Ludwig Wittgenstein's When The Sword Of Religion

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th century analytic philosopher and ascetic, once said that the honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He looks as though he were walking on nothing but air and his support is the slenderest imaginable. Yet it really is possible to walk on it. The question of religion and its significance is not only a societal and communal one but, at the same time, a deeply moral and individual one. It involves dealing with the nature of life in its totality and death, all in the purview of God. The religious experience must be understood to be, before it is anything else, a solemn and solitary act that requires contemplation and thoughtful study. Yet the exercise described here is one in which all fanatics, extremists, zealots and terrorists fail unequivocally.

This is because none of those who subscribe to extremist and violent views on religion have ever gone through the necessary mental and spiritual labour to appreciate what faith truly means — that much is self-evident. If their reasons are not outright material or political, they are fallacious and twisted, and based on either complete ignorance or little knowledge, which is equally dangerous if not more. People were surprised when one of the individuals behind the Safoora massacre was seen to have had such a ‘normal’ upbringing and education from all the ‘good’ schools and colleges but an education in business is merely vocational training. It does not teach you how to grapple with the complexity of the religious experience, which is a very human thing and thus requires some philosophical introspection and