FAITH, FANATICISM AND FOULPLAY ... 1

FAITH, FANATICISM AND FOULPLAY ... 1

The brain is susceptible to conditioning. It is a soft pliable mass which has tremendous capacity for modification. Every moment the stimuli it receives alters its existent status which is why education alters human perception about the environment within and without.

Thoughts are at once the resultant of past impressions as also the cause of future modifications of the brain. How thoughts are manufactured and whence they arise, whether the brain creates thoughts or whether it receives thoughts from without, processes them and having refashioned them as per its complex structural limitations throws them out is the subject matter of cerebral and philosophical research. Here we shall limit ourselves to discussing the implications of modifying the apparatus that the brain is by means of programming it to aspired ends.

Man is that level of organic evolution which can analyse and synthesise thoughts by creatively responding to external and internal stimuli. Unlike the animal which merely submits to the environment man challenges the environment and refashions it to his own advantage. For this he uses his faculty of thinking which in its sophistication is unique among the living species. Man can think, analyse and synthesise thoughts, form patterns and generalisations from which he derives laws, and he can advance his superstructure of thought through the generational transmission process which forms the foundation of civilisation. But there is a pitfall in this whole affair which is the cause of all fanatical anti-civilisation forces that have caused enormous harm to humanity for ages. And we shall next discuss that.

As the brain is pliable to conditioning, laying itself open to sensory and mental impressions, external stimuli as well as internal reflections, it is in a dangerous terrain always. It can be modified by systematic indoctrination. When inputs of data are subjected to scientific rigour which is the brain's secure protection, such inflow of thoughts can be handled effectively and the person saved from becoming a victim of the imposed thoughts. But when such a safety valve is removed in the form of 'divine' decree that imposes by way of first principle the submission of the faculty of reasoning to arbitrary 'divine' authority, then the danger is wholesale on one from which there is no recovery. Arbitrary assumptions of existence of divinity with tribal attributes and extent of knowledge, perverse explanation of the purpose and objective of terrestrial human life, fantastic conceptions of postmortem continuance of life in intense pleasure-producing heaven or infernal damnation in a hideous hell, attempted imposition of exclusive faith on all else who do not subscribe to it by force, invitation, inducement or allied means which may be dubbed collectively as proselytisation -- these are the products of this pliability of the brain to getting fashioned and refashioned in undesirable directions by external agencies of interest. This is what in common parlance is called indoctrination.

End of Part 1

To be serialised and continued 

Written by Sugata Bose