I recently had one of those conversations with a friend that left me thinking about something much larger than either of us intended.
He was raised Muslim and had spent much of his life accepting the faith he inherited, not unusually, but in the way most of us inherit the foundational assumptions of our lives. We rarely choose the religion we are born into. We are given it before we are old enough to interrogate it, surrounded by people who reinforce it, taught its rituals and stories, and eventually come to experience those beliefs not simply as ideas about God but as part of who we are.
Something had changed for him. He had begun questioning much of what he had once accepted, and when I saw him last week, he seemed to have arrived at a place that would probably have been unimaginable to his younger self. He no longer believed the scriptures were divine. He was no longer convinced there was a God directing any of this. In some ways, he sounded almost atheist, although labels seemed less important to him than the larger realization that he could no longer organize his life around beliefs simply because they had been handed to him.
What fascinated me, though, was not that he was walking away from Islam. People have been losing faith, finding faith, and changing faiths for as long as religion has existed. What grabbed my attention was what he was moving toward. He had become interested in Buddhist ideas about attachment, desire, and suffering, and was beginning to believe that a meaningful life might require wanting less rather than constantly trying to acquire more. He wasn’t talking about replacing Allah with Buddha. He was talking about replacing the pursuit of certainty and fulfillment with something closer to peace.
I understood that instinct very well.
I have spent almost all of my life deeply skeptical of organized religion. I have never been particularly persuaded by the certainty with which human beings claim to know what an unknowable God wants, or by the remarkable coincidence that the God most people believe to be the one true God is usually the God worshipped by their parents, neighbors, and surrounding culture. Had I been born in Riyadh, Rome, rural Alabama, or Varanasi, there is a very good chance that I would have been taught entirely different truths about the creator of the same universe, and I have always found it difficult to reconcile that accident of geography with the confidence with which we condemn other people’s beliefs.
My skepticism has grown rather than diminished with age, but something else has changed too. I am less interested now in proving religion wrong. There was probably a time when I found some intellectual satisfaction in pointing out contradictions in scripture, questioning religious institutions, or arguing that organized faith had caused enormous harm. I still believe many of those criticisms are legitimate, but they no longer seem particularly profound. Saying that religion has contradictions tells us very little about why billions of intelligent human beings continue to need it. Saying that people have committed terrible acts in God’s name tells us very little about whether God was the cause or simply the justification. And declaring oneself free from religion does not necessarily mean one has escaped the human impulses religion has always sought to address.
That distinction feels particularly relevant right now because religion is once again colliding visibly with politics, nationalism, and belonging. In the United States, we are arguing about whether America is fundamentally a Christian nation and how much Christian belief should shape its laws and public institutions. Elsewhere, ancient religious identities are entangled with disputes over land, nationhood, and history. Antisemitism gets amplified by anger toward Israel. Muslims are treated as suspect because of violence committed by people claiming to act in Islam’s name. Hindus celebrating their traditions in American communities can suddenly find themselves at the center of arguments about whose culture belongs here. These conflicts are different, and reducing any of them simply to religion would be dishonest. But the recurring pattern is difficult to ignore: faith becomes especially dangerous when it stops being merely a way of understanding the world and becomes a way of deciding who is entitled to power within it.
Perhaps that is the distinction I missed when I was younger. Religion itself may not be the problem. Certainty might be. The moment I believe that my position is not merely my interpretation of morality or history but the will of God, disagreement changes character. The person across from me is no longer simply wrong. They may become immoral, impure, dangerous, even an obstacle to some divine order. Once God has been recruited to our side of a human argument, almost anything can begin to feel justified.
The irony is difficult to miss. We are living through one of the most technologically sophisticated moments in human history. Artificial intelligence can translate sacred texts instantly, compare centuries of interpretation, surface contradictions, reconstruct historical context, and expose us to belief systems most of our ancestors would never have encountered. Human knowledge has never been more accessible. Yet access to more information has not necessarily made us less tribal. If anything, technology sometimes seems to give ancient certainties new distribution systems.
Maybe that should humble all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike.
That is the part I find myself thinking about now.
As I have gotten older, I have become increasingly drawn to the idea of detachment, although I am not sure I practice it nearly as well as I like to imagine. I have become much less interested in happiness as a destination and much more interested in peace as a way of being. Happiness has always struck me as strangely conditional. We attach it to outcomes: when the business succeeds, when the relationship works, when the children are okay, when the bank account reaches a certain number, when we get the house or the recognition or the life we imagined. Peace seems to demand something harder. It asks whether we can remain whole when some of those things do not happen.
That does not mean abandoning ambition or affection or desire. I am far too invested in people, work, ideas, and outcomes to pretend that I have somehow transcended attachment. But I have begun wondering whether much of the suffering we create for ourselves comes from confusing what we care about with what we must possess, control, or preserve. Perhaps peace is not the absence of desire so much as the ability to keep desire from becoming our master.
Which brings me back to my friend’s journey.
He believed he was moving away from religion, but as I listened to him I wondered whether he was actually doing something more universal. He was searching for an answer to one of the oldest questions human beings have ever asked: how should I live?
Religion has spent thousands of years answering that question. The answers differ wildly, sometimes beautifully, and sometimes violently, but beneath the scriptures, rituals, commandments, and cosmologies sits the same human anxiety. We know we will die. We know people we love will suffer. We know much of what happens to us is beyond our control. We know that the things we accumulate eventually disappear and that even the people we cannot imagine living without will someday leave us or be left by us. Religion gave human beings stories large enough to contain those realities.
And maybe that is why I have become less interested in asking whether God exists and more interested in asking what happens when God no longer occupies the center of our lives.
Because human beings seem remarkably uncomfortable leaving the center empty.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
