tense about the public expression of the rest of the sentence?

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