Humanity comes first...

We humans are a special breed indeed. We raise ideas and ideologies to uphold supposedly noble things and then carry the heavy burden of these ideologies on our heads to ridiculous extents. Some quaint fellow in long past times thought up a few slogans. And the vast majority of semi literate men cling to these ideas as if ideas are for all time or that an idea that is good in one context is good for all contexts or that the more fashionable an idea is, the nearer to truth it is.

The Nazis were all taught kindness to animals but they couldnt be kind to fellow human beings. And the great irony that is, Hitler was a vegetarian. Love for all creation is the real virtue and not mere tendency to feed on grass. Its not being a vegetarian that makes a man great, but development and possession of a sensitive heart, that can feel suffering and respond to it.

And add to all such corpses from past that men put in holy coffins and carry on their heads, the idea of 'secularism'. Either in its etiologically pristine European form as sepration of Church from State or in its vulagrly distorted Indian form as equidistance of the State from all religions, it is simply unsuitable to modern times. Separation of Church and State assumed implicitly that both stood for the same values, and it was temporal power that was being snatched away from the former. But times have changed, modern society no more subscribes to the narrow bigoted views held by the Church or its draconian order or even its totalitarian God. Modern man does not hold that justice means different things to the faithful and the infidel, nor does he consider it natural that men must be persecuted just because they hold 'heathen' views. Reason, freedom and dignity are now recognised as universal values, that must be granted equally to all men and women.

And equally with the Indian distortion: equidistance from all religions is only possible so long as all religions are equally capable of being distant from the polity and equally recognize universal human values. But how can religions that have historically been at loggerheads with such values be allowed to carry on with their work at the expense of fundamental human values? Does the state stand for human values or for artificial ideas that have become modern crosses it must carry just to please some 'liberals' who are but a bunch who think their ideas are great just because there are some in Europe or in China who appreciate them?

Ideas are not great just because some smug intellectuals think so or because somebody pats us on our back for holding them. Ideas are to be judged only on the basis on how fair they and how true they are. Weighed on this scale, secularism fails, wilts. It is time for us to assure in Humanism as our guiding policy and uphold values such as will be conducive for human growth and enrichment.