Man's Fate and God's Choice - Bhimeswara Challa (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

of worldly life. If temptation means being induced, seduced, and manipulated to do things that seem to give comfort and pleasure but are morally wrong, then much of life is that. The Buddha, on the way to his enlightenment and in his encounter with Mara, identifies temptations as squadrons or ‘hosts’: the sense organs; boredom; hunger and thirst; craving; sloth and torpor; cowardice; uncertainty, malice coupled with obstinacy, gain, honor, fame; and self-praise and denigration of others. That is a pretty exhaustive but hybrid list of the ways through which we are ‘tempted’. It is interesting that things like ‘boredom’ and ‘uncertainty’ are in that list. They are states of mind and, in the human world at least, the terminal ‘tempter’ is the mind itself. It is the mind that strokes the temptations of the body, tempts us to take the primrose path, the path of pleasure, preyas as the Upanishads call it, and offers endless explanations and excuses for all our transgressions and trespasses. Some scientists believe that our morality is hardwired into our brains, while others believe that the environment and people close to us help shape our thoughts and actions. But broadly most scientists agree that the struggle between doing good and doing evil resides in the brain. What is not known is if the parameters within which the brain works are a matter of biology or the environment. Some psychologists like Melanie Storry Chan say that our moral compass resides in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain just behind the forehead which is responsible for highly complex functioning such as empathy and the ability to make moral judgments. It has also been found that individuals who behave dishonestly exhibit increased activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex.

Whether or not man is naturally ‘good’ or ‘unnaturally’ bad has been debated since time immemorial. Prophets and saints and mahatmas have sought to distinguish between evil people and evil deeds; and inferentially between good people who do bad things and ‘bad people’ who do good deeds. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that no one is entirely good; he even said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, that is, God”

 

(Matthew, 19.17). Although interpretations vary on what he meant, the broad message is that only God is perfectly good. Were it not so, where is the place for evil to hide and flourish?

But modern man has settled the issue. In the ‘matrix of his mind’ there is no tangible incentive for ‘goodness’ at all; the mindset is ‘if being bad gets all the ‘good things of life’, why tread the thankless path of good?’ Yet no one, save perhaps a psychopath, wants to be ‘evil’; he just wants some things and if, his mind reasons, that is what it takes to get them and prevail, he cannot be blamed. In other words, being bad is not his choice; it is a choice forced upon him by other people. Had Hitler got what he wanted — strategic supremacy over Europe — he perhaps would not have gone to war. After all, he did not actually; it was Britain that declared war on Germany. And he gained power ‘democratically’, and an entire nation and tens of millions of people idolized him. They did not think they were bad; they were just being patriotic! Most of all, they were all as ‘human’ as any of us, as Hannah Arendt reminds us. At the end of the day, we can all ‘feel good’ about our proclaimed proximity to God, about our ‘unique’ capacity to differentiate good and evil, and we can endlessly theorize about the duality of good and evil and whether evil is an event or a process. Yet, we cannot shut our eyes to its pervasiveness and predisposition in the human nature. We cannot run away from the unpleasant truth that evil lurks deep inside the human consciousness (where God too has a home), waiting to raise its hideous head at the slightest pretext or provocation.

Modern men are not the only ones baffled and bewitched by evil. The origin and stubborn persistence and pervasiveness of evil in human affairs have long been an enduring subject of theological and scholastic speculation down the ages. It is said in the Atharvaveda, one of the oldest of Hindu scriptures, “When the divine architect planned and fashioned the

human form, all the evils and virtues entered the mortal frame and made it their home.”216 Over time, virtues seem to have taken a lashing and are in hiding. Some religions tried to ‘fix’ the problem through a divinely revealed absolute code of conduct like the Ten Commandments of the ancient Hebrews. Some others created a web of shastras, or treatises, like the ones enunciated by Manu and Confucius. Some thinkers have tried to reason that human morality plays a role, not as an intrinsic, natural necessity, but as a social need. Those who espouse the utilitarian principle have tried to codify morality simply as ‘the greatest good for the greatest numbers’ and as ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Implicitly, anything that contravenes this code is deemed evil. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the moral tenet ‘Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you’ (Mahabharata, 5:1517) sums up the concept of dharma. Vedanta says good and evil, like day and night, are inherent and are really a play of the mind. Charles Darwin, in his book The Descent of Man (1871), equated moral sense with conscience, and characterized it as a highly complex sentiment, composed of and evolved from social instinct, reason, self- interest, religious feelings, instruction, and habit. Whether it is natural or acquired, the foremost task is to re-ignite the embers of flickering morality in the human disposition. Evil is something we have to live with; eradicating evil is tantamount to eradicating goodness. But it ought not to be, and need not be, the dominant force in human affairs. We do not have to be so powerless to resist the urge to cause injury to others. There is nothing in our origin or evolution or our culture that explains or justifies the sway and sweep of ‘pure’ evil in contemporary life. It is not ordained that we should spend much of our limited lifespan trying to nag, nibble, and nullify each other.

