THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT

THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT

Spirituality essentially means freedom and must not begin with slavish submission to God. The Spirit is ever free and it is the constant affirmation of freedom that releases it from apparent bondage to Matter. In this sense, modern liberalism and democratic values are closest to the Vedanta and far off from proselytising Semitic religions that preach the submission of the individual to the Supreme Being.

The Vedanta asserts the freedom of the individual being in essence from beginning till end and does not enjoin any to grovel before an imaginary Omnipotent by way of offering obeisance, or tribute for the test one has been allowed to sit for on earth whose finite result will determine an infinite end in the Hereafter. There is no mention of any such Test, any Day of Judgement or any Hereafter in the Vedanta, and neither does modernity brook any such puerile misconceptions about life. So we see that the Vedanta is most in line with modern, progressive, democratic, liberal thinking, or you could say that modernity has so much in common with the principles of the Vedanta.

Discovered between three and five millenia ago -- that is from the recorded versions of the Vedas -- these spiritual principles that form the body politic of Vedantic texts are so very aligned to the discoveries of reason and science and must surely in due course become the religion of the enlightened of the world. While Islam and Christianity may continue for a while more to capture the imagination of the unthinking masses, their fates will be sealed as the world enters the Age of Reason en masse.

Christianity has already lost its foothold in much of the western world and has given way to atheism, humanism, secularism, socialism and all other forms of rational dispositions of the human mind, and it is but time before the same happens to Islam as well despite its last-ditch efforts at violent self-preservation. But the Vedanta and, in broader terms, Hinduism or the Sanatan Dharma has nothing to fear as its security of survival in sanctioned in its very truth, realised and rationalised by the Rishis of yore and ever corroborated by generations of sages through succeeding centuries.

The discoveries of modern science are everyday driving sledgehammer blows into the soul of the Semitic religions and daily affirming the truths of the Sanatan Dharma. While the apologists for Islam and Christianity hop about, seeking rational justification for their doctrinaire principles in Greek thought or in modern Euro-American thinking, however tenuous their arguments may appear, proponents of the Vedanta have no such necessity to go beyond their already rationalised philosophy for its validation in the intellectual sense. And wherever Islam fails to justify itself rationally, it brings in the arbitrary hand of its God to close conversation with modern sceptics or brings in dubious arguments stemming from 'the God of the gaps' line of reasoning.

Now the question that arises is this. How long will Islam and Christianity hold on to their irrational propositions and perspectives on human thinking by positing the arbitrary hand of their Gods to stifle the same? Surely we know the answer. As long as there are hordes of ignoramuses inhabiting this planet, adherents galore for such irrational assertions will abound. But the day science in truth will have permeated the consciousness of the commoner, that will be the Day of Judgement on Earth for these Semitic religions when the human hand of retribution, for perfidies preached and practised by them for ages, will deal them the deathblow from which they will never recover. Then these two proselytising religions, these Semitic sisters who have done the Hindus and Hinduism so much harm for ages, will come to its doorstep to save them from imminent destruction with their sublime Vedanta philosophy. But who can save them from their own doctrinaire dispensation -- the Day of Judgement? So, the doom of Doomsday must come about, but not in the Hereafter. It will happen right here in front of the descendants of all those who these two religions have for ages persecuted.

Written by Sugata Bose