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contrast between the traditional (religious) and the modern approach
is best illustrated by the difference in their concept of the origin
of man. The Manu of the Hindus and the Adam of the Christians and
the Muslims was a semi- divine figure. Manu being the original
law-giver and Adam in Islam the first Prophet and in Christianity
the perfect man who allowed himself to be beguiled; the modern West
traces our ancestry to the ape
The nation is a new god (nothing
short of it) which feels entitled to demand, and has succeeded in
extracting, from the people the kind of sacrifices no religion has
ever demanded; millions upon millions have been killed and maimed in
the name of the nation god. This god could not have arisen without
the help of its twin brother, secularism. Indeed, they are like
Siamese twins who cannot be separated. A nation must by definition
be secular because it can rise only on the corpse of religion; a
secular state is a logical extension of a secular nation. To be
secular is not to be necessarily intolerant of religion. Communism
is an unnecessarily ugly face of secularism just as it is an
unnecessarily crude face of the modern Western civilization as such,
that is gross materialism unrelieved by the residue of Christianity
in the shape of humanism.
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