CAN A BOOK BE BOOKED?

CAN A BOOK BE BOOKED?

A 'divine' book must be humanly examined for its claim to such divine origin to be justified, as there is no way how it may be divinely examined as such, and, if not examined thus, for it to any more have the divine right to such self-proclaimed divinity.  

If the claim to divine revelation of a scripture is to be on the basis of individual access to its content in continuous isolated 'inspiration' of sorts stretching over decades with no second individual attesting to such perception and corroborating the claim, then it becomes a contentious issue whether such a singular claim can be allowed the absolute and inviolable status of divine revelation that is unchallengeable in legal terms in a due court of law.

If science can lay itself down to scrutiny by rigorous rational reasoning, so must religion, asserted no less a spiritual personality than Swami Vivekananda. Unfortunately, this has not been the practised case in India where special consideration is show to religious books of supposedly divine origin, whatever the word 'divine' may mean. Thus has India been hostage to hoodlums who act on the spur of the toxic text and rampage civic life at will with the State permitting perfidy of a pernicious kind each time to supposedly preserve peace after the warring sect has had its bloody appetite appeased. But the toxic text, the source of trouble, can neither be challenged nor checked in its viral projection as religious sensibility of the concerned community will be hurt thus. No matter if they first verbally and then physically assault other religious communities but their sentiments must be respected, their offensive text saved from the sacrilege of being critiqued. Thus must the law of the land labour in disproportionate discretion when it comes to dealing with this 'sacrosanct' text, never daring to step into even the domain of natural right and justice whereby this problem may be solved for good in a civilised way.

The sword ruled India in the past. Alas, it still rules, with rules being made to bend over in submission to divine dictate, and dissemination of adverse ideas, totally antithetical to communal harmony, being allowed free reign in being preached from the pulpit and the podium to causing total public disarray when the hour of reckoning periodically arrives.

When law allows assumption of vows in court by touching the concerned scripture, how dare law challenge its sanctity and truth in the same vein by putting it to scrutiny in rational legal terms? Is that not a blasphemous course for law to follow? How can the Word of God be challenged? Surely, its sanctity safeguards it from such sacrilegious scrutiny? Does it not? Well, it ought not to in strictest secular terms. But then in India such secularism is not in vogue. Here secularism guarantees protection of 'sacred' texts from the profanity of rational scrutiny which science is subjected to. After all God is above all and faith dictates divine law, what to speak of error-prone man-made ones that are as inconstant as they are inconsistent with changing times and circumstance.

Written by Sugata Bose