[mukto-mona] REDIFINING RELIGION - 1

REDIFINING RELIGION - 1

The bengali meaning of Religion is Dharma which again means 'that, which contains'. The scope of this word is too wide to be tied down to a particular aspect of humanity. Religion, in a broader sense, should be a doctrine such as 'guideline to way of life', 'moral life of humankind' or even simply 'the philosophy of life' and the practice of which must lead to prosperity and happiness to every member of the society. It should be based on pure truth and free from any dogma and verifiable with personal experience and time tested. This, probably, was the intention of the honest philanthropists of the early thinkers and intellectuals, who felt its need to make a good human and a good society.

 

Science with all its truth, could not be abandoned by humanity simply because it has helped kill more than sixty million unfortunate innocent victims at one go and we refuse to call those scientists attached to the Manhattan Project, demons. Likewise, religion need not be abandoned because it had been abused by clever, ever exploiting clergies, to their own selfish interests. If science had been abused to produce weapons of mass destruction that became the tool for genocide, mass murder and harm humanity with its ill effects it has given the all necessary truth and enlightenment to the people. Similarly the abuse of so called religion caused harm but definitely exposed immense truth related to human life.

 

Religion has earned such a bad name due to the suppression of knowledge by the church in Europe, exploitation of the society by Hindu upper class pundits in the name of God and imposing ridiculous laws and suppression of ordinary people by the Islamic mullahs in the name of Allah. The modus operandi of all these clergies was same; create fear psychosis amongst simple people and the gullible masses. But to achieve that, methods were to be devised to prove their credibility in the eyes of the society. The minds, of these shrewd religious intelligentsia, gave births to supernatural, miracles, black magic, deities who punish and reward etc. etc.

 

The Renaissance was the first to declare war against this brand of religion and embarked upon the acquiring of knowledge of truth and believed objective cognizance as the only form of acquiring knowledge of reality. However, other schools like charbaks in India, thinkers like Kahlil Gibran in the middle-east did also revolt against this kind of flawed religious dogmas which were obviously aimed at serving a particular class in the society and not for the good of the masses. The Materialism evolved to counter the authority of the guardian of religion. Another new 'ism' had replaced the old 'ism'. Scientific evidence seemed to be the last word to recognize all forms of knowledge and the materialistic world was empowered to exist independent of human existence until the advent of Quantum Theory, which doubted matter's independent existence and physically established to the satisfaction of the majority of the scientific fraternity that the observer is an inseparable part of the observed objective world. However, it could not be proved whether the material world exists independently as man can not go out of existence and verify that. It could be termed as another dogma held so long by the materialistic view of scientific community.

My intention is not to put across the idea that something is superior to another but to seek to recognize truth in everything and abandon all kinds of unverifiable dogmas. I personally believe that truth is supreme and knowledge is the tool or vehicle which can help us get to that. We, for our convenience, divided the study of the world into different categories like physics, chemistry, history, geography, medicine, this-logy, that-logy etc. In the days of awakening of knowledge in Europe, i.e at the times of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, it was all engulfing Philosophy to seek the truth that sheltered and recognized all forms of learning including abstract ideas and reasoning with a rational objective.

 

I propose first to remove an idea of a conventional God, from the ambit of my idea of religion and restrict it initially to simple cause and effect in human activities similar to that which scientific ideas relies and try to apply scientific approach to the human activities. If I add heat energy to water it will boil and if I put my finger into it, I will burn my finger. Now, if I do good to another man he may or may not prosper and if he prospers he may or may not do good to me. The analogy may not be proper but I am trying to express that the cause and effect can not be applied to human actions as simply as in the case of scientific observations. Therefore to find out set laws and rules involving human actions is not only difficult but impossible.

 

Until the validity of Newtonian mechanics were questioned and found to be insufficient to explain a vast realm of activities in the microscopic world, mankind was content with the idea of predictability of cause and effect in the objective world. But with the creeping in of uncertainty, probability, unpredictability into modern science, the scientific thinkers became initially very jittery and uncomfortable but painfully digested these theories and reluctantly forced to accept them as they were time and again proved to be true based on mathematical and physical models. Even Einstein was no exception, who always believed predictability is the fundamental law of nature.

 

I would again like to stress here, that I do not profess my idea of religion to be the only truth seeking vehicle and the perplexity of modern scientific observations should be any reason for mankind to turn to and believe in religion. But I strongly believe that truth is embedded within our existence itself and knowledge of that is reasonably worthwhile and convincing us of that is the job of religion.

 

I beg pardon from them and do not consider those to be my audience who, all through their life, hated religion because they think religion has done more harm to humanity than good and are not willing to open up their mind to my idea of religion which, I consider, is a high level of philosophy full of abstractions with logical reasoning which should ultimately lead to a better understanding of life. I assure, my religion (as I wish to call it) is obviously free of mysticism, miracles, all forms of superstitions and dogmas and of course a God who resides in heaven ever busy in punishing and rewarding us and appointed a large number of priests of various sects, as his agents on earth to propagate his message and glory and authorized them to sell tickets on his behalf to reach him after death.

 

"I intend to continue this article and it will be highly encouraging if I receive comments (positive or negative), but do not want to indulge in debates at this moment until I finish it. But I will certainly consider the comments made or opinions expressed against my article while writing my future episodes."

With Love and Best wishes to all.

 

Surojit

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