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APRIL, 1990
163
Why certain religions failed to maintain peace even among their followers in the past was because they failed to eradicate excessive greed and pride and lust from the hearts of their followers, who repeated the scriptural text that enjoins the practising of love all right enough, but allowed it to be swept away from the mind by their rising passions, greed and pride and lust. In fact, certain religions directly fostered fanaticism itself.
Modern education is also not able to encompass the curbing down of the surging savage emotions and strong lust. They are beyond its scope and programme, as a matter of fact. The root of ethics with the moderns is only the social well-being of the community ; individual good is bound up in the social good, and may have to be sacrificed if necessary for the good of the greatest numbers. The individual and the society are therefore not always at one on the ethical side of life, and whenever a man has the prospect of making a big gain he may begin to think how he can avoid the social law or escape detection. In religion the foundation of ethics is made to rest on the ideal of Divinity which, being the embodiment of Immortal Life, Omniscience, Bliss and Infinite Power, is greater than all the world's temptations put together. It is the love of this Great Ideal and the fear of the consequences of evil acting which constitute an effective check on our savagery and lust and greed. And the great lucidity with which the mind comes to adhere to these two points the greater will be its faith in them. Hence the importance of scientific explanation on which Jainism insists.
As I have said already, the foundation of almost all other religions is laid on the scientific basis in reality, but it has been obscured by the employment of the allegorical script. It is possible to get at the even now. I now ask you to look into your scriptures once more from the allegorical standpoint, and see if you do not discover real beauties in them. My own writings will help you in this enterprise, in which I wish you good luck from the bottom of my heart.
Let me say one word more as to the difference between the modern thought and Religion when properly understood. Modern thought has confined its attention to the world of the senses, where brute natur found to be red in tooth and claw. It knows nothing of the Kingdom of the Soul, or the Kingdom of God, which is within. It therefore from its own point of view rightly points out the main characteristic of life which is struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. There is no question of moral fitness here ; but only of the physical and mental, that is to say, intellectual fitness. Religion, on the other hand, shows what enormous
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