THE HOLD OF FAITH, OF BELIEF, SUPERSTITION ET AL

THE HOLD OF FAITH, OF BELIEF, SUPERSTITION ET AL

Spiritual superstition has imagination, hope, desire and an otherworldly feeling, almost an intuitive precognition of a sense of immortality, wedded to it which makes it so persistently present in human life, as an idea almost impossible to remove from the nervous system despite all attempts at mass rationalisation to the contrary. Man has seemingly been programmed through ages of experience where superstitious beliefs have become part and parcel of his being and refuses to budge even in the teeth of death-dealing rationalisation and clings on to the nervous system's conservative set-up to defy logic and reason and scientific light streaming in. No wonder Stalin, assuredly in the context of Abrahamic religions, had famously said, "Religion like conscience can neither be stifled nor stilled." The words 'like conscience' perhaps indicate that there is a subjective truth to religion which defies destruction even at the hands of dictators and persists despite all effort at elimination of its shadowy surface self. Swami Vivekananda had said as well that so long as there was a thing called death, God would be there as a sort of big brother, a sort of personified 'help'. And we see even in the blazing light of modern science the growing hold of religion---with all its art and music, literature and philosophy, and no less its superstitions galore---on the mind of man, shaping for good and for evil the destiny of nations, of peoples and of humanity en masse as it traverses through the twilit corridors of an uncharted future.

Written by Sugata Bose