This is the best reason I’ve seen yet for promoting religion even if you don’t accept it yourself. It stops people pissing on the walls! Or so say Ranjani Iyer Mohanty in a piece in the The Atlantic, “Only God can stop public urination.”
If you’ve been to India, and I have (many times), you can’t help but notice the prevalance of public defecation and urination, for private toilets aren’t ubiquitous (almost nonexistent in villages), and public excretion has become a noxious custom, even in the large cities. How do you stop it? As Mohanty describes, you put up tiles or murals depicting the gods on walls customarily used for male urination.
I suspect it won’t work. If you gotta go, you gotta go, so you’ll just move your outdoor activities to another place. But here are some photos of the urination-preventing devices:
Mohanty has other suggestions:
My daughter, a firm believer in national integration, has suggested that these god tiles also include Muslim, Christian, and Sikh iconography. After all, if there’s one thing Indians have in common, it’s their god-fearing—or at least god-respecting—nature (pollsreveal that roughly 90 percent of Indians view religion as an important part of their lives). I wonder what would happen if I placed a few god tiles around my daughter’s room; after all, messiness cannot be next to godliness.
In fact, the concept has already expanded to several faiths. In documenting how tiled Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh gods arrived in Mumbai’s streets (they replaced or supplemented written messages ranging from the polite “please do not sully the wall” to the more aggressive “son of an ass, don’t pee here”), the Indian photographer Amit Madheshiya recently marveled at the “harmonious existence for the gods” in such “cluttered and messy spaces”—especially in a predominantly Hindu country that “is often irreversibly divided along the coordinates of religion.”
Unfortunately, panaceas are rarely perfect. The other day, as I was leaving my neighborhood, I spotted a man on the same road urinating against those same walls. I was shocked. Who could be so bold as to disregard the presence of all those gods? And then it dawned on me: He might be an atheist.
Yes, we have here something rare: a completely novel critique of atheism!
h/t: Brian ~