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BHATTACHARYYA : THE BASIC IDEA OF GOD
89 God, who is thus in a very real sense immanent in the spiritual nature of man. God is no doubt conceived in most religions as an external being "Something beyond the cloud, some one beyond nature, the Great One who breaks the law and works his will for his own." "There is no denial also that this transcendent God with some of the primitive people is identified with the Law-giver, the priest, prophet of the Seer. But with the progress of the process of rationalisation, all this came only to mean that God is more than the perishing individual, a reality, greater than ones empirical self. Religion in the process of rationalisation is thus a progress from the objective to the subjective consciousness of God, the former, characterising generally the primitive and the less advanced outlook and the latter representing the more advanced, "finding the voice of God mainly in the inner shrine of the heart" (E. Caird). So far as the God-consciousness was concerned, the school of Schlimacher did away with all dualism between Verstand and Kernnufi, the gulf between the pure and the practical reasons and found in the essential emotional nature of man, the explanation of the religious sense.
For the discovery of the true grounds of religious consciousness and for the matter of that, of the true nature of God in his aforesaid four-fold aspects, we are thus led to fall back upon the true nature of man. Now, undeniably man is a social being, he feels that there are other beings who are essentially like him; that, in other words, there are spiritual realities other than but similar to him. Even the primitive man has the sense that he is not religious by himself, that his God is not exclusively his, that he has not the liberty to choose his own God, nor the exclusive claim to enjoy his blessings alone. The nature of man is thus inseparably related to that of others like him. If then rationalisation requires that God is to be sought in the nature of man, there are apparent psychological reasons for an individuals looking upon his community as something divine. The State, for example, was looked upon as Divinity by some peoples and for similar reasons the religious Brotherhood, the Church, was recognised as God by most of the social religions. The most pronounced and unambiguous form of acceptance of a collection of man as the sole Divinity is that introduced by Auguste Comte in which the supreme God is identified with Humanity, whose worship is to be performed by an organised priesthood and Church through an elaborate system of rituals.
While it may be admitted that all rationalised religions must be based on a recognition of the other realities, separate from, yet similar to the individual, it is never right to obliterate the individual and fix upon the 'other element as the sole real Divinity. For, the other
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