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THE ROOT OF RELIGION: INTUITION AND REASONING.' SATKARI MOOKERJEE
The subject of the present seminar has a perennial interest both for the believer and the sceptic. The sceptic must be thankful to the pious believer for providing him with the staple for his criticism. After all his attitude is primarily, if not mainly, negative. He wants to demolish the very foundation of the belief of the follower of a religion. He can succeed in his task by showing that the faith and practice of a religious man are based on hoax invented by the intellectuals of a country for thriving at the expense of credulous fools. The professional custodians of religion do prescribe certain ceremonies and ways of worship which can be performed with valued materials such as food, cloth, aromatics. These things are covetable to men of all walks of life and consequently grateful to the Deity. The Deity of course does not consume them but leaves them intact for the use of priests and their family. The sceptics are mostly intellectual people who have carried on their crusade against religion as social institution with formidable arguments in all ages and countries which focus on the utilitarian value of the Votive offerings. India produced a class of intellectuals who prided themselves on their freedom from superstitions and independent thinking. Scepticism is almost as old as religion. The Buddha had a contemporary called Ajita Kesakambali who preached the materialistic doctrine that there is no life after death, the soul dies with the body and conciousness is only a byproduct of the physical elements-earth, water, air and fire. It is on a par with the heat of the body. The Buddha believed in life after death, heaven and hell and transmigration. His chief concern was the promulgation of a way of discipline which would ultimately lead to emancipation from the cycle of birth and death. He had to fight these materialists and prove their tenets as false heresy. The purpose of my mention of this historical fact is to show that faith and scepticism have run pari passu without being able to extinguish each other. It is not an unprecedented novel phenomenon. The present day communist creed of dialectical materialism sponsored by Karl Marx is only a revival of old materialism and scepticism with ingenious trappings. We shall give our evaluation of this respectable philosophical doctrine in due course.
1. Read on April 8, 1971, at Seminar of Scholars.
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