Science and Spirituality.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

-Albert Einstein



The war in Iraq is not yet over, it smolders at a slower pace. For a change this time round it was a shorter course of human destruction. One could say that the scientific techniques of warfare have won, the Iraq war being the pilot study to see if the newer technology does really perform as predicted by the scientific formulae. Religious fanaticism did win the war last time on September eleventh, in shaking American confidence in their invincibility. One could philosophize to say that in every war one or the other of the two schools of thought should win, anyway. Who, then, are the permanent losers? Mankind, of course.



Both science and religion started off with very laudable motives. Whereas science tries to unravel the mysteries of the outer world of man that he could assess with his five senses-all in the “eye of the beholder” and, religion, on the contrary, attempts to dive deep into the unfathomed depths of man’s inner world, which is beyond the reach of our senses. In short, both of them seem to unravel the mysteries of Nature. Science, we are made to believe, is the supreme truth. The US supreme court recently opined that the peer review system-the benchmark of science-is flawed badly and is no better than chance!



Religion, on the other hand, has been aiming to make man tranquil and sociable, transforming the monkey in man into a cultured human being. The better word in place of religion would be spirituality. Religion is mostly ritualistic belief systems but spirituality mainly deals with the inner feelings of all humans for caring and sharing. All the cells in the human body, in fact all living cells, would want to come together. But for the immune system, thank God for that, we would all have become one large cell mass-a syncitium.



Both science and religion seem to have a few people sitting on the fringe who want to make the best use of their power. In this power game of one-upmanship science lost track of its great responsibility of doing most good to most people most of the time, and went into the business world. Every research finding of value is today patented and used for gaining more power and more money. Religion did not lag behind, either. It realized the enormous power potential of influencing people in the name of God and a whole New World of ritualistic fanaticism came into existence. Who are the losers in the bargain? Mankind again, of course.



Wars are born in the minds of men. The people who sacrifice their lives are the innocent citizens, the common man on the street and the passionate soldiers, who are being brainwashed to believe that they are being patriotic and should die for their motherland! The powers-that-be that go to war always claim that the loss of life has been minimal each time, as if they had expected the whole of mankind to be wiped out otherwise. The truth, however, is that for the man who dies and for his near and dear ones it is total irreparable one hundred per cent loss, though. Statistics are used every time when one wants to take the common man for a ride. Millions lost their lives in Afghanistan and recently in Iraq.



People, who could not care less to kill others, either in the name of a scientific “just” war or compelled by the burning religious passion, could be classed along with the serial killers who enjoy in following a particular modus operandi in liquidating their victims. Both could be clubbed in that old fashioned classification in psychiatry as psychopaths. A more recent, and, a more parliamentary, word for them would be “anti-social personalities”. This class of human beings does not believe in truth and they do not have any guilt feelings, either. Most of the politicians, the world over, belong to this category. There are, of course, exceptions. The exceptions are not politicians: they are statesmen.



History of mankind is replete with biographies of such men and women in power who took pleasure in manslaughter-the Asuras of our Puranas, the “Noblemen” of the Roman Empire, and the religious fanatics of the present and, of course, the war mongers who want power with an excuse. The last group takes care to proclaim to the world that they wage every war for liberating the oppressed people in this world, as if God has given them the mandate to be His executioners on earth! All these people, down the ages, belonged to one class with a special unnatural trait of sadism in enjoying the fruits of others’ death and destruction! May be science, one day, would unravel the mystery by discovering a new gene in them, the killer gene to exonerate them.



Recently Balkis, the tigress, in an American zoo, killed her caretaker. Lo and behold, science won the war again and the court ruling went against the poor lady who lost her husband because science discovered a gene in the tiger that made the tiger kill the poor man. In the meantime news has come that the first three children treated with engineered genes to control their intractable genetic diseases have all come up with unusual cancers and the study has since been stopped! Our much celebrated cloned “Dolly” has been sent to meet her Maker by her “human creator,” Ian Wilmot. Scientists who have been threatening both politicians and religionists that they would clone a man have been rather muted these days after the death of Dolly and many other mishaps in the field of genetic research.





