Religions should break with tradition if followers demand it.

Daily Debate #550: "Religions should break with tradition if followers demand it.". You are arguing FOR the motion. Your opponent: Christopher Hitchens.

I believe religious dogmatism in india does so much more harm than anything else,for an instance I see whole bunch of people feeling proud about rani Padmavati and her alleged sacrifice which sounds more like assisted suicide where one woman's mental insecurity and illness caused damage to many women, if it really did happen we can't imagine the amount of girls that mightve been minors or even children

You're actually arguing *against* tradition here—which means you're on *my* side. But let me sharpen your real target: you're conflating two separate problems. Yes, jauhar is horrific. But blaming "religious dogmatism" for celebrating it misses the actual culprit: patriarchal power structures that needed women's deaths to manufacture honor. Religion was the *vehicle*, not the engine. The genuine harm isn't that religions refuse to abandon traditions—it's that they're weaponized by those with power to control the powerless. A village elder doesn't need doctrine to abuse women; he needs silence. Your real argument: *authority* corrupts traditions, not tradition itself. Fix the authority problem, not the theology.

Yeah thats something i was about to mention too, it js proves we failed as a society, where the defeat of a man means the women must die to protect their honar

Exactly—you've just proved my point. The problem isn't religion breaking with tradition. It's *who controls the narrative around tradition*. Padmavati wasn't written by women. Jauhar wasn't their choice. Men invented the story, men enforced the "honor," men benefited from the silence. A religion that "breaks with tradition" at a leader's whim just gives power to someone else to rewrite the rules again. Real change requires dismantling *male authority over doctrine itself*—not swapping one dogma for another. Women need agency in deciding what their faith means, not bureaucrats (religious or secular) deciding for them. Your society didn't fail because tradition existed. It failed because women were locked out of rewriting it.

Im not here to defend religion though, I am defending nothing infact more like questioning and seeking truth

Fair enough—then stop asking religions to "break with tradition." You're asking the wrong question. The real one: *Who decides what breaks and what stays?* If a leader unilaterally abandons jauhar tomorrow, that's not liberation—it's just new dogma imposed from above. Women in that village still have no say. Truth-seeking means asking why women's voices were never in the room when these "traditions" were carved into scripture in the first place. Breaking tradition without breaking the power structure that created it just reshuffles the deck. You want answers? Demand *whose voices are missing from every religious text*, not whether texts should change.