August 15, 1973 THE THUNDER
RELIGION AND SCIENCE
By Late Shri Abani Mukherjee, M.A. ************************************************************************************

We have today more scientific knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of peace in the world. The discoveries which should have lightened have added a weight to the miseries of the world. Love has gone. Wisdom has vanished. The principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, has enlarged the inequality of mankind. Religion is the only solution of the present impasse.

Love and Religion

The basis of all religion is love. Whatever strengthens and purifies it, whatever enlarges its circumference is religion. It is the only medicine which can cure modern War psychosis. Modernists hold the cause of war is neither political or economic nor biological but psychological. It is a mental disease. Its cause is Fear Mentality Inhuman Mentality and War Mentality. Fear Mentality is best expressed by beliefs of America on the one hand and the Soviet on the other that sooner or later one adversary intends to strike another. Inhuman Mentality lies deep in color, race and class. War Mentality is embellished by Mao’s theory of Force.

Politics is wearing a new outlook today. The two nuclear giants have come to understand that violent hatred will result not in one Rome of the Proletariat but two Carthages. Mao’s dogma of the force is inadequate to the stormy present. People must think a new and act a new. Men are destined to be brothers through the father hood of God; that each man is his brother’s keeper and we should love our neighbor as ourselves.

Edifice of Oneness

Pursuit of this religious sense is not so dramatic as the pursuit of our animal nature. But for the vital good of man it should be pursued with unflagging determination. An Edifice of oneness is not built over night. It cannot be built in a day. Yet there is no place to be panicky Russia and America both have realised the necessity of some sort of brotherhood in the world. What is necessary is to feed fat this realisation by the knowledge of religion – how blood dimmed tide crammed with inhuman miseries has been looked whenever the ceremony of innocence has drowned, how deluge overtook us whenever the falcon could not hear the falconer.

“Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand
The Second Coming.”

Our Duty

What is our duty? We should become heroic to do away with the excess of scientific mentality, to accumulate materials of external life. The mentality must be assimilated to the internal laws of human nature. The body must be balanced to that which animates it. It should be proclaimed everywhere that a man is great not by what he was but by what he is. Science is the science of Has’ just as religion is the science of Is’. Religion is divine. It is the Centre and circumference of all knowledge’s. It is that which comprehends all sciences.

All science must be referred to it. If it is denied it will deny the fruit and make the world barren and waste as the world has become today. Science has attended more to the cause disaster. We are so much obsessed with science today that we have forgotten our total personality. That flaring of passion which enables man to see the whole has left us. We have become dull to those partial apprehensions of the agencies of the world. We can no more participate in the internal, the infinite and the one.

But oneness is the cry today scientific earth is saying ‘No, Scientific sky is saying ‘no’, yet we must achieve it through love the basis of all religion. It is concealed in deep waters. But let us be mariners equipped with new ship of spirit. We shall steer forth for those deep waters where mariners have never dare to go. We will frame our song with:

“The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
which an age of prudence can never retract
by this and this only,
we have existed.”