The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

they aiding and
abetting? Are they, through their beliefs and behavior, pouring fuel onto the fire,
or are they moderating and alleviating human passions like anger, avarice, and
aggression that are so much in the play in today’s world? Do religious traits and
practices like prayer, pilgrimages, worship and other rituals soften our ugly side,
or do they make us feel intoxicated, condescending, special, superior, and safe,
that our relationship with other people actually gets worse? While it is unfair and
sweeping to say that religion makes people bad, or that it strengthens the evil
inside us, what we cannot ignore is that, in the words of Blaise Pascal, “Men never
do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”.
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Of all ‘savageries’, it is the religious kind that is hardest to understand. We
cannot also ignore that religion has immense potential to make us confuse selfserving
with ‘serving God’, confuse prayer with piety, self-righteousness with
self-esteem.
An element of the paradox is our relationship with God in human life.
Throughout the ages, many of the world’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with
the concept and question of God. While the vast majority of people in the world
proudly proclaim themselves as men of faith and as believers, and undertake many
activities in that capacity, a growing number, at the same time, seem prepared
to incur divine wrath and after-life punishment in the pursuit of materialistic
possessions and the good things of life. And they are many who are devout and
immersed in many religious rituals with sincerity, and who hurt and humiliate
fellow-humans, selectively or routinely, and see no conflict between the two.
Many people identify morality with theistic belief but not with benign behavior
towards other people, particularly those who cannot retaliate. The Nobelist
Steven Weinberg said, “With or without [religion], you would have good people
doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do
evil things, that takes religion”. Some suggest that “It’s not so much that religion
makes people do evil, it’s that it provides a convenient excuse for nearly anything,
and that lowers the bar for committing bad behavior we might otherwise avoid.
So while religion isn’t required for people to be jerks, it may perpetuate jerky
behavior and make it more widespread”.67 We also seek and find explanations
and excuses for our own prejudices and polluted minds in what religious texts
say, or are interpreted as. Today’s terrorists, not only the religious types, too, echo
the same line. The point is, right or wrong, if we believe we are fighting for God,
or that God is on our side, or that we have earned God’s support, then any of
us can become a savage or a saint, a maniac or a mahatma. God plays multiple,
sometimes contradictory roles in today’s human society: He offers both hope and
escape. We pronounce Him as both eternal and dated, as both timeless and the
one whose time has passed. Many have so much faith in His justness and justice
that they put up with rank injustice, which also allows the greedy and guilty to
go scot-free. He is within us all and witnesses the battle between good and evil
but He does not take sides and thus allows us to be evil. What on earth can we do
with Him?! Voltaire famously said, after seeing the havoc the French Revolution
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had wrought on France, “If God did not exist, He would have to be invented”.
Can we say that now? For one, God very much ‘exists’, there is no need for
invention. If a time comes when man really and finally gives up on God, tens of
millions will be dead or killed almost overnight.
It is unlikely that any new revelations or insights could be raised any more
now. We will never have conclusive and universally accepted answers to questions
such as whether God created man or not. Or, if He exists or not. Or, why He
‘allows’ evil in the world. The more pertinent point is that the ‘idea’ of God can
play a transformational role in human life. Whitehead said that ‘the purpose of
God is the attainment of value in the temporal world’. The question of value is
at the heart of morality. Whatever has been the impact and influence of religion
on the human mind and human history, the fact is that many religions do have
value frameworks regarding personal behavior in the form of shastras (laws),
commandments and codes of conduct, meant to guide adherents in determining
between right and wrong. These include the Triple Gems of Jainism, Judaism’s
Halacha, Islam’s Sharia, Catholicism’s Canon Law, Buddhism’s Eight-fold Path,
and Zoroastrianism’s ‘good thoughts, good words, and good deeds’ concept,
among others. These frameworks are outlined and interpreted by various sources
such as holy books, oral and written traditions, and religious leaders. These have
remained mainly in the domain or religious and spiritual spheres, but they have
faced serious obstacles when trying to enter the ‘temporal world’. A principal
reason is that it is through the medium of the mind that we have sought to relate
to them. Another cause is that we have distanced and differentiated God from
man and come to believe that so long as we are nice to God it doesn’t matter if
we are nasty in our behavior.
We cannot long wander around any serious metaphysical speculation or
even materialistic mindset without encountering the age-old questions: Must
morality be grounded in God? And can there be ‘religion’ without God? Has
science made religion obsolete? Some say that goodness is good enough, a life
well-lived is a good life, and that God is at best an add-on that makes it easier
to be virtuous. Some, like Einstein, say that they believe in God not as a person
but as an ‘illimitable superior spirit’. Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov says, “If
God does not exist, then everything is permissible”. The implied statement is
that ‘God must exist, because morality is a must’. Some also draw a distinction
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between ‘is permissible’ and ‘ought to be permissible’. Nietzsche took a different
stance, and by pronouncing the death of God he implicitly said morality too
need not exist. What all moral philosophers and humanists have grappled with
is where and how to draw a line in our conscious behavior in the absence of
universal and unchanging moral values. We must also keep in mind that the
ultimate purpose of ‘new morality’ is that in any attempt to create a fabric of
human destiny we cannot escape, however elusive and effervescent it might be,
the moral dimension. Nor can we take off the table what Armand Nicholi called
‘the question of God’, independent and irrespective of religion. The point is
we will never be short of people who can passionately and persuasively argue
in favor of or otherwise about the existence, nature, purpose, and power of the
divine. Even if one sees God, another can dismiss it as a visual hallucination.
