When it comes to dogmatic religion, renounce it to become atheist of sorts, but when it comes to the spirituality glowing within, become a theist by all means. Irrational beliefs are to be shunned but to wholesale reject all that is good in spiritual culture simply because you do not have the patience or purity to persist in its practice for a while in all earnestness is proof of a superficial attitude towards pursuit of truth and is not conducive to the discovery of the underlying reality of nature and life. Such an approach to the deeper issues of knowledge can hardly be called scientific or rational in the right sense although such scepticism always finds superior solace in denunciation of all it finds abhorrent in arbitrary religious culture without itself sounding in any way the depths of truth, be they material or spiritual. Atheism of such a tenor is necessarily an extreme reaction to the other extreme of blind and imposed faith in arbitrary assumptions of an archaic kind bred in primitive minds and in medieval mind-sets. This is all too arbitrary a reaction itself and suffers from the same pitfalls of human thinking, that of limited reasoning, as its counterpart does in its failure to apprehend the advantages of rational anchoring. Neither of these is the right approach to truth for each one is flawed in its partial interpretation of life, its exclusiveness and its dogmatic adherence to only its own peculiar mode of investigation into the fact of life and nature. A better, a higher, a more inclusive method was devised ages ago in India whereby these two systems, edited and revised, were harmonised and integrated to form a comprehensive system of observation, analysis and inference along with contemplation, introspection and realisation within whereby truth could be apprehended in its catholicity. There has thus developed in India a rational system of philosophy to expound the subtle truths of spiritual perception in so far reason and logic, words and images can go to explain them. Faith or blind belief in myths and unique arbitrary prophetic pronouncements have never found favour with the spiritual seeker of India who has soared in the highest heavens of spiritual contemplation while remaining rooted to the rigour of rational validation of his insights into the nature of things. There has never been a collision of courses between science and spirituality thus and each has seamlessly progressed unto its respective end. The people of India have embraced even such non-Vedic religious systems as Jainism, Buddhism and that horrible degeneration of materialism, the Charvaak philosophy which carried on its blatant tirade against the Vedic Dharma. Prior to the Islamic invasion of India, never has there been persecution in the name of spiritual disputation save for the one blemished occasion of Shankaracharya's persecution of his Buddhist victims in debate who entered fire after being worsted in philosophical disputation. Barring this singular jarring note, the symphony of Indian spiritual civilisation has been beautifully orchestrated by the central philosophy of the Vedas which stands for unity in diversity, unity of the being amidst the myriad diversities of nature. What followed the Isalmic invasion of the land of Aryavarta can hardly be called Indian in essence for it was a foreign dogma thrust upon India by barbarous hordes who had hardly any humanity in them but were hell-bent on destruction of the beautiful Bharatbhumi and its pristine perennial philosophy, the Sanatan Dharma or Hinduism. That even Islam was absorbed and assimilated in the vast body of the motherland to give rise to a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture whose best fruition was the Indian version of Sufism is proof of the catholicity of the Indian mind born and bred in Vedic culture which only knows inclusion and universalism and never exclusion which is the seed of all intolerance and persecution in then name of faith or ideology. Thus, atheism in the Western sense has never been a dominant mood in the Indian psyche and science has never been in conflict with religion. Investigation, enquiry and inference have been the way both in science and religion in India and there has been a harmonious development of both the disciplines in this country from which the world may yet learn the loftiest principles of liberalism. Rank atheism which merely rants against all forms of theistic deliberations without having sufficient knowledge about the intricacies of the inner life of the spirit, falls into the crude error of misjudgement of a discipline to which it has no clue. While much of the criticism levelled by the modern atheists against the malpractices, superstitions and indoctrination of religion is valid, much more valuable heritage of human thinking and higher living in the domain of the supra-mundane which it discards is damaging to the cause of overall human culture. Atheists ought to study the Vedanta in depth before they pass sweeping judgements over the gamut of religious experience that is the hallmark of civilisation along with the grand achievements of science. Ignorance of the workings of the inner mind beyond the realm of the Freudian subconscious and mere intellectual conceptualisation of human thought processes from the study of the brain infuses a sense of physicality in the comprehension of things, thereby missing the spiritual mark by miles. It is with a sense of becoming humility then that modern atheists ought to become conversant with the Hindu scriptures that deal with the high flights of the Vedanta, then take a plunge into the ocean of self-consciousness before sitting in final judgement over the fate of religion and all its glorious traditions. May humility ignite wisdom even as wisdom conquers egotism and lends sanity to the soul! Om! Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!
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