My dear friends,
Why ought I to respect a religion that does not respect mine and preaches that it alone is the true path to God? I respect human beings everywhere and of every faith but do not respect their faiths if those faiths do not respect mine and condemn me as an infidel. This is my stance. I, however, am ever searching for a way out of this human conundrum and hope to one day be able to arrive at a suitable synthesis of all the grand principles of the great religious systems of the world in the light of the Vedanta that declares the essential divinity of every being as fundamental to its discourse and the validity of all paths to God when pursued in the light of universal acceptance of all other faiths and never dogmatically in the narrowest sectarian sense.
Humanity is one and the divinity within is also one despite its myriad manifestations. This realisation inspires me to love all as my own. But I cannot subscribe to telling this blatant lie that all religions preach the same thing for they patently preach radically different and often opposed principles as their fundamental credo. Neither can I bring myself to announcing this hypocritical lie or making this self-deluded assertion that I respect all religions and their founders equally. I do not. Whichever religion is liberal enough to accept mine as true, I respect that religion, and whichever founder of religion was pure and devoid of barbaric violence, I revere such a one and even adore. But I am guided in all this by the literature that I read, by the news that I get to hear and by the historical records of religions that I happen to come across. As such, my reading of religions may be imperfect and my judgement thereof flawed, too, to a certain extent. I try to be as impartial and objective as I possibly can in forming my opinions and am always open to amending my views in the light of later discoveries.
I am a rational person, a liberal but not a jellyfish that I will, out of fear or the socially induced propensity to be politically correct, choose to always compromise with truth and refrain from criticising those elements of human society that are tending to push it into the days of medieval barbarism by the imposition of their perverse principles which they deem to be the revealed word of their highly sectarian God. My crusade continues to bring sanity to the public discourse on religion and society and life in general for I am a thinking human being and, as such, exhort all my brethren across the globe to put their minds and hearts together when it comes to submitting to or rejecting authority human or divine, messenger of man or God.
Thank you and my love to all of you.
Yours sincerely,
Sugata Bose.
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