Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (feel good fiction books .txt) 📕

334 Allah: Both Transcendent and Imminent. Discover Islam. Accessed at: http://www.islamforall.net/is%20there%20a%20god.htm

is the source of all religions, each claims monopoly and exclusivity and commits unspeakable atrocities? Does any of this, and murder under the cover of martyrdom serve any cosmic or divine purpose? If so, what could that purpose possibly be? We will not have answers to any such questions because either the kind of intelligence we have is not good enough or knowing the answers might do more harm than good to us. But what we can and must do is to take a serious and holistic look at the very role, function and purpose of religion as it has come to mean in human affairs.

Religion, Swami Vivekananda said, is “the manifestation of the divinity already in man” and “the idea which is raising the brute unto man, and man unto God.”335 We seem far from that ideal. Despite utopian dreams, we will almost certainly never have a unified global religion, or a single scripture or a ‘unified God’. Then, where is religion, as the foundational force in the human consciousness, headed? Looking at what goes on in the name of religion, one feels both dazed and disgusted. On the one hand, one sees the reason why religion was conceived or revealed. Since man by nature could not be trusted to be ethical and egalitarian, religion was meant to instill a sense of fear and moral responsibility to do the right thing in life. It was a way for people to have hope that, when things go horribly wrong sometimes, as they are bound to, religion was to give balance and comfort in the thought that there is a supreme being watching over us who will take care of us. But on the other hand, we see people viscerally hating each other purely based on religion and nothing else, and passing judgments on someone, based on the nature of his faith, even before they get to know that individual. And we view and read about ordinary ‘god-fearing’ people committing unspeakable horrors on those who profess an ‘enemy’ religion. As the world simmers, as knowledge explodes, and as the existential context of life changes, people change as well, simply to stay alive. For religion to remain relevant and effective as a source of spiritual guidance and emotional support, to bear suffering stoically, it too must change. But religion draws its inspiration and inspires precisely because it is supposed to be timeless, eternal as the direct word of God. So, if it strays merely to survive, it loses its legitimacy and its appeal. But if it remains frozen, it loses its relevance and invites ridicule.

Caught on the horns of a paradoxical quandary, the world’s great religions find themselves at a critical juncture. Desperately clinging to values and beliefs that are often thousands of years old, they find it increasingly difficult to provide the spiritual guidance and moral strength necessary to face the challenges of modern life. So the question is: can the great religious traditions of the world winnow and reinvent themselves in order to show the world how to address the needs and hopes of a complex, materialistic, twenty-first-century world that is increasingly becoming skeptical, if not antagonistic, to religious impulse and trying to embrace something about which everyone has a particular understanding and vision: spirituality. We must remember that when we refer to a ‘religion’ or ‘religions of the world’, what we are in fact alluding to are the interpretations of their religious texts and the interaction with the religious institutions. And we must also remember that we live in a world where we often crave more for the very thing we despise; religion is no exception. We want to embark on a search for the sacred; yet we want to live in a secular society. People throng to places of religious symbols but there is nothing ‘religious’ about the ambience of their life.

We want to annihilate the ‘social’ symbols of profanity — pornography, prostitution, sexual permissiveness; yet we harbor profanity in our mind which manifests as ill will, envy and malice. The world is shrinking geographically, and people of different faiths are forced to live together; yet it does not seem to be rounding off the rough edges of religious practice or

335 Swami Vivekananda. Sayings. Accessed at: http://www.sriramakrishna.org/vvksay.htm

fostering greater desire to learn from each other. Many people talk of all religions being different paths to the same God, but a lot more people perhaps than ever before are prepared to kill and be killed to protect their ‘God’. It is hard to synthesize and harmonize all these strands and arrive at a common platform, and extrapolate the likely future of religion as it is currently organized. What is clear is that we cannot isolate and segregate religion, or rather what it entails inside us, from the state of our consciousness and the pulls and pressures it will be subjected to.

