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one says that one does not believe in God, one only means that one does not believe in the popular ideas about Him. It is true that Jainism denies the existence of any Personal God knowing Him either as Creator or Father or First Cause, but this denial of God would assuredly not make a Jain an atheist.
Indeed, it is not only with Jainism that it has been branded as atheistic simply because it never accepted the popular conception of Deity and always yearned after a higher conception of God; but it is the case with many persons in various countries in all the ages. In the eyes of his Athenian judges, Socrates was an atheist who never denied the gods of Greece but simply claimed the right to believe in something higher than Hephaistos and Aphrodite. Spinora was also branded as an atheist and apostate. Many such persons have been called atheists, not because they dreamt of denying the existence of a God, but because they wished to purify the idea of Godhead from what seemed to them human observation and human error. When Fichte was accused of atheism, what did he reply, "your God", he said "is the giver of all enjoyment, the destributor of all happiness and of all unhappiness among human beings. That is his real character. But he who wants enjoyment is a sensual, Cosual man, who has no religion and is incapable of religion. The first truly religious senti ment kills all desires within us. A God who is to serve our desires is a Contemptible being, an evil being; for he supports and perpetuates human ruin and degradation of reason. Such a God is in truth the Prince of this world; who has been condemned long ago through the mouth of truth. What they call God, is to me not God. They are true atheists; and because I do not accept their God as the true God, they call me an atheist."
Max Muller distinguishes between two kinds of atheism-one which is unto death, and the other which is the very life-blood of all true faith. About the latter he says, "It is the power of giving up what, in our best, our most honest moments, we know to be no longer true; it is readiness to replace the less perfect, however dear, however sacred it may have been to us, by the more perfect, however much it may be detested, as yet, by the world. It is the true self-surrender, the true self-sacrifice, the truest trust in truth, the truest faith. Without that atheism religion would long ago have become a petrified hypocracy, without that atheism no new religion, no reform, no reformation, no resuscitation would ever have been possible, without that atheism no new life is possible for every one of us" (F. Max Muller, Lectures on origin and Growth of Religion, p. 311). We shall be doing justice if we ascribe the term atheism in this sense to the teachings of Jain prophats. The whole force of Jainism is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of The final goal of any particular soul is to become pure and perfect i.e.
Mahavira Jayanti Smarika, 76
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