CAN MEDIEVAL RELIGION THAT IS ARBITRARILY IMPOSED SURVIVE THE SLEDGEHAMMER BLOW OF REASON?

CAN MEDIEVAL RELIGION THAT IS ARBITRARILY IMPOSED SURVIVE THE SLEDGEHAMMER BLOW OF REASON?

Let us have free debate on the exclusive and absolutist principles of religion which are based on faith rather than reason and are opposed to rational thinking carried to conclusion. Let us scrutinise them and see if they can stand up to the test of reason. If they are divinely inspired, they should not cower before such rational scrutiny. If not so in real, however, they will necessarily run away and seek shelter in the safehouse of superstition.

So, 'Let men be thinkers', as Swamiji put it, and let them come out into the open in an open society and subject religion to reason to find out if it can truly sustain itself thus. Religious apologists will spread out their canvas of dubious logic, irrational explanations and disingenuous dialogues but they will not be able to get away with it. Finally, the fanatics will try to settle the score with the sword but if an entire polity be gradually well-trained in reason, such roguery will not carry the day.

Much, perhaps most of the believed principles of religion will be exposed as having been based on imposed irrationality and will be falsified. The lack of credible evidence will nullify long-held articles of faith and what remains in the end, if anything at all, will be the philosophical part of these faiths where they conduce to reason. However, faiths they are and their philosophical justifications are borrowed from Greek thought. Hence, these religions will collapse under the shelling of reason and humanity will be released from their octopus-grip for good. Let us hasten such a day when reason will deliver us from medieval misreading of life and reality. Sufficient unto the day has been the evil thereof. 

Written by Sugata Bose