Money and religion

No matter how much you preach, how much you write, how many arguments you make in favour of your stand that there is no god, the believers will ignore you. And given that believers usually have strong sense of belief, it is very unlikely that your preaching and reasoning will have any effect on them.

Instead, the easiest way for you to spread your message is to make the religious ones pay. Literally. Religious arbitrage, I call it. Religion usually comes with a set of beliefs. And superstitions. And the religious people are more likely or less likely to do certain things because of their beliefs. And you need to exploit these beliefs. Exploit them as much as you can, and try make money at the believers’ expense.

My argument is this: if you think your religion or the lack of it is better than any other religion, there must surely be a way in which you can exploit this to make money at the expense of the other religion. So go ahead and do it. Nothing talks like money.

I did my bit in this direction last Diwali. I went to buy a mobile phone, and figured that it being dhan teras the shopkeeper was loathe to send me away without selling me anything. I managed to get the phone for almost a thousand rupees below what it cost the shopkeeper (I confirmed this figure with a friend who is a sales manager at Nokia). The poor guy even gave me a bill for an amount much larger than what I’d actually paid.

You might claim that I could have bargained harder. But as I said, even religion has its monetary limits, and the shopkeeper would’ve figured that incurring the wrath of the gods would’ve been cheaper than selling the phone to me for lower than he actually did.

So stop preaching. Stop preaching when you know you have no chance. Stop bringing up the FSM in every line of conversation. And let money do the talking.

PS: Religion might just be a special case for this argument. You should be able to take advantage of all sorts of beliefs (including the non-religious ones) using this strategy.

3 thoughts on “Money and religion”

  1. One could also use the reverse funda – making large consumer durables/jewellery etc. purchases at times of the year regarded as inauspicious. The retailers would be so anxious to make the sale that they should give some discount.
    The other point is, this would work better in a non-cosmopolitan place, since the set of superstitions/beliefs are more likely to be uniform across the population, creating a distinct trend which one could take advantage of.

    1. i completely agree with you on all counts.

      the only problem is that sometimes retailers will refuse to sell you stuff at times when they think it’s bad for you to buy – for example, the neighbourhood kirana in Bangalore from where we sourced all our groceries would refuse to sell us turmeric after 6pm. so you as a customer can’t take advantage of this – only people who can are the other shopkeepers

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