Facts of the religion-

The world is poorer and more wretched today for all its paraphernalia of the luxuries and amenities of life, because of its apathy towards religion and philosophy, in a matter so vital as the understanding of life and its problems, particularly the basic ones. Man has been left to himself to pick and choose as he pleases without any expert guidance, dazed by the glare of scientific inventions and unprecedented scale and unable to assess and evaluate them in the correct perspective, man has come to hold wrong conceptions of the ends of life. No wonder that his energies are flowing into wrong channels resulting in misery, disappointment, conflict, and anarchy. If we fail to approach and study religion and philosophy in truly scientific spirit and to understand life and its purpose as best as we can. It is so much the worse for us. Howsoever much we boost of the Scientific spirit of this age.

The modern approach to religion has been thoroughly unscientific. The truly scientific spirit is the product of philosophic contemplation. The scientific attitude is consistent with the pursuit of truth of its own sake and that is precisely what religion and philosophy stands for.

The religion and philosophy thought found perhaps in the Indian soil the fertility and the fullest development. The Seers and Prophets spoke from depth of their knowledge and experience. Motivated by nothing but the exclusive and un-allowed desire truth. They devoted their whole lives to the pursuit of truth. They worked hard and experimenting tirelessly in the laboratory of the head and heart, and diving deep into all aspects of life and human nature. They discovered the eternal laws and principles governing all the lives and based on them. Enunciated truths and doctrines by for nobler in their application to life and of greater account to humanity and yet no less capable of being demonstrably proved to be true than any of the discoveries of science. One has of course, to differentiate between the instruments used and material handled by philosophy and religion on the one hand and the physical science on the other. This difference will quite naturally manifest itself in the nature and the kind of proofs obtainable in the case of both. One cannot reasonably expect physically demonstrable proofs of the mental emotional and intellectual process or sypehic proofs of the spiritual experience.

Religion is the outcome of the supreme endeavor which the ancients made out of selfless love and compassion for humanity to discover and lay down ways and means to bring round man and to train and attune him to the civilized way of living together. If religion were a dogma civilization would be hoax and man condemned eternally to the life of the jungle.

Religion deals with human beings and studies all aspects of human life with a view particularly to determining the purpose, aim and the ultimate goal of life, observing the factors which help and the factors which binder the attainment of that goal. For the attainment of the ultimate goal of life religion enjoins a certain type of moral and spiritual discipline. At the sub-human level, life is mainly guided by instinct. The animals are bound to obey the natural instincts. They can act but instinctively and do not have the option to say no to their instinct or impulse.

These are natural impediments in the way of attainment of the ends of human life material, moral and spiritual. Religion guides man courteously and prudently through all the agreeable and disagreeable mazes of experience from the lowest to the highest levels of consciousness of truth. The good of man has always been the exclusive and basic idea underlying all religious and this constitutes the common ground of religions.

Different religions seek to achieve the objective in different ways according to their conception of what constitutes the highest good 0f man. Free will implies freedom of choice or discretion between two or more things or courses of action. It is by virtue of the discriminative faculty that we are able to judge, access distinguish and evaluate the various things, thoughts and feelings and is thereby afforded an opportunity for the exercise of our choice accordingly. The free will comes into play when the power of discrimination gives one of the options to follow or not to follow either reason or instinct or both of these. Freedom necessarily throws on man a moral responsibility. By employment of freedom, man can raise himself to the divine status or degrade himself into animal life. We are truly free when we have the power and capacity not to submit slavishly to the impulsive currents rising within us but to rule over nature both internal and external.