What has actually happened is that man, unable to integrate and assimilate the different demands of religiosity, has turned into a marauder, masquerading as a monk, making the brute less brutish than man. In a sizeable number of people, faith or the manner of its misrepresentation, has become a deadly tool, a holy license to exercise leverage through violence. Some say that a ‘religious impulse’ is a basic built-in feature in the human machine, and that was put in by God. While every religion, save Buddhism, expressly affirms God, most people believe God to be, as William James described in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a ‘larger power’, a power that is independent of us and as something larger than our conscious selves; and in our union with that power we will find our greatest peace. Instead of helping us to attain that peace, organized religions have been so compromised that many people are driven to the conclusion, in the words of Sigmund Freud, that “when a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”336 Charles Colton, an English clergyman, aptly wrote, “Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”337 And Ambrose Bierce, an American satirist dubbed ‘Bitter Bierce’, wrote, “Religion, a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”338 So, who is the villain and who is the victim — religion or man? We must understand that even if religion or a scripture was divinely inspired or revealed, its perception, comprehension and practice pass through the filter of human consciousness dominated by the mind. The filter seems to alter the character. Furthermore, few really ‘know’ their own religion, nor have they studied their own scriptures. Perhaps, had they been fully informed and had they understood its true essence, the scope for religious extremism and absolutism might have been greatly minimized. Scholars are debating if religious vengeance and violence are only motivated and triggered by the perceived threat to one’s religion, or if there is more to it than meets the eye. What makes people blow themselves into bits just to make sure others meet the same dreadful fate? And, for the record, such religious extremism is not confined to Islam. Of course, every religious ‘revolutionary’ protests that he is only defending his religion, which is his sacred duty.

Clearly, religion has in it something which when mixed with the latent tendencies of the human mind becomes a volatile and violent passion that explodes. At the same time, we cannot infer that religious impulse is inappropriate to the human form of life; on the other hand, even many scientists are talking about the existence of a ‘God gene’ or a ‘God particle’ inside all of us.

The roots of religious violence have of late received much scholarly attention.

Basically there are two typologies: one external, the other internal. The first typology looks

336 Sigmund Freud. Quotations of Sigmund Freud. Atheism. Accessed at: http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Freud.htm

337 Cited in: Robert Andrews. The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. 1989. Columbia University Press, USA. p.223.

338 Cited in: Robert Andrews. The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. 1989. Columbia University Press, USA. p.223.

for causes outside religion and puts it solely on human frailties, culture, and civilization. The other argues that the very doctrine of faith or dogmatic belief and what it entails, inexorably leads to violence. It could be a combination of both. A distorted, faulty or inadequate comprehension of the ‘spirit’ of religion adds fuel to the fire inherent in the human mind.

Once we envision God as a vertical authority above us, not innate in another human, and that our primary loyalty is to Him, not to another man, and when we become convinced that others who do not share this vision are doing injury to Him, then the gates are thrown open wide for hatred and violence. ‘God’ then comes before ‘goodness’, divinity before tolerance. When religion and its symbols — places of worship, ways of salvation, divine revelation — become scarce by its denial to others, the sacred gets sullied, and intolerance and violence follow as night follows day. The only way to halt the march of religious ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘fanaticism’, both loaded words with pejorative meanings, is to rob or rid every religion of its monopoly. It is man’s instinctive need for ‘monopoly’ — of faith, power, access, property, wealth, pleasure — that causes much social strain and which seems to be a particular human trait. It is in fact a logical extension of the desire to control without competition, which is the more basic human instinct. In matters of faith, this monopolistic tendency is more extreme and becomes evangelical and aggressive. Without monopoly, there would be no need for conversion, no need to ‘defend’ any particular faith or a specific religion. It should be made socially ‘hip’ to be seen as practicing more than one religion. Believing should not require belonging, and practice ought not to be a ‘take it’ or ‘leave it’ package, and any place of worship must be a place of sanctuary and sanctity open to all.

Spiritualism and self-fulfillment

One of the questions that many thoughtful people wrestle with is, if we are so exalted, why do we behave so abominably? If we have any semblance of divinity about us how can any of us, be it a ‘terrorist’ or a psychopath or religious extremist do what they actually do? And, as

R.D. Ranade framed it, ‘if the Atman (soul) is capable of being realized even while the body lasts, why is it that all people do not realize him in their lifetime, or yet again, if he can be realized by some, what can we regard to be their qualifications for that realization?’339 The search for an answer to this question goes to the heart of the search for truth. Down the ages, the yearning for spiritual awakening of the human soul has been typified by the travails of those who believed that they were more than a body randomly born, leading a rudderless ritual of a life, and doomed to die by sheer wear and tear, decay and disease. Traditionally, spiritualism sans religious roots was perceived as a threat to organized authority, and the spiritualist, as a kind of upstart, someone who is trying to cut corners. Spiritualism today has acquired an altogether different context and content. Partly as a reaction to what religion has come to stand for, and partly as a way to cope with the stress and tension of our combative life style, many people, across cultures and ages, are embracing that moving target we call spiritualism. Celebrities, movie stars, writers, business tycoons, and social bigwigs are jumping onto this bandwagon. And when it comes to their much-advertised passion for spiritualism, none of them find it incongruous with their life priorities,