Religion has nothing to do with fear and, therefore, it is
wrong to attempt to make people devout by instilling fear into them. What
difference is there between fascism and religious ideology that indoctrinates
from birth by imposition, brain-washing and instilling of fear? All forms of
ideological compulsion are reprehensible and must be done away with. And the
sooner they go, the better for human society, for fanatics bred in
indoctrinating schools work contrary to the higher interests of civilization.
One wonders what glory is there in believing in autocratic archaic
dispensations throwing rationality to the winds and laying oneself susceptible
to all forms of debilitating weaknesses. Better a healthy atheism than
submission to revelation which has no basis in evidential truth for the former
strengthens the mind while the latter degenerates it.
Religion must be impersonal as science is for it to be
considered universal and true. There cannot be an Indian religion, an Arabic
religion, a Chinese religion or a Greek religion just as there cannot be any
more a Greek science, an Indian science, a Chinese science or a German science.
Science has broken through these national barriers long back and achieved
universal agreement about its principles based on evidence, mathematical proof
and rational rigour. It is time religion follows suit instead of remaining a
backward belief-system based on pseudo-revelation and superstitious assertions.
To ask people to subscribe to irrationality is a crime and betrays the best
interests of civilized humanity. We must all wake up to this challenge and
become more scientific in our outlook at any rate if religion will remain
intransigent and backward. The Vedanta, however, is absolutely rational and may
be studied by scientists in their endeavour to understand the principles of the
inner world of man and the universe that somehow elude the reach of measuring
instruments or detecting devices.
Devotees throughout the world in all nations and cultures
must awake to the menace of religious intolerance and make personal adjustments
in their lives that they do not subscribe to such malevolent forces nor lose
the sense of oneness with all of humanity despite the divisive tendencies
trying to separate man from brother man. We must re-educate ourselves in
tackling and overcoming this age-old menace of imposition of a so-called God's
will on all and sundry by force or fraud or inducement, taking advantage of the
hapless situation of the victim. We must under no circumstance give up our
independence of judgement or submit to irrational assertions of so-called holy
people however mesmeric their personalities may be. It is in our human interest
to be sceptical of all forms of debilitating discourses masquerading as
scripture for truth is truth and need not be holy to be accepted as such. The
law of gravitation has been superseded by the General Theory of Relativity
simply because science runs on evidence and not dogma. Let religion follow suit
if it has to survive as a discipline worthy of pursuit. Whatever the
irrational, untrue accretions are, will fall off by the process of scientific
enquiry leaving the kernel untouched. Then the core of religion will survive as
the science of the inner world and will be complementary to the science of the
outer world instead of being antagonistic to it. Strange to say that India is
the only place in the world where science and religion always co-existed as
complementary disciplines of a single search for truth. The Hindu scriptures
call them Apara Vidya and Para Vidya respectively and, that too, only the
realized truth of the spirit the Rishis have called Para Vidya, not the mantras related to such realization as such.
This brings us to the final part of this deliberation, what
is the future of religion? This question may only be hypothetically answered on
the basis of an assumption that the human species will survive an environmental
and a nuclear holocaust as seem to be in the offing given the current trends
and tendencies. If civilization survives, though, then religion will have to
reform itself for it to have any hold on the thinking humanity of the future.
