Law is a normative value to help society live in collectivity and harmony. For law to be a supreme regulator of all, it must become integral in theory and practice. An integral dimension of law helps State, society and legal systems to balance and harmonize competing claims arising out of complexity and heterogeneity of life and changing needs. Professor Dr. K. Parameswaran outlines his integral theory of law in this series of articles by showing how law must integrate knowledge from other disciplines; bring them under what law wants from them. This Part I, discloses the ‘integral dimension of law’ that exists between Law and Religion.
Law and religion have stimulating intersections. Both deal with understanding and regulation of human behavior, individual and collective life, and have a hierarchy of sources in origins. Law is ‘natural’ with normative determinisms, ‘positive’ with authority and sanction, and ‘real’ while operating through evolving social requirements. Religion is suprareality in historical sense, supra-physical in experiential sense and deeply psychological or rationale in modern sense. Individual and collective human behavior can be molded into any shape by both law and religion. If their origins, aims and functions are misunderstood both can become authoritarian. History sheets across world evidences positives and negatives of law and religion as well as excesses and absences of interrelations. However, when law and religion is studied through integral dimension, it can speed up human and world development, create scope for pragmatic justice and equality, liberty and fraternity with less or even zero social damage. This new integral study can enrich law and religion and take their studies and practices to create a world of new society and better lifestyle.
What necessitates study of law and religion in legal scholarship and research? Why do they fall in the domain of both public and private laws? There are several ways of looking at this. When religion represents ideas for collective life, it must understand and accommodate all kinds of social collectivity comprising of complex and heterogeneous elements, independent and interdependent variables or simply put, satisfy needs of every one in society. Else, religion can become repressive leading to lack of order making legal system force stability in conflicting situations. So also with law that holds legal values of justice, equality, liberty and fraternity. If core legal values are improperly understood or lacking in implementation, legal values can cancel basic peace and wellbeing threatening to destroy central aim and purpose of social life which religion can take hold of. Law and religion becomes two sides of a same coin and can become vicious cycle, one biting the other if their essential truths are not interconnected. Racial wars out of cultural associations or ethnic identity or suppression of liberties based of religious customs etc., show us the conflicts between law and religion. Legal history is replete with international treaties like UDHR 1948 or ICCPR and ICESCR 1966 and various municipal laws like preventing witch practices, magic remedies, superstitions and forcible conversions etc. By these we see how law and religion have a necessity to hold on to ‘something central, universal and practical’ in both understanding and experience of collective life’, independently and interdependently.
Generally known, Indian Constitutional provisions, statutory and customary laws deal with religious issues based on fundamental freedoms, human rights, administration of religious establishments, financial and revenue matters etc. Fundamental Duties, Directive Principles of State Policy, Distribution of Legislative Powers, Minority Rights etc., are well laid out in Indian legal system with judicial pronouncements and interpretations. Both law and religion look at each other when their details of practices spill into collective life of society impacting rights, duties and freedoms. It becomes difficult to conceive of a peaceful inter-relational role between them. Progress of both disciplines currently undergoes a see-saw battle in terms of power-positioning and normstandardization when we study social conflicts.
Take the following issues where law and religion conflict severely and are at cross roads. Abortion, Euthanasia, Same-sex Marriage, Drugs, Surrogacy, Animal Sports, Medical Testing of Non-human Primates, Morality and etc. All these have become social issues now in Parliaments and Courts that neither law nor religion are able to give correct solutions especially when law and religion hold contradictory views. It becomes impossible to arrive at any meaning as to ‘what is a correct solution’ from legal and religious points of views. Legislature, Government and Judiciary are not able to pacify all social groups which hold extreme religious values. Where is the balancing point? What is the integral view on these issues that can give lasting solution common and universal to all?
Integral dimension of law and religion are based on five elements. One, law is to be seen as larger than a body of mere legal rules from Acts enacted by people who create, interpret and implement them. Both law and society must understand; allow all kinds of human experiences, enrich and support them to make law freely lifeaffirmative for which religion as oldest and deep companion of human mind must be seen in socio-psychological legal and evolutionary perspective. Barring few punitive methods, law ought to be lifetherapeutic. Two, rationality and faith are not contradictories; they are two shades of human experience resulting in both subjective and objective evidences that law must recognize resulting in facilitating meeting points of science and religion. Three, Nature’s pluralism and its impact in human life demands multiplicity, diversity and uniqueness in every strata of social existence that law must permit. Four, legal institutions cannot objectify social life to such an extent that law becomes only anthropocentric of human benefits alone and not life-centric holistically. Five, legal reasoning and logic must accept consciousness as intuitive experience and not a mere rationality of five-sense’ perception alone. These five elements can reconcile extremes of law and religion and solve many serious problems of sociopolitical existence for State. For answers of aforementioned issues based on five elements of integral theory, follow next issue of concluding Part II of the series on ‘Integral Dimension of Law: Law and Religion’.
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