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Need for religious reforms
If religion cannot be eliminated from society, it has to be used creatively and positively. For long religion has served to unite community, provide meaning to life and death, and generate hope even in hopeless individual and social conditions. The ideas of humanism, equality before God, love and compassion are found in most religions. However, in a religiously plural society, for integration of people, peace and harmony, you need a new religious framework applicable to all. Such frameowrks are found in the writings of great humanists and preachers of universal human love in all parts of the world and in all centuries. The following quote from Tolstoy’s letter to a Hindu echoes this quite well. Tolstoy (1908) argued that all religions present the same truth everywhere but all of them got distorted due to motivated interpretations by pseudodivine rulers. The evils of existing religions need to be corrected by asserting that “love represents the highest morality.” Tolstoy’s letter was translated by Gandhi in Gujarati and published for wider circulation. (Major writings and speeches of Gandhi seem to be influenced by this thought is clear to any serious reader of Gandhi.)
To quote:
If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on-if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the 'Sciences', and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies-their name is legion-and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupifying ballast-the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory. |
Tagore wants to say that the practice of universal love is the practice of true religion which is free from blind faiths and beliefs. Like Comte (in Sociology), Mohammad, Buddha and Gandhi he wants to build a new society based on love and equality. Love and equality provide the framework for analysis and reconstruction of society. Till it happens there is always a danger that the gains of construction of good society (which will be difficult to define if humanism is not taken to be the starting point) can be lost quickly due to self-seeking people in power.
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