Faith and Reason: The Blindness of Logic and the Eyesight of Compassion

 **2003**

God, or call it Goddess if you will.

God or Goddess being the cosmic constant, and faith its quotient.

The latter varies perilously.

It's a puzzling thing. The more mature, the more reasoning, the shakier become the foundations of faith.

With your intelligence and reasoning, you become less and less prepared for the mystical whispers of faith and miracle.

If some occurrence, which could have struck you as a miracle, thus strengthening the foundations of faith, comes your way, you want to, although half-heartedly, accept it as a hint of the design of divinity.

But the next instant, the modern, civilised, myth-and-mystical-busting knife of cold, hard and steely resolve of reasoning cuts through the soft, ascendant veil and lets you see suspiciously at the sun of logic.

Modern man, though he wants to believe—given his edifying, astringent, chaotic circumstances—yet his quotient is very poor, and the very same is plummeting down dangerously.

Maybe it will come down to the crashing of the divinity constant, the super-reason will chuckle infallibly.

What would it then mean to be totally faithless?

That would be sheer blindness.

People say faith is blind. But I maintain its upkeepers have the keenest, most nice and the clearest eyesight.

The sight of passion, compassion.

The clear sight of compassion, humanity, love and devotion.

Reason, they say, is the thing farthest from blindness. But its adherents are the blindest creatures on earth.

You adhere blindly to the steely logic of self-interest, even though you could have well borne a bit of light and let in the concept of this adage of self-interest, and not compromised in your bargaining with a poor, old, famished street hawker over five rupees and spoiled the deal.

You save yourself from the loss of five rupees, which doesn't mean almost anything.

It is, after all, the adherence to the ideology of self-interest rather than the prospect of losing five rupees which makes you blind to the pathetic condition of your fellow human being and robs him of the immense, incalculable satisfaction of striking his first distinctly profitable deal after entering the village.

Reason is thus the poisonous wall which incarcerates us, blinds us, insulates us from all the antidotes to the venom of self-interest.

Just imagine how the world will be when full of blind, venomous snakes.