Both ought to be kept in a hidden folder, used privately, cookies and history deleted after use. Users ought not to cross the line where one’s pleasure or devotion is somebody else’s pain or loss of innocence.

Most of us play by the rules when it comes to porn. Most of us don’t when it comes to religion. But while most governments continue to allow public display of religiosity (let’s call it PDR), they have problems with even the most private, furtive viewing of pornography.

With the exception of countries like France and Belgium which rightly ban wearing religion on your sleeve. Interestingly, these are the same countries which tend to have a more clear-headed approach towards porn, targeting indefensible areas like child sex, snuff, revenge porn and bestiality. Alongside these, France cracks down, for instance, on sites that promote terrorism and racial hatred.

The Indian government blocked hundreds of websites last week citing a legal obligation, then said the ban is only temporary and only child porn will be blacked out. It would be fine to believe it if it were not the impulse of successive governments to periodically want to occupy what they feel is high moral ground regarding sex.

Also read - Radhe Maa to Masaan: Will India ever stop shaming sex and mini skirts?

This is basically giving sexual openness a sound whipping, and reinforcing colonial uptightness so drilled into our middle class psyche that we love it now and recognise is as pristine desi conservativeness.

The matter about porn is settled. You can’t even technically block it. As a society which has absorbed a well-known porn star, Sunny Leone, as a mainstream actor, we seem to be slowly veering to the moral view that it is fine to watch most kinds of pornography in private. The other day even the Chief Justice of India said that it was impossible to totally ban porn.

Do what you do privately. Should we then now have a debate on whether religion — to be practised freely, as the Constitution guarantees — should be a private affair with minimum public display? No ajaan or bhajan on loudspeakers, no billboards of gurus and charlatans who cheat millions or run molestation camps, and no religion-based schools or colleges.

Also read: How Radhe Maa's mini skirt exposes our blind bhakti

The fountainhead of misery in most of last week’s news, as with almost every week, has been religion. And stuff at home and in our neighbourhood.

Radhe Maa is caught rolling around in a lounge sporting a miniskirt, disappointing thousands of her followers whose abiding devotion was shattered. Sachidanand Giri Maharaj, a Noida beer-bar and nightclub owner who lately became a godman, is on the run for fraud and land grab. Murky killings or attacks on witnesses keep happening in the Asaram sexual offence case. And another blogger is hacked to death with machetes in front of his wife by Bangladeshi Islamists.

“Religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great, as only he could. “Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.”

Given that India is skewered from all sides by global Islamist terror designs, conversion targets of the Christian missionaries, and defensiveness of Hindu reactionaries, it is time to debate whether religious freedom should apply fully and only in private. It is time to have some curbs on PDR.

Religion and porn have more in common. Both work in templates and rituals. And both subvert their higher forms, spirituality and eroticism.