Men and women groomed in science will increasingly move away from the
belief-based Abrahamic religions to the Vedanta of India which is founded on
rational rigour backed up by experiential realizations of the higher truths of
man and nature. Will the Semitic religions die out then? A more likely outcome
will be the remodelling of these religions along the line of the Vedanta,
allowing for scientific scrutiny of their principles and assertions and not
hiding under dubious Greek philosophical cover for explanation of texts otherwise
scientifically untenable. Acceptance of the fact that there is much that is
irrational in religion and needs to be discarded or, at least, shelved from use
and merely maintained as a piece of history, will save these religions from
falling into disuse. But if rigidity persists and there is an absolute
intransigence in reformation as it may very well be, then such religions will,
at first, gradually, and then, precipitously disappear from the thoroughfare of
life and will be relegated to the corridors of history. The Vedanta, however, will for equally obvious reasons triumph in getting hold of the public imagination
for it is the one philosophical system that makes man the centre of the entire
debate of life and truth and not an external arbitrating God. In the Vedanta,
man in his essence is the highest Reality, the Supreme Being, the ultimate
arbiter of things. The Vedanta bows down to none, makes none bow down to any
and declares the essential divinity of all that exists. There is no God to
fear, no prophet to adhere to, nor scripture to abide by save rational
deliberations to hear, cogitate and, after reasoned satisfaction, to realize.
This Vedanta of the ancient Hindus seems to be the
future religion of scientific humanity. It will be the bridge between theism
and atheism and will transform man from a believing being to a realized being
in the ultimate and to an aspirant for such an end in the common. God is gone
and so is the apparent man. What remains is the Real Man, the Atman, the
Brahman, Existence Absolute, Consciousness Absolute, Bliss Absolute, the Sachchidananda.
This is the destiny of human civilization and this is the future that will
unfold in the coming generations. Scientific knowledge will sweep away all the
dross that has accreted over the ages and create centre-space for the unfolding
of the Vedanta movement to establish the scientific truth of religion. Remember, truth is compartmentalized for ease of study but is essentially one. There is
nothing called religion in essence just as there is nothing called science as
such. There is but a mighty truth of existence locked up in the human heart and
in the core of every atom that seems to be. The truth of the external world and
the truth of the internal world are not two but one. Seen from different
standpoints they appear variant but are in essence one for it is the One that
appears as the many, so the Vedanta says. But do not believe. Now that you have
heard it, set about rationalizing on it and then experiment in the laboratory
of your mind before arriving at conclusions. From such enquiry will set in self-revelation,
never unique but ever universal, never selectively prophetic but ever
accessible to any that does similar experimentation with the truth that lies
uniformly within all. When large numbers of the people of the world begin to
practise the Vedanta, then and then alone will fear cease and man standing
erect in the sunshine of light will proudly reclaim his inheritance of his own
divinity that he had forever mortgaged to an external being that had never
existed and so had had no power ever on him save what he in his ignorance had
invested in it. But that is a far cry as yet it seems, for the world continues
to be gripped by age-old superstition and fear psychosis which the ignorant
call religion.
It is time for humanity to take stock of the situation and,
instead of cleverly perpetuating myths of miracles and magic to suit nefarious
ends, propaganda and counter-propaganda by religious denominations to get the better of each other, it is time
for all to sit down and re-examine the core issues that confront humankind and
seek possible solutions from the age-old wisdom of India enshrined in the
Upanishads. The Hindus convert none, so there is nothing to fear from learning
from the Hindu texts the core principles of spirituality which teach not only
tolerance but universal acceptance of spiritual ideas so long as they are
verified by experience by any sincere aspirant. Let the movement of inter-faith
discourse be in true earnest and not a surface sham, a 'politically correct'
deliberation of the devout where a whole lot of lies are concocted to cover up
the anti-human features of the respective religions and clever manipulation of
passages and sly text-torturing takes place to hide basic malicious motives of
these dogmatic faiths. Unless there is free and unbiased scientific discussion on
religion, a million inter-faith dialogues will take us nowhere. Till then we
cannot sit pretty doing nothing for our future hangs in the balance between survival and doom and it is up to us to decide which way we shall go as a
species. Let each one of us own up to our responsibility towards the world and act
locally to avoid a global catastrophe. Let us in real earnest practise all that
is good and worthwhile in religion from the standpoint of universal reason and
well-being in order to sink in our ploughshare of effort to save our future.
May humanity live! May real spirituality prosper and not proselytizing violent
religion!
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