People sometimes object to spirituality, saying, “It requires so much faith.”
Actually, everything requires faith. Even materialism requires faith – the faith that we ourselves don’t exist.
According to materialism, matter is all that exists. So there is no ‘I’ who is the observer and experiencer of matter. Our sense of I-ness is an illusion that has somehow arisen out of the electrochemical firings of brain cells. So, when we believe in materialism, we are required to disbelieve in our own existence. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (16.09: nashtaatmaano) indicates that materialists destroy their own soul.
Soberingly, the toll of materialism goes even further. If our sense of selfhood is an illusion, then our thought process is also an illusion – there is no I who is thinking; there are just electrochemical signals streaking through the brain. The results of that thought process being nothing more than just another electrochemical pattern are also meaningless. And as the philosophy of materialism is one such thought process, it too is meaningless.
Thus materialism requires us to believe in a self-destroying and meaning-destroying philosophy. Why don’t we recognize these exorbitant faith-demands of materialism? Because the masses today unthinkingly believe in materialism and we usually follow the masses with an uncritical herd mentality.
So if we have reservations about putting too much faith, then we shouldn’t put faith in materialism.
And though spirituality too requires faith, its faith demand is much more reasonable. Consciousness is categorically different from matter, being the experiencer of insentient matter. So positing that consciousness comes from a non-material source, the soul that is the ‘I’, is eminently reasonable. And Gita wisdom offers us yoga as a systematic process for elevating our consciousness and experientially verifying our spiritual identity, whereas materialism offers no such verifying process.
Therefore spirituality is much more faith-worthy than materialism
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Very insightful and thought provoking article. This article has impelled me to think whether our law system fails if we dismiss the existence of the soul and consider matter as all in all. So, if we were only matter then why should a criminal be hanged to death when his actions aren’t impelled by a conscious doer, but are the results of some chemical reactions in his brain. If we do not put faith in our existence as a spirit-soul, then everything becomes just non-sensical.
Thank you very much for sharing such an enlightening article.