| 8. From the age of 15, the child should be educated on the positive aspects -- not the bizarre, not the fantastic, not the strange, habits and customs -- of all world religions by competent teachers, who, while they themselves would be students of comparative religion, would keep their own bias, if any, towards a particular faith or opinion, in abeyance as best as possible in order to present objectively the commonness of spirituality in all religions. Comparative religion is not competitive religion. Every religion is a blend of micro principles and macro settins. The broad framework of the former is usually understood though not followed in its totality. But it speaks to man as man. The micro-setting however is a mixture of local mythology and ritual and this never appeals to a stranger or outsider. Only a powerful poet or talented sculptor may be able to impart some understanding of it to one not born and nurtured in the tradition. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It is a crisis of intellect that wants to adjudicate among the great religions of the world. What is important for the 21st century citizen is to come together and rediscover that this crisis of intellect can be resolved only by going back to the very ancient thoughts that have remained with us for more than twenty centuries now. The period of the first millenium B.C. is the most important period of history in this connection. That was the time when the axis of the world's thoughts shifted from a study of nature to the study of man's life and his inner aspirations. Then in India we had the Upanishadic Seers, Mahavira the Jina and Gautama the Buddha; in China we had Lao Tse and Confucius; in Iran there was Zoroaster, in Israel there were the great prophets; and in Greece, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato. That surge of activity and investigation and the profundity of thought of that period have never since been matched. They achieved so much with so little help from any gadgetry -- which, by the way is what is helping us today to unravel further frontiers of knowledge. The philosophers of the first millenium B.C. achieved what they did by sheer rational thinking coupled with a certain unique intuition of their own. The test of significance of what they left for posterity is in the fact they have survived twenty centuries of war and peace, strife and hatred, and all the ups and downs of great empires and civilizations. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It is extremely doubtful whether anything of what we call 20th century science and technology will survive as valid knowledge twenty centuries hence! The best guess is that not much of what we hold as science today will survive that long and even what we today call the scientific attitude may mean something entirely different in the year 4000 A.D. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| February 20, 1999 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Copyright Ó V. Krishnamurthy | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||