Jainism and World Problems

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
eyes to the natural law which says that without love no lasting peace can be maintained in the world, and that without Religion you cannot have true love. Let me repeat, Materialism is based on the needs of the flesh, and the flesh wants more and more of the worldly goods for its ease and comfort, and that the worldly goods are not available in such abundance as to shut out jealousies and rivalries and the grabbing spirit of covetousness.
What changes are desirable in our ideals to-day then? I would like to answer this by saying that the first need of the moment is the understanding and the imparting of the true teaching of Religion, freeing it from unholy allegory and misleading metaphor. I should like to see all boys and girls taught the Science of the Psychology of the Soul in a simple easy way. Other sciences should be read certainly, but the Science of Salvation must reign supreme. All human activities work best when controlled and guided by Religion. As for morality let our teachers be not dancers and acrobats, but learned holy men who understand and practise Religion in the proper spirit, and let the schools for morals be not theatres and cinemas but properly constituted Universities and the abodes of the Pious and Sainltly Professors of the Science of the Soul. Theatres and cinemas can be easily improved to leave out such themes as that of woman's frailty and the sexual lapses of men; they can be impressed into service for educative and uplifting purposes. In all departments of life we should cut down the seed of devastating greed, and replace it with the spirit of renunciation, even though the layman may not find it easy at once to give away his overcoat also when a claim is made for his coat. If we work in this spirit the end cannot but be a happy one, so that we shall find that all the cause of the topsy-turvydom of our affairs is really our soul-less materialism and the boast of the sciences that are aiming at the building of a Tower of Babel, to bring down the heaven on earth for the benefit of the flesh.