Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

speak, the ‘meaning of his meaning’, the purpose of his presence, his relation to the cosmos, and to move from the shadow of death to the sanctuary of immortality, has over time crystallized as the three strands of religion, philosophy, and science — or the spiritual, metaphysical, and material. And man’s almost pathological paralysis to harmonize the ‘triad of thought’ has greatly hampered human endeavor to find a way to mold into a better being. And religion, or rather the way it impacts, long identified with the best of human behavior, looms large in that respect, fast becoming a central issue of our time. Perhaps, when the dismal tale of the premature passage of the human species is written, it might well record that the most lethal — and tragic — aspect of human life has been our star-crossed equation with what we claim to be God’s own direct word: religion. It has acquired what physicist Steven Weinberg calls ‘deadly certitude’ that makes a zealot truly believe that cold-blooded killing is doing God’s work. Not only does it claim monopoly with God, our sense of morality and even our wanting to be ‘good’ is intertwined with religion.

What we do and how we do as religious practice has societal and planetary implications. Further, as Robert Wright argues, religion too, like an organism, changes in response to changing social conditions in the real world (The Evolution of God, 2009).

Religion is no longer a means to ‘true worship of true God’, or to tame our passions or cleanse and transform ourselves through prayer and piety. Religious fervor has become a kind of frenzy, a major source of dissension and discord in human affairs and seems to stoke our darkest desires. Man seems ready to set aside every other identity, and willing to sacrifice every other relationship, rationale, norm or value or code of conduct, to respond to his religious impulse, which is increasingly being perceived as fighting an implied threat from another religion.

It is ironic that the murderous ire of religious righteousness is not directed against atheists who openly ridicule or denounce God, but against those whose faith in and devotion for God is no less but who say that their vision of divinity differs. Prayer, which is supposed to make the one who prays a better being, has become a passport to conduct that violates every scriptural injunction. Like much else with man, it has opened a chasm between precept and practice. Every religion prescribes a certain personal and communal code of conduct.

Islam, for example, claims to be the divinely inspired complete way of life. One of the mahavakyas in Hinduism proclaims not virtual but actual divinity of every human being. The risk lies in their misinterpretation and selective adaptation, which can easily slip into reckless religious bigotry, obliterating or obscuring the divine and unleashing the devil inside. If, as some researchers say, there is in all of us a genetic urge to worship, called God-gene or God- particle, then it has, mixed with malice, mutated.

 

Instead of acting as a balm on frayed nerves, religious thought is adding ‘holy’ fuel to the human fire, and religious anger is now a major springboard for violence, aggression, and mayhem on earth. We are face to face with what Sri Aurobindo called “Ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or church”, and as a consequence, we have to accept the bitter truth about “the historic insufficiency of religion as a guide and control of human society.”34 These are prophetic words and the world today is a testimony to Sri Aurobindo’s prescience. The spirit of true religion — piety and purity, compassion and oneness of all — is compromised by self-righteousness and the driving desire for competitive gain. Some skeptics go to the extent of saying that it has offered to man the perfect pretext for the dance of the devil on earth, a ‘sacred’ cover for our awful behavior.

The question as to how this kind of religious fervor will mature and come to fruition in the decades to come might depend to a large extent on the history of this troubled century. While for long, it was expected that the clash between ‘godly’ religion and ‘godless’ science would be the major source of global instability, it is the fight between different religions that is at the root of much of the violence in the world. The fact is that the supposed clash of faith and reason has never evoked the kind of raw wrath and dark emotions that inter-religious conflict ignites, when a zealot believes that his religion is ‘in danger’. The dilemma we face is that we cannot live with the way religion shapes our lives, nor can we do without it. And we seem powerless to make any religious difference to either pursuit.

But if we think that we can escape the grip of religion and embrace science, the truth is that science fares no better as a force of stability in human affairs. The problem is that empirical science validates itself by claiming that its assertions are based on measurements of physical reality, which is far from vindicated. Furthermore, it has ignored the moral difference between what we could do and what we ought to do, and that some doors are best left unopened, and, if opened, one should not cross the threshold. Without a spiritual dimension or self-abnegation, scientific practice in its barest essence, is trying to liberate man from his biological base, the consequences of which could be such that human intelligence is incapable of even imagining. It could make the human ego — the one that separates the ‘I’ from ‘we’, and the ‘we’ from ‘God’ — stronger, not weaker, and our sense of individual identity more entrenched and hedonistic.

