Religion has a great influence in one’s life. Suppose four friends are sitting in a restaurant having dinner. The first friend is enjoying roast beef, the second is vegetarian so he is serving spinach and cheese, the third is smoking a cigarette and he is drinking alcohol. One is eating fried fish while the fourth is looking at the cigarette with disgust, but alcohol is the one he hates the most. Anyone watching can tell that these four people have set their food and drink preferences according to their religious orders.
Religion and human society:
But here the question arises whether the observance of religious orders is limited to one’s self under personal belief or else religious orders are the only source of absolute and eternal moral code whose implementation leads to the existence of a higher human society? Even the average student of history knows that the scales of good and evil have always changed with time and this change has been due to the development of human consciousness, evolution and economic causes.
There is no need to search the history of man for ten thousand years, if we go back only a hundred years from today, we will find that according to the religious code which it was wrong for women to leave the house, today the spokesperson of the same code is for women to work.
Virtues are being described. Bertrand Russell in his Essay on Ethics writes: “A good man is one who feels the happiness of his relatives and friends, and if possible of mankind, and if he is fond of the arts and sciences.” So what to say! It is not important whether that person obeys the moral principles that the Jews wrote down thousands of years ago, because it is possible for a person to follow all those principles and remain evil!
I don’t like the interpretation because in their opinion the moral sense that religion awakens in a person cannot come from the intellect. My favorite columnist Khurshid Nadeem has described this argument beautifully, in his recent column he writes that “Those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ have stood with the people of Palestine in comparison to Israel.
This is the expression of the moral sense, which religion wants to awaken…’ He further writes, ‘The source of change in human beings is not their intellect, but their moral sense. Therefore, the case of religion is also that it makes man morally. But it should be made pure. Reason should be pure. It also shows a person the ways that are immoral and provides him with arguments for them.
If anyone wants to understand this, he should go to a court and listen to the arguments of the lawyers. In this country, all the reasoning for subverting the constitution is provided by reason. Moral sense can never do this.’
The first thing is that with the people of Palestine, there are not only Muslims and Christians from all over the world, but also Jews, ultra-liberal, modern, secular and those who do not believe in God. And if it is said that the moral sense is in every human being and only religion awakens it, then this argument is correct.
Religion, of course, demands moral purity from man but this does not mean that the source of change in human beings is an absolute sense of morality, because the standard of morality has been changing in every era, in the era when slavery was permissible, the morality of that era did not consider it bad, but even the concept of it today. It is impossible, the reason for this change is the evolution of human intellect and consciousness, thanks to this evolution, man invented laws, established basic human rights and created the United Nations Charter.
The reason why Westerners stand with Palestine today is because Israel is committing war crimes in violation of the United Nations Charter. If they were not followers of religion, would they have remained silent spectators and their ‘moral sense’ would not have been awakened? And then whose moral sense was correct in the crusades, the Muslims or the Christians?
Undoubtedly, religion acts as a beacon for human beings, provides moral guidance, is the best source of history, poetry and literature, but the problem arises when a follower of a religion claims that the teachings of his religion The moral framework is universal and final, so it should be implemented. When four friends sitting at the dining table can order food according to the moral teachings of their respective religions and we do not have any objection to it, then religion in a collective arrangement. What was the logic of implementing the moral order?
Another problem is that people put religion against science and reason, which is not the right attitude. Religion only demands from humans that they use their intellect and try to know the secret of this universe so that you can approach its creator. But what happens is that when a new scientific discovery contradicts a religious belief, religious people become defensive and try to interpret their scriptures to make new demands to make them ‘correct’ according to science.
There is no need for this, science has never made a final claim on any matter, every new scientific research is actually a rejection of the previous theory, and Einstein’s theory modified Newton’s laws on a cosmic level, so it did not affect Newton’s greatness. It doesn’t matter because Einstein’s theory will be modified tomorrow and this cycle will continue till doomsday.
Religious teachings only attract people towards good, goodness and goodness, it is not necessary to prove science wrong or to call the intellect to be good in order to prove them right. There is no problem if the debates of the clerics are also watched, it will warm the heart and the soul will get peace and reward for free!