What is orthodoxy?

America’s founding fathers were men of both science and faith who attributed creation to the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Not the Christian God or the Jewish God or the Islamic God: Nature’s God. In that hallowed tradition epitomized in the Declaration of Independence , a document I will refer to again along with its counterpart the Bill of Rights; I am strongly inclined to believe that after acknowledging the effects of quantum mechanics and  looking through the lens of the Hubble we will find that woven throughout the universe is an abstract intelligence which may without offense to either science or religion, be permitted to call divine.

This is the language of the twenty first century which was not accessible to Galileo or Bruno. To doubt and to question are rights we have had to fight long for. Whoever we humans have had to fight for those rights are the orthodox and their agents of inquisition. As we go on I intend to leave you in no doubt as to ‘who’ these reactionary orthodox are.

I will briefly mention the challenge from the Orthodox Church to my film Sacred Evil. Sacred Evil was/or rather is the story of a nun who is haunted by grim visions. Though she lives in the sanctuary of the Convent the demons continue to pursue her. As a last resort the Mother Superior calls in Ipsita Roy Chakraverti to heal the nun. Now Ipsita is a qualified Jungian psychotherapist as well as a self proclaimed Witch or practitioner of Wicca.

This raised the heckles of the Church. No matter that the rest of the film was about the healing of the nun and no Christian doctrine or ritual was put into question or subverted. The point made by the Orthodox in this case is that you have no right to judge what is correct portrayal of our faith. Only we can judge. This then is the domain of the Orthodox. He is the final arbiter. He is the judge. No law or due process applies to him. He has abrogated that right to himself.

It is pertinent to note that those who challenged my film with a Wiccan theme, are the same people who killed millions during the Inquisition, including 600000 so called witches who were burnt to death like Bruno the scientist. 400 odd years later they haven’t yet been brought to book or tendered a proper apology though everyone goes on and on about one Hitler. The Catholic Church has killed more people than a hundred Hitlers put together. So have the fundamentalist followers of Allah and the Zionist landgrabbers of Israel. Even the supposedly nonviolent Buddhist emperors of India razed a minimum thousand Hindu temples and were responsible for the killing of thousands of priests between Asoka’s time till Sankaracharya revived the Vedic  faith.

From Wicca to Wikipedia we have come a long way But the orthodox of course have never understood the bottom-line for all those who like me and you are governed by the creative impulse. That bottom-line is: Nothing less than Freedom; nothing more than Faith.