My close friends know that I am a big fan of Gandhi and always had an aversion towards the violent freedom struggle. In fact, Gandhi is my second favorite character from the history, the first being Chanakya/Kautaliya. And let me be clear, I admire both these figures for the same thing: their cunningness and their political/financial understandings that actually made India strong at two different time periods in history. But I digress. Coming back to the article in discussion, I never expected Bhagat Singh to be an atheist, let alone have such a deep understanding about religious beliefs. As Amit Verma puts it, the article makes you want to learn more about Bhagat Singh as a person.
I like to think myself as an agnostic and not an atheist. I don't have courage to discard the existence of a supernatural power and not because I am scared of an Almighty and his wrath but because its a psychological need that I have come to accept. As I wrote earlier, I am a hypocrite when it comes to concept of God. I believe in him when the pressure/stress around becomes too much for me to bear. If I am in a stressful situation, the only way I can relax is by believing that He exists and will be responsible for the consequences of my actions/decisions (As we say it, aage uski marzi (All is in God's hands now)). I don't have enough strength to take responsibility of all my actions and I have a ready made concept/person to blame, then why not use it (I say, When going gets tough, believe in God)? But I do so in full knowledge that I am using the concept of God for my advantage and ultimately its me who has to change in order to succeed (it just gives me a brief respite). Having said that, I completely agree with the views of Bhagat Singh. I wish I had enough courage and emotional strength to become a full-fledged atheist.
The article makes me wonder that how many of the atheists in the world were brought up as an atheist? Most of atheist I know(including me), have come from families of firm believers and thought their way to Atheism. As Bhagat Singh puts it:
According to me, any man who has got some reasoning power at his command always tries to reason out his environments. Where direct proofs are lacking philosophy occupies the important place. As I have already stated, a certain revolutionary friend used to say that philosophy is the outcome of human weakness. When our ancestors had leisure enough to try to solve out the mystery of this world, its past, present and the future, its whys and wherefores, they having been terribly short of direct proofs, everybody tried to solve the problem in his own way. Hence we find the wide differences in the fundamentals of various religious creeds, which sometimes assume very antagonistic and conflicting shapes. Not only the Oriental and Occidental philosophies differ, there are differences even amongst various schools of thought in each hemisphere...
...All these creeds differ from each other on the fundamental question; and everybody considers himself to be on the right. There lies the misfortune. Instead of using the experiments and expressions of the ancient Savants and thinkers as a basis for our future struggle against ignorance and to try to find out a solution to this mysterious problem, we, lethargical as we have proved to be, raise the hue and cry of faith, unflinching and unwavering faith to their versions and thus are guilty of stagnation in human progress....
But above all, I like the underlying question of the article:
Is it due to vanity that I do not believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God?
I think, all the atheist, agnostic people reached to their conclusions by only one reason: Common Sense.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteoh...btw...Happy diwali.....
ReplyDelete