An audit of the Vietnam War and Falklands wars lately has shown that the per capita death of the wounded soldiers was marginally less in Falklands where the British did not have all the hi-tech methods for immediate treatment of the wounded. In many cases the wounded soldiers were left to lie in snow for hours before they were picked up for attention. On the contrary, in Vietnam, the American army had the best five-star hospital in Saigon, minutes away from the war theatre, for the wounded soldiers to be airlifted and managed “most scientifically” without loss of much time. The study did show that too much interference, immediately after major injury, might come in the way of the body’s natural healing mechanisms modulated by the autonomic nervous system, thereby increasing mortality!



History repeats itself with regularity. If we do not learn from history we will have to relive history. Florence Nightingale and her nurses arrived on 4th November 1854, in Scutari, across the Bosporus from Istanbul, the English theatre during the Crimean War (1854-56), where nearly two thousand wounded and sick lay in foul rat-infested wards. This was in response to the demand of The Times, London correspondent, William Russell, who wrote: “Not only are there not sufficient surgeons…. Not only are there no nurses and dressers…There is no linen to make bandages.” The Times and the nation demanded action.



Florence Nightingale offered her services to her friend Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of War. A party of thirty-six nurses-ten Roman Catholic sisters, eight Anglican sisters, six St.John’s House nurses, and fourteen from various London hospitals were with Florence. As she was fighting her battle with the wounded, the Battle of Inkerman raged and the hospital was soon deluged with more wounded. She got another eighty nurses as reinforcement. Three hundred scrubbing brushes were summoned. Florence provided meals, bedding, and saw to the laundry. “I am the kind of General Dealer in socks, shirts, knives, forks, wooden spoons, tin baths, tables, cabbages and carrots, operating tables, towels and soap,” she wrote in her diary. Within six months, and battling against military resistance, she slashed death rate from about 40 per cent to just 2 per cent without the help of hi-tech medical science!



“A lady with a lamp shall stand,

In the great history of the land,”

wrote H.W. Longfellow.



As we had seen earlier, under all circumstances of war or peace, mankind suffers the ultimate consequences. Even in the olden days man suffered due to all that happens in society. “The spiritual and intellectual life of Europe was always subject to violent change. It favored and created divisions and discontinuities, and indeed dramas, always with the aim of building a better world.” wrote Fernand Braudel in his classic, A History of Civilizations.” Today’s warmongers do the same. They profess to do all that they do for building a better tomorrow for the next generation, only to create chaos and misery for, at least, the present occupants of the world.



The word humanism is ambiguous and needs clarification lest the reader should mistake it for various other related words like humanity etc. It is a learned expression coined by a German historian in the year 1808 AD. Pierre de Nolhac, the author of Petrarch and Humanism claims to have introduced this word in French University in 1886 in the course of his lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Braudel claims that by the year 1930 the following different types were known in Europe. New humanism, Christian humanism, pure humanism, technical humanism, scientific humanism as also humanism of Karl Marx and Maxim Gorky. I introduced the word Medical Humanism in my article in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in the year 1995 and later in my inaugural lecture to the medical students at the White Memorial Centre in Los Angels in 1996.



Humanism could be almost synonymous with spirituality and is against exclusive submission to God; against a wholly materialistic worldview, against anything that neglects humanity and against anything that denigrates human nature. Sociologist Edgar Morin left the Communist Party and was asked why he did so? His answer was all revealing. “Marxism, my friend, has studied economics and the social class. That’s marvelous, my friend. But it forgot to study humanity.” The same could be said of today’s science and religion. They have studied everything that needs to be studied in their respective fields but forgot to study humanity and its needs. That is why humanism is the need of the hour.



The world is standing at the threshold of self-destruction, by the mindless search for the materialistic utopia through scientific and religious route. If humanism does not make its forceful impact on both those groups the future is very bleak, indeed. Let the warmongers and the materialistic scientists listen to the following advice of the Rg. Veda, which proclaimed that only truth and ethics of the highest order could save this world from annihilation! Spirituality does not neglect scientific research but, by no means, gives it higher priority than human needs. Nanotechnology is not as important as the Giga problems of mankind like starvation, poverty, deprivation, illiteracy, disease and death! Similarly, spirituality does not exclude God, but holds human needs above the ritualistic tenets of religion. Humanism, in its true sense, is spirituality in essence.

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