LIBERATING INDIAN MIND -26
TO BE or NOT TO BE

While I feel threatened by advancing strides of papacy*, I recall that exactly 91 years and 6 months back Bertrand Russell delivered his historic lecture that has inspired a number of geniuses to re-examine their moral and intellectual stand. A friend of mine, senior by 10 years, wrote a booklet having made some initial experiments in other religious practices. He had gone as close to Christianity as to be baptised when compulsory requirement of beef eating repulsed the vegetarian. He reverted to tell why he was a Hindu with added vigour. Another friend, junior by 15 years, wrote a booklet to tell why he was not a Hindu to prove that he was secular.

(Note: *The Lecture …was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall on Sunday March 6, 1927, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society.)

Right from my childhood I did not observe anything which others thought necessary. Weeping helplessly in my solitude, remembering my mother, I lamented why I was not borne a Muslim. In that case I could visit her burial site and weep inconsolably till she herself rose to hug me.

On the other hand for quite some time I sat after morning bath for puja, reading Hanuman chalisa (हनुमान चालीसा), Bajarang Bana (बजरंगबाण) and some part of Rama charitmanas(रामचिरत मानस), meditated on Dipavali nights to achieve mantrasiddhi( मंत्रसिद्धि), out of my own curiosity to achieve or show myself a bit extraordinary. Even at a late stage I made another trial reciting Durga Saptsati (दुर्गासप्तशती), concentrating hard before the icon of sarvmanagala (सर्वमंगला)’
, ultimately to realise that it is all self-deception. I found neither any additional piety nor spiritual improvement in me. But it was not as a devotee but a seeker of spiritual elevation.

To be or not to be a Hindu was never a moot point. It was settled issue beyond the reach of any speculation as much as I was son of my father, member of my family, resident of my revenue village which was part of my postal village, that fell in my subdivision, and my revenue circle and finally in my district. Before I learnt my alphabet, I had crammed my identity details. If someone simply asked my name he would get a long reply trying his patience: मेरानामभगवानसिंहवल्दरामधारीसिंहग्रामहरियरसीयरबुजुर्गकिताखुर्दतप्पागगहातहसीलबांसगांवपरगनाभौवापारजिलागोरखपुरकारहनेवालाहूं। No break to separate words, no pauses for clauses, no respite for taking breath. It was as if embosomed on my mind as a stamp mark – Inseparable, unterminable by any doubt. Exactly the same was with my communal identity, HINDU. Interminable, immutable, unquestionable.

The main reason for this immutability was that my Hindu identity never disturbed me in my thought and action in any way. Although Semitic religions had their inspiration from ‘Hindus’ settled in Asia Minor, they all were set in their socio-economic moorings. Religion in their sense never prospered in India. We had sects or sampradayas which not only differed but had also clashes, but in that sense Hinduism is not a religion but a conglomerate of religions, all of them similar except in the belief of the superiority of their deity – Shiva (शिव), Shakti (शक्ति) – Durga(दुर्गा), Kali(काली) in different manifestations . If we take these sects to be separate religions then, in that case every househoould have as many religis its members. Nay, the same individual could profess a number of religions.

We have ample material to trace the birth, development, ascendancy and decay as well of the deities , but we shall not indulge into that beyond telling that the same Mother Earth (the source of मातृभूमि > वन्देमातरम्,) has been symbolizing space with its four quarters, चतुर्भुजा, with added angular quarters अष्टभुजा, plus the vertical dimensions दशभुजा and temporally काली, consuming any and everything existing कराला. In a synthetic conception of space and time born of famines and death caused by it makes it कपाला bearing necklace of skulls, चामुंडा). We can trace why to avert personal harm, blood of animals harming agricultures – water buffalo and goat – came to be shed to satiate her. This makes even these sects rationally explicable and therefore with much less blind faith ascompared with the religions which defy explanations and are therefore called belief systems.

Dharm is purely a scientific concept. It defined essential and innate attributes of objects and beings, in absence of which they cease to be.; they can not be conceived even. Look at the fire without heat, lamp without light, poison without toxification, snake without fang. In a word dharm is above good or bad. Use of dharm as religion is tautological error.

II

Now we may examine the grounds which forced Bertrand Russel to dissociate himself from Christianity
(1) There are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature—namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. … Of course there is another sense which you find in Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshippers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. … I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant Him a very high degree of moral goodness.

(2) Belief in eternal hell fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

(3) You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

(4) …as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be…. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all.

(5) … You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because He is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am travelling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard, intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

(6) THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN …it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, 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?

(7) THE MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR DEITY … You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was sceptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother’s knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasise—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times…. If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. … a line which I often thought was a very plausible one—that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

(8) THE ARGUMENT FOR THE REMEDYING OF INJUSTICE… ,Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say: ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. …

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.

(9) THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST : … You will remember that He said: ‘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. … Christ said: ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says: ‘Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.’ That is a very good principle…. I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion…. 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.

(10) DEFECTS IN CHRIST’S TEACHING : …. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: ‘Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come.’ Then He says: ‘There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom’; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ … He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he was certainly not superlatively wise.

(11) THE MORAL PROBLEM : … There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that 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, … You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: ‘Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world of come.’ That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come.

Then Christ says: ‘The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. 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.’ Then He says again: ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. …You remember what happened about the fig-tree. ‘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. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects

(14) THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR:.. As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. …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 practised 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. …

There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the Church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. 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.’

(15) FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION: ….Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion has gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.