In very simple but profound, even poignant, terms, the sense of God for the
vast majority of mankind is nothing else than another name and form of hope,
as much a part of their lives as any other living person; and this is so despite
all the hardships, misery, inequity, and injustice they might experience in their
lives. If God is dead, they too are dead. And it is so too, regardless of who we
are individually, sinner or saint, villain or victim, oppressor or oppressed, rich
or poor. And their faith in the relevance of God is larger and higher than their
allegiance to any religion. They are not interested in issues such as religious
atheism or theistic irreligion. Or, in issues like whether God is a person or a
force, entity or energy, or about the attributes of God and how to reconcile the
relevance of the divine with the reality of the wretchedness of the world. God is
beyond religion; in one sense, He is infinite, impersonal, abstract; in another, He
is particular and very personal; even if He will not talk, He listens, as opposed to
humans. We cannot see Him but He can—and does—see us. Those who know
nothing of the substance of any religion or even of their own religion, those who
know nothing of any scripture or sacred text, still bow before God, sometimes
seek nothing, oftentimes the smallest thing. The important thing is that they
feel God’s ‘presence’, and feel equipped to face the world, solaced, comforted,
renewed, ready to endure suffering. God may have sworn to protect the righteous
but the unrighteous too can seek God’s grace or mercy or help. Hindu scriptures
are full of stories where the demons pray to God and obtain boons which, so to
say, boomerang on Him!
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One of the striking paradoxes of contemporary life is the coexistence
of a world soaked in materialism, selfishness, avarice, and bigotry, and the
growing popularity of places of worship. We can look at it, or rationalize it,
in various ways. One, that a sinner needs and turns to God more than a saint.
Two, for God, everyone is the same. Three, there is no good man or bad man;
only good deed and bad deed. Fourth, we are all playing different roles in the
cosmic drama. Lastly, this is all the mischief of maya; it is all appearance, our
mistaking the unreal for the real. And so on, so forth. Whichever is the truth, the
fact is that those who defy the dictum of God—who are corrupt and unethical,
and who commit every conceivable crime or sin—do not find any qualms or
contradictions in seeking God’s help while violating His word. The weak and
the meek, the wretched and the ostracized, the downtrodden and the deprived,
they are the ones who have reason to cavil, but they don’t. Although being the
ones most victimized, they don’t ask questions like ‘How can we reconcile the
apparent ascendancy of evil with the existence, omnipotence or justness of God?’
It is not that they have no expectations, frustrations or unfulfilled desires, but
none of that shakes their divine disposition. They may not see or speak to God;
they might not be able to recite a single verse from any scripture, but He is simply
integral to their lives. They forgive Him even if their prayers are not answered
in the way they wish. In one sense, God is more a part of the lives of those who
negate or mock Him than of those who believe in Him. For, one needs more
knowledge to disbelieve than to believe. Belief is a matter of the heart; disbelief is
a matter of the mind. In either case, the divine has always been inseparable from
human consciousness. As biologist Edward Wilson says (Consilience, 1998),
“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in
biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout
prehistory when the brain was evolving”. What Wilson calls ‘mind’ could also
be described in broader terms as ‘consciousness’. It is another matter that that
very ‘consciousness’ now calls God dated, defunct, even inefficient, and wants
to take His place. And since he does not know exactly how God looks like,
man does the next best—make himself into a form of life variously described as
supernatural being, supramental being, superman, transhuman, overman, etc.
Some say that man is an unfinished product, a transitional being, deliberately
left that way by God as a kind of challenge to human ingenuity and sagacity.
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Underlying all conceptions of the divine is the tendency to look at everything
with man as the epicenter and the center of creation, which leads us to look
at God also in human terms, to imagine Him in a human form. For example,
in Hinduism, God’s earliest avatars are other creatures like the fish (Matsya),
the tortoise (Kurma), the boar (Varaha), and half-man-half-animal (Narasimha).
God could have chosen, omnipotent as He is, to do what He had to do but
instead opted to take the form of non-humans to tell us that all creatures are
equal to Him and that He has no particular preferential form. This can also be
viewed as symbolic of the path of evolution which envisions that animal life
first appeared in the ocean, then turned amphibious at some point in time, and
from these developed terrestrial life of lesser orders, to more advanced forms
of carnivores, to less advanced humanoid forms, and finally to man today. But
in general, the message from both scriptural and scientific thought is that man
is the God’s finest—and highest—creation, and, at the same time, as Thomas
Aquinas famously described, God is man’s ‘beatitude’,