This weekend I was away shooting an amazing Sikh wedding along with friend of the blog and awesome photographer the lovely Bhavna from Upendo Images and, as it turns out, one of our avid readers and fantastic second shooter for the day Maria Assia. It was my first time filming a Sikh wedding and it was a fascinating experience, full of ritual and tradition and an extraordinary insight into a culture I confess that I knew relatively little about beforehand. Everyone at the wedding was so incredibly welcoming and friendly and happy to explain the meanings behind all of the rituals to those like me that hadn’t experienced them before and encourage them to take part. It was a beautiful wedding spread over two exhausting but fantastic days and it got me thinking a lot about different cultures and religions and the way we think about them.
Religion has undoubtedly been the major force in the shaping of modern society and it affects the way we all live our lives today whether we as individuals hold religious views or not. It has helped shape our laws and guide our sense of what is morally right and wrong, it has been a force for great good in the world as well as being held up as an excuse for terrible wrong-doing. Its power to bring people together is perhaps equalled only by its unfortunate tendency to segregate, but that segregation is the work of man, not of any deity and is clearly based on two of the least attractive human traits: speculation and generalisation.
A certain amount of segregation is, I think, natural and generally self imposed. Whatever our views we always seek out like-minded people, whether that’s a common religious belief or just someone who shares a hobby. We seek out personality matches and when we find one we latch onto it in whatever form it may take, often to the exclusion of others. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, without it we would probably feel very alone, and I think a little rivalry between those natural groupings is one of the things that drives us forward – if we each completely accepted the views of other groups of people at face value we would cease to move forward in our quest for knowledge. The thing that I’ve genuinely never understood though is why we allow that simple, respectful rivalry to descend into out and out racism.
When asked about my own religious beliefs these days I struggle to give an appropriate answer. I used to say I was agnostic but found that this in itself gave people an immediate unfounded impression of my thoughts in just the same way that proclaiming myself to be of any particular religion would. I was often ridiculed for “not being able to make up my mind” or just being too lazy to work out the facts. So strong in fact were these connotations that my thoughts on the subject were generally instantly dismissed as irrelevant: ironically in having no one firm belief I was treated in the same narrow terms by others as if I were proclaiming to be of any one religious persuasion.
I now instead say that I take a scientific view (not to be confused with scientology!) of the world, not in the sense of some scientists who dismiss religion entirely but in the purist sense of science: I am open to any and all hypotheses until they have been disproven and replaced by a better theory based on the evidence available. Science has, in my personal view, disproven many aspects of the writings of many different religions if those writings are to be taken literally rather than as a guide and as a lesson. However science hasn’t provided an answer to some of the biggest fundamental questions about our universe – for example it’s now generally accepted that the world began from the big bang – an explosion of gases and particles that created the basis for everything we see around us. But for that to happen, for that incredible, life-bringing explosion to have ever taken place those elements that formed the explosion had to be there in the first place – there was always something there to make this happen, to create life itself. Was it a god or even many gods? I don’t know. But if it was some form of God I want to know how they themselves existed in the first place and religion and science equally have yet to provide me an answer to that one. We’re all seeking the same answers and maybe one belief system has got it right, maybe no-one has. But in my eyes the only truly preposterous view is that we can dismiss and disrespect other people’s beliefs entirely when none of us can truly say, hand on heart, that we have all the answers.
But this post isn’t designed to be a debate about religion, more a celebration of the cultural differences that religion amongst other factors has brought about. Many of those differences seem so strange to us, but the moment you experience them for yourself you can begin to understand how beautiful and important those cultures really are. Some customs may seem strange but if we actually take a look at our own traditions I think it’s easy to see how many of them would look pretty weird to other cultures, particularly at weddings which are an event filled with so many rituals and traditions in virtually every society around the world. We’re not all that different from one another and it’s about time we realised that and celebrated our heritage and cultures for what they should be: the means to bring people together, not to drive them apart.
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