Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Ok, this is not a dumb thing that a religious person said, but a stupid thing that an atheist did in the name of religion. And I post it here because it is a situation that many atheists find themselves in - they have a religious family that knows that they don't believe in God, but nevertheless expects them to pretend to believe in God on "special" occasions so that they show "respect" toward the member of their family who believes in God.

And this is the event in the life of Dr. Atul Gawande who is an atheist surgeon born and bred in the US, but when his father died he had to get involved in a Hindu ritual which had consequences that were bad for his health, which he expected to happen and tried to avoid, but didn't quite succeed.

We traveled to Varanasi, the ancient city of temples on the banks of the Ganges, which dates back to the twelfth century BC. Waking before the sun rose, we walked out onto the ghats, the walls of steep steps lining the banks of the massive river. We’d secured ahead of time the services of a pandit, a holy man, and he guided us onto a small wooden boat with a rower who pulled us out onto the predawn river.

We passed riverbank platforms with huge stacks of wood awaiting the dozens of bodies to be cremated that day. When we’d traveled far enough out into the river and the rising sun became visible through the mist, the pandit began to chant and sing. As the oldest male in the family, I was called upon to assist with the rituals required for my father to achieve moksha—liberation from the endless earthly cycle of death and rebirth to ascend to nirvana. The pandit twisted a ring of twine onto the fourth finger of my right hand. The pandit reached over the bow with a small cup and had me drink three tiny spoons of Ganga water.

It’s hard to raise a good Hindu in small-town Ohio, no matter how much my parents tried. I was not much of a believer in the idea of gods controlling people’s fates and did not suppose that anything we were doing was going to offer my father a special place in any afterworld. The Ganges might have been sacred to one of the world’s largest religions, but to me, the doctor, it was more notable as one of the world’s most polluted rivers, thanks in part to all the incompletely cremated bodies that had been thrown into it. Knowing that I’d have to take those little sips of river water, I had looked up the bacterial counts on a Web site beforehand and premedicated myself with the appropriate antibiotics. (Even so, I developed a Giardia infection, having forgotten to consider the possibility of parasites.)