I remember a few years ago reading in the news that a Charity shop had been banned from putting on a nativity display during the Christmas period because it might offend non-Christian people. I remember thinking this was ludicrous. Who would it offend? Muslims respect Jesus, Hinduism is a group of diverse and contradictory religions and has therefore historically been religiously tolerant (though we are now starting to see a backlash against oppression by authorities of other faiths), Buddhism is a religion of tolerance (except for in Sri Lanka and Burma) and the atheists can laugh at all of our ‘unscientific superstitions’. I have never heard a Jewish person complain about seeing images of Jesus in public either. Yesterday however my mind was changed, not by a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew or atheist, but by a Christian!
A year ago, we moved into a house with three Christian people. Outside our bedroom a Frisbee saying “Smile, Jesus loves you” was hung on the wall. The person living opposite us asked us to keep our door closed because he said the smell of the flowers in our room was making him dizzy. I found this strange for two reasons:
- The flowers were artificial and had no smell.
- I have never heard of any (non-psychiatric) medical condition in which the smell of flowers makes people dizzy.
Some time later we made an altar to transport
our Buddha and deities to and from the yoga class we teach each week.
Before this we used to transport them individually and suffered a lot of
breakages because they are delicate. The altar was too large for us to
store in our room, so we put it on top of a cupboard in the living
room. The Christian housemate that previously asked us to keep our
bedroom door closed said that he would prefer us to keep it covered by a
sheet so that he would not have to see it, so we did.Recently the objecting Christian moved out and a Buddhist friend took over tenancy of his room. After asking our other Christian and Muslim housemate whether it was OK, I left the altar uncovered. The third Christian housemate is only here for half the week and she was away. When she came back she asked Padmini to keep the altar covered out of respect for her as a Christian. She also admitted that it was her that had previously covered our Ganesh deity with a towel; a towel that was visibly dirty.
To get to the bottom of this problem, we sat down with our two remaining Christian housemates to discuss the issue (one not minding seeing our altar and one adamantly wanting it to remain covered). Our Buddhist housemate is moving in later today and our Muslim housemate said that he would agree with what ever the outcome of our discussion was.
I explained to the Christian housemate that objected to our religious imagery that we did not want to offend her or make her feel uncomfortable and therefore it would be helpful if she could explain to us how our deities affected her or made her feel. She said they did not affect her, but that we should cover them out of respect to her as a Christian. She also told us that she had removed the “Smile, Jesus loves you” Frisbee. This showed that she had some insight into her double-standard but as I will explain later, incomplete insight. Padmini told me that our intolerant housemate often played Christian music on her radio (I usually do my best to ignore what she plays even though it is loud enough to reach the entire ground floor), which for some reason she seems to like playing in the corridor rather than in her own room.
We agreed to keep our deities covered. I then asked our intolerant housemate whether she had considered how her putting a dirty towel on Ganesh made us feel, or how her asking us to keep our deities covered made us feel. She said she was sorry, but did not answer the question. To illustrate the point, I asked her how she would feel if we asked her to stop playing Christian radio in the corridor and asked her not to put her Christmas cards up this year (last year she covered the living room walls with her Christmas cards almost as if she was the owner or only resident of the house). To this, she replied that she would not mind (I suspect this is untrue), and that she did not play her music loud anyway (this is untrue). It is a terrible shame that there will be no Christmas cards up in our house this year. I have read the Bible from cover to cover and respect Jesus, but I think this may be the only way our Christian housemate can get any insight into how her religious intolerance affects us.The Abrahamic religions do not rely on deity images for their religious practice, but imagery is at the core of Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism. We do not find hijabs, kippahs, turbans, crucifixes etc offensive. Why do people find our religious practice offensive?
V
