SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND HUMANISM.

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

-Albert Einstein



The war in Iraq is over, next one would be in Syria, America says. 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 this time, the Iraq war being the pilot study to see if the newer technology does really perform as predicted by the scientific formulae behind them. Religious fanaticism did win the war last time on September eleventh, in shaking American confidence in their invincibility. That did the trick many times in the past as well. 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 has progressed so much that it is claimed to have made man’s existence on this planet that much easier. Religion, on the other hand, has been aiming to make man tranquil and sociable, transforming the monkey in man into a cultured human being.



Both science and religion seem to have a few people sitting on the fringes 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 every 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. Thousands lost their lives in Afghanistan and recently in Iraq.



People, who could not care less to kill others, either in the name of a “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. This would be socially unacceptable to many. 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. Most of the politicians, the world over, belong to this category. There are, of course, exceptions at every time and every nation. 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, the religious fanatics of the present and, of course, the war mongers who want power with an excuse, though. 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! They do not even deserve the name of yamadoothaas since they do not follow any niyama, nor do they have any dharma. It would be a travesty of truth to even remotely associate them with the just King of death, Yamadharmaraaya. 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. When the wife of the dead man sued the zoo authorities for damages, scientists came to their rescue by discovering a new gene in the dead tigress that made the animal a man-eater! Lo and behold, science won the war again and the court ruling went against the poor lady who lost her husband. Human genome is born the other day, after full gestation, with all fanfare. Unlike scientific predictions of more than one hundred thousand genes looking after every single human function, the newborn baby has shown only thirty-five thousand odd genes; just about double that of a round worm. There may not be enough to go round, anyway. 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.



“Art is man’ s nature; nature is God’s art.”

- P.J.Baily.



Wars have been very fertile grounds for scientific medical research. Wars have been a great stimulus for basic scientific research as well. Unfortunately, our present scientific mindset is such that we recognize only profitable areas of research and try and sweep under the carpet those that do not benefit the benefactors of science-the grant giving bodies. Grants for research today come mostly from private business in every field. Governmental funding for research is dwindling everywhere. Naturally, there are bound to be strings attached. Whereas we have learnt a lot from war time experiences in the progress of medical science as also other sciences, a recent experience seems to have been swept under the carpet deliberately.



An audit of the Vietnam war and Falklands war 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! This experience could be clubbed with that obtained in Israel recently where doctors went on strike for three months. Death rates and morbidity did fall down significantly during the strike period only to go up again to its original level after the doctors came back to work.



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 Bosphorus 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!



“A lady with a lamp shall stand,

In the great history of the land,”

Wrote H.W.Longfellow.



Field Marshall Sam Maneckshaw once showed me his abdominal wall, pulling out his shirt. The whole place was full of multiple ugly irregular scars. He then told me that the Japanese pumped in more than eighteen bullets into his tummy in the Burma front, during the Second World War, and left him in the forest for dead. His soldiers took pity on him and carried him in gunny bags all the way to Calcutta. By then his abdomen was stinking with so much pus that the doctors there refused to do anything except first aid. He eventually reached Madras General Hospital in a moribund state. Col. McRoberts kept on operating and removing the bullets one by one and draining the pus in buckets over a period of six months thereafter. The maggots that had settled in the wound in the forest saved Sam’s life, was the opinion of Col. McRoberts. History has repeated itself. Maggots, cultured in the laboratories scientifically today, only could kill the super-bugs, brought on by scientific overuse and abuse of antibiotics these days in hospitals. In the olden days Nature used to culture maggots for the good of the wounded or sick animals and the wounded hunter-gatherer man in the forest!



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. For the purpose of understanding humanism in the context of the present write up, I shall borrow the broad definition from Augustin Renaudet, the historian of Tuscan and European humanism.



“The name humanism can be applied to an ethic based on human nobility. Turned towards both study and action. It recognizes and exalts the greatness of human genius and the power of its creations, opposing its strength to the brute force of inanimate nature. What is essential remains the individual’s effort to develop in himself or herself, through strict and methodical discipline, all human faculties, so as to lose nothing of what enlarges and enhances the human being. “Reach towards the highest form of existence,” said Goethe at the beginning of Part Two of Faust, “by dint of uninterrupted effort.” Similarly, Stendhal said to Eugene Delacroix in 1850: “Neglect nothing that can make you great.” Such an ethic based on human nobility requires of society a constant effort to embody the most highly perfected form of human relations: an immense feat, an immense cultural achievement, and an ever-greater knowledge of humanity and of the world. It lays the foundations of individual and collective morality; it establishes law and creates an economy; it produces political system; it nourishes art and literature.”



Humanism 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 marvellous, 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. Now I would crave the indulgence of the reader to see the prophecy of these two stanzas in the Rg Veda, the mother of all human wisdoms for all times.



“Satyam, brihad reetam ugram,

………..vishwam dharayaanthi.”



[Truth and ethics of the highest order, applied sternly to our lives only could make this world go on forever.]



“etad vaco jaritar mapi mrishtha

a yat te ghoshan uttara ugani.”



[Forget not, Singer! this word of thine, which after ages will resound.]



How true, indeed! Let the warmongers and the materialistic scientists listen to this advice of the Rg Veda. Humanism does not neglect scientific research, but by no means gives it higher priority than human needs. Similarly, humanism does not exclude God, but holds human needs above the ritualistic tenets of religion. Humanism, in its true sense, is spirituality in essence. To understand this statement one must know that spirituality simply means sharing and caring. In short, it is to live and let live. Let us move from science to scientific humanism, hi-tech medicine to medical humanism, from war to peace, hatred to debate, suspicion to understanding and from religion to spirituality, the other name for religious humanism, to save this world from annihilation.





“Ask God’s blessings on your work, but don’t ask Him to do it for you.”

Dame Flora Robson.



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#1 | 2316 on 1
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