The human species has been wondrously creative but, tragically, our creativity about things has always been at the expense of the deeper knowledge about the basics of life. We seem fated to strive for liberation without knowing the source of our bondage. Furthermore, even what we need to know to be ‘competitively successful’ in life has become so vast and demanding, that there is little urge or energy left to know, knowing which, as the Upanishads say, nothing else need be known. Every calling, every avocation — of a doctor or lawyer or a housewife — is all-devouring, shutting out all other windows of the world, transforming every one into a ‘specialist’, if not a ‘super-specialist’. Knowledge itself has fractured our personality. The Vedas proclaim that all knowledge is in each of us and the ‘knower’ within awakens and brings it to the front of knowledge. They also say that a life of either bare contemplation or of bare action alike is fraught with evil. The Japanese use a phrase called chigyogoisui, meaning ‘unity of knowledge and action’. Just as a bird cannot fly with only one wing, knowledge becomes meaningful only if it is combined with rightful action. Human intellect has a tendency to rapidly absorb and adapt the wrong kind of knowledge for

 

 

 

34 Sri Aurobindo. The Human Cycle. 3rd edition. 1999. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.176.

 

destructive purposes, and becomes lethargic, if not paralyzed, when it comes to the right kind or constructive knowledge.

The American author Edgar Allan Poe, dubbed as the master of the macabre, wrote that human creativity will have no appreciable effect upon humanity, and that “man is now more active — not more happy, nor more wise than he was 6,000 years ago.”35 Poe also wrote that “there are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell.”36 Aldous Huxley even wondered if our world is another planet’s hell. The one difference could be that our world is full of gadgets, avowedly to make our lives better, but in fact are perhaps meant to enfeeble us, a sort of punishment for sins on the home planet. At least, Yama, the Lord of Death and Hell, will not turn God into another gadget, as we have done, a ubiquitous bell-boy at man’s beck and call. When that ‘boy’ does not respond promptly to every jingling of the bell, we chastise him for not ‘doing his duty’. Many things that man wants might be denied to him, but what is not taken away is the power of choice in the direst of circumstances. Viktor Frankl, recalling those fellow inmates of Nazi concentration camps who gave away their last piece of bread to others, wrote in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that “they may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”37

Whether or not we know the meaning of it, one of the most common phrases associated with life is ‘meaninglessness’, or ‘absurd’ as Albert Camus termed it. In one sense, it is a state of the mind; and in another, of the moment. A good meal can give meaningfulness to life and a bad stomach, meaninglessness; a bereavement can make life look absurd, and a birth can make it fulfilling. In fact, it is the apparent ‘meaninglessness’ that gives practical meaning to life; for if there is ‘meaning’ that we can effortlessly fathom, then there is no search, no ‘inner trail’ and no ‘inner reward’ — and no good or God. In our ‘meaninglessness’, many turn to God and, as Pope Benedict XIV put it, if God is laid aside, then all our hopes, big and small, rest on nothing. Meaningful or meaningless, belief and behavior are disconnected. We see this disharmony and dislocation throughout the behavior processes of mankind, in political, economic, and social and religious disorders.

We may believe in many things, but when it comes to ‘doing’, we are governed primarily by the perception of self-interest and of self-righteousness. It springs from the instinctive sense that what we are doing is good for us and therefore must be good for everyone else. We do not know whether we should be thankful or regretful that all our beliefs do not become deeds. And we do not know why certain beliefs become behavior and others do not, and why certain people’s behavior is so bizarre. It seems to have little to do with nature or nurture, upbringing or ambience. The psychologist Carl Jung said that the important thing is to know or not to know, not to believe or not to believe. But if ‘knowing’ does not become action or becomes wrong action, then perhaps ignorance is bliss.

But with the bunch of beliefs we harbor we want to ‘govern’ God. In today’s world, the phrase ‘God-fearing’ is taking a wholly new and menacing meaning: the tables are turned

 

 

 

 

35 Mind Power. The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India. 7 January 2008. p.6

36 Cited in: Laura Moncur. Edgar Allen Poe’s Birthday, 19 January 1809. Accessed at: http://www.quotationspage.com/special.php3?file=w980118

37 Cited in: Wikipedia. Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl. 1946. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man’s_Search_for_Meaning.

 

and God must fear us, based on what we are doing to His other creations and to His credibility, calling Him redundant and toothless. We want to ‘create’ tomorrow’s God, tailored to our precise specifics. And despite the fact that much of mankind formally affirms its abiding faith in God, there are more ‘devout’ people than decent people, more ‘conscientious’ people than compassionate people, even more ‘god-men’ than godly men in the world. As a result, our passionate personality has eclipsed our compassionate companion.

To lead a wholesome life, man needs both passion and compassion in the right mix, and each has a place and a time to manifest. But the key to human transformation is to make compassion a reflexive