LIBERATING INDIAN MIND -27
RE-EXAMINATION

We may now critically examine Russel’s observations with an eye on .

1. Russel appears not to be against any one believing in god, but against making is precondition of being a Christian. A Hindu is not required to believe or not to believe in God, or any scripture.

2. Humanity is divided into religious communities as globe is divided by geographical boundaries.:That is prime reason we are a Hindu or Russel for himself admits that “in that sense we are all Christians.” But because of that no one should hold his religious head to be wisest and most upright, in his case he does “not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness.” All the religions – Buddhism, Jainism, islam suffer from this dilemma, but some how Sanatanis kept so safe from the vice that they could ridicule their deities and even the revered ones for their failings in judgment and moral indecencies.

3. The idea of hell was not foreign to Hindus. It could have come with some tribe which had such a belief. It could not hold strong. Instead life cycle held firm including a migratory life of ghosts. On cosmological question we may not place much weight except from the fact that Hindus did agree with scientific advances while others refused to change. Normal Britishers themselves do not show much resilience. They failed to adopt metric system of measurement and weight as yet.

4. A dubious position in which even Supreme deities are helpful but not almighty and yet possessing extra-ordinary power, shared by trinity (ब्रह्मा, विष्णु, महेश) despite omniscience, omnipresence lacking omnipotence yet extraordinary benevolence is part of Hindu (सनातन) tradition, while Omnipotence is the sheer attribute of Semitic faith. He is not Omniscient. He needs intermediaries to be correctly informed, and the Idea of Omnipresence is inconceivable in a God who sits in the seventh sky, aloof from his creation. The responsibility to create an evil free world is his, but his Omnipotence is overruled by Satan. As such he loses that lone power as well. This helpless god is powerful in his punishment alone but there he appears to be on the side of the Satan as innocent people have to bear his wrath mostly. So omniscience and omnipotence is illusory and a matter of baseless belief. In that case, “if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists?” That may be a good ground to suppose “that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking.”

(5) I have no comments to pass on the moral rectitude of Christ. We simply remind that those precepts that are repeated often to prove humility and peacefulness of Christians as advised by Christ were borrowed from the east where they were practiced by a large number of elevated souls. Russel rightly commented, ‘Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tze and Buddha some five or six hundred years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept”. But that was so contrary to the western culture that despite Christ’s appeal they acted savagely and that shows the real Christian character.

(6) ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ Is another such commandment, which is variously common in day-to-day parlance दूसरों को दोष देने से पहले अपने भीतर झांको. Being at variance with western rowdyism praised as chivalry. No doubt “That principle” he concedes “I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries.”

(7)Then Christ says: ‘Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.’ Russel holds, “That is a very good principle.” But seldom practiced except in recent days when East and West the twain did meet and west was humanised.

(8) “He says: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.’ That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to.” East had sizable number of figures who lived up to that principle whom Christ had emulated.

(9) “When He said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’” he in fact was again repeating a precept common in eastern value system that had come down from hunting-gathering days and was preached as अपरिग्रह a lesson against hoarding, variously repeated in different books such as Ishopanishad’s त्यक्तेन भुंजीथा:, consuming moderately so that others are not deprived. Again a foreign concept to the West which was beyond its imagination. Even Russel fails to comprehend its import.

(10) The idea of hell as punishment has been not criticized by Russel but the fact that it is irredeemable, “He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment.” In Hindu idea of hell it is concomitant with the gravity of the sin and both heaven and hell are time bound. As far the kindness to other creatures is concerned, it has no place in Semitic imagination. “Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming to divide the sheep and the goats He is going to say to the goats: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.’ He continues: ‘And these shall go away into everlasting fire.’ Definitely “that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty.”

(11) An impact of Indian civilization has been missed by others as well as Russel, “He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever,” . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: “Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away”.’ This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree.”

Agreeing with the conclusion drawn by Russel let us remember that in the genesis the Adam is forbidden to taste the fruit of knowledge and once he commits that sin, his eyes open he was likely to eat the fruit of immortality, the fig tree, he was at the verge of becoming पैप्पलाद, the fruit of ashvattha, the fig tree, that he was exiled from the garden of Eden. In this episode the same bite has come with a different garb.

(12) Russel says “I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.” But even religious books rightly interpreted can yield crucial information. For example, Adam was exiled from Eden Garden. Where was Eden Garden according to the western tradition? Somewhere in the East no doubt. And where does Adam reach, in the west, close to fertile crescent. Where from he reaches there with the knowledge of cultivation. And still you force us to believe that knowledge of agriculture came to east (India) from the west (Fertile crescent) while a similar and more convincing account is found in our tradition in which due to violent opposition from the Asuras, those determined to practice artificial production ran helter-skelter in all direction before in Indian environs they settled in the North East.

(13) “That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
He was not a Christian yet he was part of a circle most of which were Christian and as such he had to be only tolerably severe. In a state of total lack of concern he should have added that the more inhuman and wretched a Christian was in his dealings with non-Christians the more revered he was and as such most of those raised to the office of papacy, and those who counted as Saints belong to this very category of criminals.Theodores, Piuses and Innocents can be rated not above dreaded criminals. As such the specious ground on which a Christian is “a person who attempts to live a good life” needs a redefinition in which the bad is good and good is bas, in Christian parlance.

“ And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. ‘What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.’

“ Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.” Says Russel. True. That has been seminal teaching of all the Hindu books be they scripture or fiction. But his view that “ The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. “ is in fact based on the near east beyond which the Europeans had seldom reached. How Brutal were the Egyptian and Babylonian autocrats, how they resorted to mass massacre time and again has been properly delineated by Will Durant. Mill extended it on the plea of Brahmanical supremacy and Marx uncritically appropriated it. The same mistake has been committed by Bertrand Russel here.

Conclusion:
Summing up his critique Russel says, “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”
This is how Sanatan Dharm has been defined as we shall detail tomorrow.