Knowledge is cherished in this worldly realm because it can instantly produce many things of practical utility. Like a tool or instrument, we engage knowledge and put it to use as convenience dictates, whenever and wherever. We employ knowledge as a servant in our service, rather than embrace it like a dear friend and hold it to our breast. The radiance of knowledge has grown dim in the present civilized world for two reasons. For two reasons, mankind can no longer maintain complete faith in the faculties of his own intellect. The first reason is this: man still dwells on a lower rung of the ladder of spiritual advancement, and in the scheme of human development, matter has always been unfolded before spirit, and the external faculties have always developed before the internal ones.
From the material to the immaterial, from the sensory to the supersensory, from the gross to the subtle, from the body to the soul—this is the natural course of man's fundamental nature. Yet the opposite is what we see happen most often. The second reason is this: mankind remains so poor, his earthly wants so unfulfilled, that he has neither the capacity nor the leisure to taste the pure joy that knowledge brings. Until such time as man's finer sensibilities and basic needs are satisfied, he will have no inclination to expend thought or time in pursuit of spiritual peace and contentment. As long as ordinary human needs remain unmet, people will not concern themselves with extraordinary ones, no matter what we say.
In various parts of the world, people still spend their days in want and deprivation. In society, many still cannot enjoy the worldly fruits of knowledge. Why should such restless masses listen to counsel urging them toward disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for the sake of knowing the supreme beauty of truth? Whatever we may say, people will not concern themselves with extraordinary needs until their ordinary ones are met.
It is not worldly desire alone that obstructs the path of knowledge. The religions prevalent in this world have also degraded the pursuit of learning in the eyes of common humanity. The preachers of established religion brand scholarship as ignorance and atheism, intelligence as base desire; they knit their brows at the very name of science. Their great fear is this: what if, through the acquisition of knowledge about God, about God's creation, about the laws God has ordained, there should occur some grave disturbance to His worship? In this world, the priest's pious pride condemns the scholar's prideful knowledge. We are told to renounce intellectual vanity, but those who counsel thus do so largely to conceal their own ignorance. They think that if others' knowledge should come into view, they would have no place left to hide their own lack of it. Those who fear the manifestation of knowledge are the very ones who bid us set aside pride in learning. Yet there exists another class of people—those so absorbed in the pursuit of knowledge that they have no time to take pride in it at all.
The religious teachers of antiquity have often, without cause, denounced the glory of knowledge. Even in our own time, many people lack the capacity—or will—to pursue the higher reaches of learning, and so content themselves with the baser exercises of intellect; thus true knowledge and truth itself do not fall to everyone's lot. Clever men are not above mocking the simple faith and conduct of the learned devotee. From such causes a fundamental hostility has arisen between religion and learning. It is therefore no wonder that even many liberal-minded religious persons have at various times leveled harsh criticism against knowledge. Among us still, the very names of intellect and reason strike fear into the hearts of the devout. This is why the religious warn people to keep their distance from independent thought.
It means nothing more than this: they believe that unless people think and discourse on matters in precisely the manner they themselves do, people will become unbelievers and atheists. They fear even the common sense of mankind. And so when a thoughtful and gifted person assumes the role of a religious teacher, other priests and clergy become deeply anxious and turn hostile toward this newly appointed guide. We see how religious functionaries are seized with dread at the sight of talent. Their conviction is that religion admits only of faith, and has no place for genius. Such fear is truly groundless. The notion that intellect will shroud our soul, that knowledge of God will corrupt the heart's love for him—this has no foundation whatsoever. Many simple believers labor under this same anxiety.
Without the development of imagination, conception, and reason, the human mind can never achieve excellence. Highly gifted persons, having attained great heights of mental development, more often than not abandon the path of religion. With their scientific knowledge, they protest against the opinions circulated in religion's name—yet such people are everywhere few in number. Are they truly opposed to all truths related to religion? Not at all. In most cases, these learned persons merely protest against the falsehoods that religious teachers propagate under the guise of truth.
Through the narrowness of the devout, religion has been so debased and rendered contemptible in the eyes of civilized humanity by the cruelties and oppressions committed in its name throughout the ages, by the bitter enmity followers of one faith have shown toward followers of another—all this, neither the materialist philosophers from Charvaka onward nor the atheist scholars of our own time, for all their irreverent discourse against religion, have succeeded in sullying to any equal degree. When one sees the opinions propagated under religion's banner, and how the inhuman masquerade as the pious in spreading religion's message; when one observes how superstition and childishness are presented as God's sport with humanity, and how sin is spread beneath the guise of religious practice—any sound-minded person of good sense would naturally turn away from religion in disgust. This is inevitable and right.
True truth, genuine virtue, and authentic devotion—when recognized and honored as religion—are never spoken against by the learned. Thus it is the duty of every conscious person to take special care in rooting out the delusions, corruptions, and false pieties that propagate themselves under the name of religion.
Science and religion are friends to each other, true companions and mutual aid. God created them both to help one another. How then can man introduce division between what God has made one? If we attempt to sever religion from science or science from religion, both will suffer grievous harm. The learned minds of our age burn with infinite love for truth. In their quest for it, they have shown extraordinary labor, perseverance, and moral courage. For truth's sake, they are steadily sweeping away errors that have been ancient and honored, and for this the merchants of religion and the religiously blind have taken their stand against them and revile them at will. Conservative scholars, those who call themselves guardians of faith, are striving to uproot from the very foundation the countless customs and unnecessary prescriptions that are forcibly imposed upon people in religion's name. Seeing this, ignorant and self-serving priests deliberately sow various kinds of groundless fear in the minds of common folk. Before those who truly love religion protest and condemn the devotionless character of modern scientific thought and temperament, it is their sacred duty to first seek out and properly understand the true facts about this scientific thought and attitude. Rather than declaring war upon science, if the devout would calmly reflect upon the natural world, upon human history, and upon nature itself, it would bring the greatest benefit to religion itself. It is only through genuine and truth-seeking science that we can dispel the errors and harmful forces of false and illusory science. From the Greek philosopher Epicurus down to the French scholar Comte, the materialist philosophers have wrought endless benefit to human society; and it can be said with certainty that the ignorance fostered by religion has caused far greater harm than this.
To reject the human mind is to reject God himself. The priests of various communities preach a religion that distrusts the human intellect, and this causes far greater injury to human society than the philosophy of unbelieving scientists and atheists. Throughout the ages, many learned and great souls have labored to demolish these temples of irreligion built under religion's name, and to set the human spirit free. If this distortion of religion had not occurred, if the talents of those brilliant minds had not been spent in destroying the seeds and fruits of this irreligion, that energy could have advanced knowledge and science far more greatly.