 

 

 

 

216 Sacred Space. The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 14 August 2004.

 

Evil has many manifestations, but the one we are concerned with is personal or moral evil. The raw truth of the human condition is that no one is fully free from all evil, whether it is endemic or exogenous. The French playwright and philosopher Octave Mirbeau wrote, “When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a

pungent smell of decay.”217 There is much that goes on inside our bodies that we do not want to admit to our own conscience. That ‘smell’ is the byproduct of the way humans have organized their individual and collective lives anchored in individualism, the pregnant price of which goes by the maxims of ‘progress’ and ‘problem solving’. Because we find it hard to share the fruit of our labor, our idea of overcoming any obstacle is elimination, of the situation or the individual. It has now come to such a pass that we are increasingly eliminating ourselves in the name of problem-solving, both as individuals and as a species.

To the age-old threats from microbes, biohazards, and pathogens, we can now add the pandemics of suicide and homicide. In the process, our creativity often ends up tampering with the laws of Nature, and we are not wise enough to manage the processes we initiate or invent. The result is that “In a universe of interconnection and interrelationship of all things,

each alteration sets into motion unknown and sometimes unknowable consequences.”218

The evil in man may have had much to do with the way the human species has evolved, but we are now ominously being told that its effect is not confined to humans. And evil could be a tool not for transformation but annihilation. Possible scenarios for a cataclysmic conclusion to the human tenure on earth need not be, as generally assumed, the result of a war or global warming or melting glaciers, or monster earthquakes or crashing Manhattan-sized meteorites. These are still possible or even probable, but it could also be far more insidious and internal, a virus within, the silent but catastrophic deterioration of the human condition. At the turn of this millennium, man is at once narcissistic and nihilistic. It has been said that those whom the gods want to destroy, they make them mad first. Human behavior is bizarre and goes beyond the bounds of self-interest and self-preservation, or even self-belief. The sage Vyasa, the celebrated author of the Mahabharata and many other sacred texts and several Puranas, when asked to sum it all up, said, “The act of greatest merit is to

help others, and the greatest act of sin is to cause intentional injury to others.”219 Today it requires more effort and will, not to commit that ‘greatest sin’ but to commit that ‘act of greatest merit.’ Motive is the real measure of man and in that perspective few are guiltless.

What really bothers most theologians like St. Augustine and many ‘god-loving’ philosophers like Socrates is not the equation between man and evil, but between God and evil. It has been said that more people have abandoned their faith due to the existence of evil than due to any other reason. If God is good, Almighty and the Creator of everything, how can He create evil, and if He did, He is not all-good. But the confusion lies in extrapolating everything human to God, and in labeling God in terms of human good and human evil. Then again, is evil a ‘thing’, which, in the words of author Peter Kreeft is something like a “black

cloud, or a dangerous storm, or a grimacing face, or dirt”?220 Or is evil simply the absence of good or a ‘lesser good’ than that desirable? In his monumental Summa Theologica, Saint

 

 

 

217 Octave Mirbeau. The Quote Garden. Accessed at: http://www.quotegarden.com/soul.html

218 Cited in: Examining the Raw Truths of Life. The Trouble with Oneness: Individualism has its Own Kind of Blow-back, or Collateral Damage. 17 June 2008. Accessed at: http://theforbiddenblog.wordpress.com/category/humankind/

219 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 26 August 2004. p.2.

220 Peter Kreeft. The Problem of Evil. Accessed at: http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/evil.htm#top

 

Thomas Aquinas found only two objections to the existence of God, and one of them was the problem of evil (the other was the apparent ability of natural science to explain everything in our experience without God). Carlos Steel, a researcher and a professor of ancient, medieval and renaissance philosophy, summarizes the Socratic view: “In the discussion on education in the Republic, Socrates lays down the principles which those who speak about the gods must follow if they want to avoid the errors of traditional mythology. The first typos of this rational theology is this: ‘God is the cause, not of all things, but only of the good.’ For ‘God, being good, cannot be responsible for everything happening in our life, as is commonly believed, but only for a small part. For we have a far smaller share of good than of evil, and while God must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some other factors than God as

cause of the evil.’”221

What are those factors? As Steel puts it, God is not responsible for ‘most things in human life’, since most of them are evil. In this view, God is not the cause of evil, he only guarantees the inevitable decree of fate. In Hindu mythology too,