Religions Without Sacrifice: One person’s faith is another person’s fantasy because religion has been reduced to meaningless rituals practised mindlessly. Temples, churches, synagogues, mosques and those entrusted with the duty of interpreting religion to lay people seek to control through fear of hell, damnation, and purgatory. In the name of God they have spawned more hate and violence than any government has done in the world. True religion is based on spirituality, love, compassion, understanding, and appreciation of each other whatever our beliefs maybe — Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostics or whatever. Gandhi believed whatever labels we put on our faith, ultimately all of us worship truth because truth is God.
Superficially we may be very devout believers and make a tremendous public show of our worship, but if that belief, understanding, compassion, love and appreciation is not translated into our lives, prayers will have no meaning. True worship demands sacrifice not just in terms of the number of times a day we say our prayers but in how sincere we are in translating those prayers into life styles. In the 1930s many Christian and Muslem clergy flocked into India to convert the millions who were oppressed as untouchables. The Christian clergy stood on street corners loudly denouncing Hinduism and proclaiming the virtues of Christianity. Months went by without a single convert accepting the offer. Frustrated, one priest asked Grandfather: After all the oppression and discrimination that the ‘untouchables’ suffer under Hinduism, why is it that they do not accept our offer of a better life under Christianity? Grandfather replied: When you stop telling them how good Christianity is and start living it, you will find more converts than you can cope with. Thesewords of wisdom apply to all religions of the world. We want to shout from roof-tops the virtues of our beliefs and not translate them into our lives.Without sacrifice we may become active in a church but remain inactive in its gospel. In other words, we go for the social facade of religion and the piety of religious practices. There is no real walking with people or going the second mile or trying to deal with our social problems that may eventually undo our economic system. It takes sacrifice to serve the needs of other people – the sacrifice of our own pride and prejudice, among other things.
Politics Without Principle: Gandhi said that those who firmly believe in nonviolence should never stand for elections, but they should select representatives who are willing to understand and practice the philosophy. Gandhi said that an elected representative is one on whom you have bestowed your power of attorney. Such a person should be allowed to wield authority only as long as he enjoys your confidence. When politicians indulge themselves power games, they act without principles. To remain in power at all cost is unethical. Gandhi says that when politicians (or anyone else, for that matter) give up the pursuit of truth they, or in the case of parties, would be doomed. Partisan politics, lobbying, bribing, and other forms of maipractices that are so rampant in politics
today is also
unprincipled. Politics has earned the reputation of being dirty. It is so
because we made it dirty. We create power groups to lobby for our cause and are
willing to do anything to achieve our goal. Not many among human kind have
learned how to resist temptation, so who is to blame for the mess we find
ourselves in?
The Seven Habits will help you avoid these Seven Deadly Sins.
Q.2. The three cardinals of Gandhian philosophy truth, love and nonviolence are so coherent, cohesive and co-focal, that altogether they stand like a solid rock.Explain.
Ans. The three cardinals of Gandhian philosophy-are:
(1) Truth,
(2) Love, and
(3) Non-violence.
The absence of
even one breaches the wholesomeness of the structure. However, all the three
elements ought to be understood across a much wider plane and in a much deeper
sense beyond the threshold of their common meaning.
Truth is difficult to listen, more difficult to speak, and most difficult to
practise, yet it is simplest, purest, and clearest since it is irreducible,
irrevocable and irreversible. Knowing the ‘truth’ means knowing the ‘reality’.
Humans by nature are truth seekers, and they have always been inquisitive, investigative and argumentative to probe more than what they know, to go deeper than what they see in themselves, others and their surroundings, and anything else with which they can interact through physical senses and mental processes. Truth is the aim of a scientist; truth is the goal of a judicature; and, for a saint or a prophet, truth is the name of God. But certain parameters, which decide the end results, should also be checked out before arriving at the truth; and they are: credibility of an analyst or experimenter, dependability of an instrument or technique and the reliability of the data from primary or secondary sources. If all these parameters are bias-free and error-free, they add credence to the results that can be accredited as ‘true’. However, our access to the ‘absolute truth’ may still be denied by Nature, for our understanding of ‘being’, ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ of the minutest object and event (shorter than a femto-second) — the building block of this universe — has been so far very limited. Such limiting zones are formed in our thought process alone, because the evolution or dissolution of our mental fields effected by internal and external stimuli, defines our analytical power and comprehension up to a certain point of accuracy, beyond which uncertainty becomes larger than the observable object or events of the micro-domain. If we accept it as an inherent limitation imposed by Nature in reaching the ultimate truth, Gandhi must then. be regarded as one of the greatest corporate managers and human resource developers of the twentieth century. Or as Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore aclaimed, said, “He was a living truth at last, and not only quotations from books.” Gandhi knew that common masses cannot manage themselves for perfect non-violence, and elements of imperfection are unavoidable. That is why according to Gandhi, although imperfection in practising perfect non-violence is inevitable, one’s duty is therefore to strive constantly for the removal of least imperfection.
The second element of the Gandhian philosophy is love, which too has varied meanings and shades in different societies, and for different groups of people. One may instantly relate it to liking, fondness, passion, infatuation, attachment and adoration, whereas in Gandhian context, we must expand its horizon to encompass compassion, empathy, sympathy, kindness, reverence, esteem and devotion. -We need to transform our mind-set from passion to compassion, from antipathy to empathy and from individuality to plurality in order to understand the expounded meaning of love.