Article28

The Future Belongs to Reason

The foundation of my thought rests upon an uncompromising conviction: reason is supreme. Truth is not whispered in deserts to chosen men, nor thundered from mountaintops into stone tablets. It is not dictated by revelation, guarded by priests, or preserved in dogmas that forbid doubt. Truth must be discovered—never once and for all, never sealed, but always pursued, always tested, always questioned. To believe otherwise is to betray the essence of what makes us human. Revelation is a closed door; reason is an open window. Revelation demands submission; reason demands debate. It is why Socrates, condemned for asking too many questions, remains a universal symbol of human inquiry, while Jesus, demanding blind obedience, remains locked inside the walls of his church.

This is the first consistency in my thought: revelation must be rejected. Every religion that insists on a divine monopoly of truth becomes, by definition, an enemy of inquiry. When Moses claims the law is handed down once and for all, when Muhammad insists his Qur’an is the final word, when Paul damns philosophy as “foolishness,” what is left for the human mind? Nothing but obedience. Compare that with the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, which dares to ask whether even the gods know the truth. Compare it with the Upanishads, which say that paths are many but the truth is one. Compare it with Socrates, who stands in the marketplace, insisting that even the existence of the gods must be subject to question. Revelation is static; reason is dynamic. Revelation freezes; reason flows. Revelation demands silence; reason demands dialogue.

The second consistency is that the universal cannot be born from the tribal. The greatest Jews in history are precisely those who walked away from Judaism. Jesus was not loyal to the rabbis of his day; Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue; Marx denounced Judaism as a religion of money; Freud dissected Jewish monotheism as a primal obsession; Luxemburg and Trotsky gave themselves to revolution, not ritual; Einstein and Chomsky belong to science and humanity, not to any rabbinical authority. Their universality lies in their rejection. They refused to remain children of a tribe and thus became giants of humanity. The lesson is stark: universality demands betrayal of parochialism. Those who cling to being chosen are never chosen by history.

Civilization itself must be distinguished from religion. Hinduism endures not because it is a religion in the Semitic sense, but because it is a civilization: fluid, plural, and evolving. A religion of revelation must stand still; a civilization moves. Hinduism is not a creed handed down once and for all, but a conversation spanning millennia. Its scriptures not only tolerate doubt, they enshrine it. One finds hymns of praise beside hymns of doubt, gods beside atheism, rituals beside philosophy. This is why Hinduism survives the battering of centuries: because it cannot be frozen into a single revelation. India’s unity, therefore, cannot come from saints or godmen who trade in miracle cures and cults of personality. It must come from militant secularism, a nationalism rooted not in piety but in reason. The same is true in America. The Founding Fathers, falsely labeled Christians, were deists. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison—all rejected revelation, preferring the God of reason, closer to the Vedantic spirit than to the pulpit of the evangelist. To call America a “Christian nation” is not only wrong but insulting to their intellectual honesty.

Patterns of thought emerge in history when one looks closely. In India, the gods belong to the North, while the philosophers belong to the South. The Rig Vedic pantheon, Krishna and Rama, even the Buddha—these arise in the North. But the rigorous defenders of philosophy, the architects of thought—Nāgārjuna, Śaṅkara, Dharmakīrti, Candrakīrti—emerge from the South. The North supplies the myth, the imagination, the symbol; the South supplies the reason, the analysis, the defense. Myth without philosophy is blind, wandering without defense; philosophy without myth is rootless, abstract and bloodless. India survived because it fused both: gods to inspire, philosophers to defend, myth to guide the masses, philosophy to sharpen the mind. This pattern—North as imagination, South as reason—reveals that civilizations thrive when both halves of the human spirit are nourished.

Politics, too, must be stripped of its piety. A nation’s independence rests not on prayer but on material choices rooted in reason. Oil dependence is not theology, it is servitude. Every barrel imported from theocratic regimes is a tax on freedom. The path to sovereignty runs not through temples or mosques but through wind farms, nuclear plants, hydrogen cells, and science labs. A nation enslaved to the oil sheikhs cannot pretend to be sovereign. Secular nationalism, not godmen, not saints, not imported theologies, is the safeguard of unity. India cannot be held together by chanting slogans or erecting statues; it can only be secured by reason and nationalism that is uncompromising. The West, too, cannot defeat jihadism with sermons about tolerance. It must defend itself by exporting reason, secularism, and democracy—never theology. In the early 20th century, secular currents in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt briefly defeated fundamentalism; the lesson is clear: it can be done again.

Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable. My thought is consistent because it grows from a single root. Reason is supreme. Revelation is rejected because it imprisons the mind. Universality is possible only when tribe and sect are transcended. Civilization thrives as a process, never as a fixed dogma. The gods of the North and the philosophers of the South remind us that myth and reason must meet. And politics, stripped of piety, finds its integrity only in the relentless pursuit of rational independence. Revelation has mugged humanity long enough. The future belongs to reason.