World Religion and World Politics
The article: World Religion and World Politics
World Religion and World Politics
Chapter 1
The mystery of daily life
For the great majority of people the world over daily life is a mystery. It abounds in an immense mass of riddles. But it is not the existence of these riddles alone that causes much torment and suffering; it is also the attempt of many people to provide solutions to these riddles, solutions that sometimes prove to be quite wrong. These wrong solutions have, in many cases, led people into ruin because they have, in good faith, adapted their lives to them and acted accordingly. Their daily behaviour has thereby become wrong. Indeed, these people have simply become derailed, which here means that they behave in a way that, even if unconsciously, makes their daily life a greater or lesser state of suffering or an unhappy fate, according to the extent and nature of the derailment. People's derailed or wrong behaviour becomes evident through all the greater and smaller wars caused by their behaviour, between one man and another, and between nations and states. We have witnessed wars and revolutions with torture and death-chambers, mutilations and executions without end, indeed, we have even witnessed the authorization of murder and killing in these cases. What are we to think about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where thousands of people were wiped out, not to mention all those who became life-long invalids, were ruined and became homeless? What are we to think about all the many people born to parents in need amidst great squalor and primitivity, experiencing an unhappy or agonized fate until they die, while other people are born into opposite conditions, to parents who live in wealth, luxury and well-being? Why do some people have no place to lay their heads, and others own gigantic fortunes, indeed, are multimillionaires? Why do people have to entend hospitals and build new ones despite the untiring work of doctors and science to remedy the ocean of disease with which mankind is infected? Why then do the instances of disease not decrease? Why all these destructive, mutilative and deadly wars that torture and injure mankind, and turn life into an epoch of doomsday or Armageddon? It is not so surprising that life is a mystery for the people of this earth.