Once upon a time, two brothers lived in a prosperous city. One was rich, self-make, tough-minded and sceptical about matters of faith. The other wasn’t exactly poor, but not rich either. Full of doubt, he was willing to follow every godman whose star was on the ascendant. The latter strove hard to convert the sceptical brother, who steadfastly refused to accompany the faithful one to the satsangs held by the ‘guru of the month’.

After a while the faithful one gave up his self-appointed mission to save his brother’s soul. But he continued to harbour grave misgivings about latter’s salvation: “He will learn only when misfortune strikes in this life”, he said to himself. “Or perhaps in the next one when he stands on the threshold of Hell where he’s bound to the consigned to, due to his faithlessness.”

However, unbeknown to all, the prodigal one secretly supported charities and worthy causes. He didn’t do this to earn a place in heaven, for he did not believe in afterlife. Nor did he care for the mileage leveraged from his ‘good’ works. So how was such conduct to be judged? The answer would depend on who’s sitting in judgement and in what context. Sant Tukaram, widely regarded as the paragon of Maharashtra’s Bhakti movement, for example, defines a real Sadhu as ‘one who befriends those in dire need’. Know him to be God personified, he adds in a famous abhang. German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who inspired Karl Marx, echoes similar sentiments in Essence of Christianity, which made a great splash in Europe after its publication in 1841. Feuerbach believed that there is no qualitative or essential difference whatever between God and man. Rather it was faith that created a distinction between man and God. Love identifies man with man (whereas) faith divides God from man, he said.

One of the consequences of this ‘us and them’ separation is believers’ intolerance of people who do not believe, Feuerbach added. “Faith is in its nature exclusive and makes man partial and narrow. This intolerance and narrow-mindedness follows, he said, from the fact that if you (like the sceptical sibling) are not for God then you are against him. So it’s not love, which unites that is blind, but faith which ‘already knows who God will place on the right, and whom on the left.” What about the Shepherd, who sought to bring His kingdom of love on earth?