Is God Dead?

Mohammad Yaqub Khan
Editor The Light

”Is there no place for religion in the modern scheme of things?” This was the subject of an interesting debate which took place last week in Lahore under the auspices of the Punjab Literary League, Dr. F. D. Lucas of the F. C. College presiding.

Some of the arguments advanced may be summed up thus. The theory that religion was indispensable to progress has been exploded. Religion has proved a dividing and disruptive force. Religion is a figment of the imagination. Man invented God to satisfy his craving for the supernatural. Religion is static and does not change with change of times. If Christ were re-born in Nazi Germany, he would be re-cruci­fied. Most of India’s present troubles are due to religion. ”Religion is a dead and spent-up force. Its carcass stinks: let us bury it.”

We are only tempted to laugh when we hear utterances so childish from men of education and enlightenment. Religion and disruption, religion and stagnation, religion and lifelessness are so many contradictions in terms and where the one exists, the other is not Religion came to unify, to instill life and lead to progress and pros­perity. Man, in his wickedness distorted it into disruption and decay and has at the same time the audacity to turn round and call religion names!

If you switch off the current and your light goes off or your fan stops, it would be a misstate­ment to say that electricity is a spent force, it no longer lights, it no longer moves. On the contrary the absence of light and motion, when the switch is turned off, should serve as an addi­tional confirmation of the fact that electricity has the efficacy to light the bulb and work the fan. When the thing is present, we have the results. When the thing is gone, the results are gone too. This links the results undeniably to the thing concerned.

That exactly is the case with religion. Those who had the thing in them, Buddha, Jesus, Muham­mad ﷺ, were so many lights that illumined the world, living embodiments of human sympathy and fellow-feeling – an antidote to disruption, dis­union and degeneration., People who came later merely pretended to. have the same thing in them. They were like the bulbs from which the current had been switched off. If, therefore, their lives are dark and dismal, this is as it should be. They have to thank themselves for it. But since man is by nature prone to shift the respon­sibility for his own misdeeds to the shoulders of others, they turn round on religion and start denouncing it. What they actually have in them is not God, but the Devil, masquerading as God. It is thus the devil-in-man that is a perennial source of trouble, disunity and disruption. All the ills of the present-day world are direct­ly the outcome of man’s greed and lust for power. Jesus never taught exploitation or self-aggrandizement. Here in India what are the communal quarrels due to? Certainly not due to religion! Neither Krishna nor Muhammad ﷺ taught anything but fellow-feeling and self-abne­gation. These quarrels are due to the devil within us. The Hindus and Muslims have mutually conflicting material interests and in these consist of the germs of these communal quarrels. Religion is nowhere there. Its name, however, is dragged in and exploited in order to lend artificial edge to the quarrel. It is wrong, therefore, to say that religion stands in the way of India’s freedom. It is their political and economic rivalry that keeps Hindus and Muslims at loggerheads.

It is true great iniquities have been perpet­rated in the name of religion. Man has run at the throat of fellow man with the ferocity of the beasts in the name of God. Man has burnt fellowman alive and roasted him on the stake in the name of religion. But the name is not the thing. That is where the misunderstanding lies. Everywhere, it has been the devil masquerading as God.

Spain has of late been the theatre of the most gruesome horrors known to history. No one can lay the blame at the door of religion. Russia claims to have banished God. But can it also claim that it has been able to banish along with Him disunity, disruption and decay? Why, it has magnified disruption on a worldwide scale, spreading the germs of class-hatred and class warfare the world over.

To say that religion impedes progress is equally wrong. The early history of Islam is to this day the wonder of the historian who is at a loss to account for the meteoric rise of Islam as a great power and civilization. That was a purely religious force, aroused at the magic touch of the Prophetﷺ, which, when released, dazzled the eyes of the world with its achieve­ments. The dead sands of the desert became instinct with a new life. He must be a bold man indeed who should venture in the face of this hard fact of history to say that religion im­pedes progress. In fact, it is another name for progress. If Musalmans have today fallen low, it is not because of religion but for lack of that true urge of religion.

Whatever the superficial observer may say, God-idea alone can save the present-day world from the doom towards which it is fast drifting. The last Great War left the whole of humanity sore and bleeding. Another may wipe it off. That is where the materialistic philosophy of the West is bound to lead to, and no power can avert this doom unless the whole outlook on life is overhauled, and the gross material values of life give place to spiritual values. And God is the Fountainhead of these values.

God is thus not dead. He is alive to-day as thousands of years ago. He is a force to-day just the same and no society can find peace and progress unless it is securely fastened to those high­er moorings of God. It is the modern man himself who is dead – dead to the higher values of life. In other words, the God-in-him is dead. God as such is there to-day as ever before, the Fountain­head of all life and light. The modern man, to revert to the simile, has switched himself off from that Fountainhead. It is incorrect to complain, therefore, that God is dead, a mere stinking carcass. He has no God in him. What stinks is his own dead, earth-bound soul. God is another name for life, life eternal, for sweet harmony, and for progress. Man has only to switch on the current to see it for himself.

M.Y.K.

(Tuesday, August 24, 1937)