In my relative’s mind, it was clear that her commitment to the practice of devotion and the act of devotedness to Krishna were among the great private truths of her being. The upside of this architecture of beliefs was that it granted her mental worlds with a texture, specificity and a situatedness which allowed her to locate herself in the world without great effort. However with the rise of scientific reasoning, constructs that we traditionally relied upon — curses, ghosts, spells, jinns, angels, blessings, demons, gods — to explain our worlds have had to relinquish their explanatory claims. Individuals may believe in hell, but hell itself is not a prerequisite to explain how the world was put together. Due to this process of secularity that has been under way for more than a century, the very grounds our traditional beliefs were typically birthed from — a world of porous beliefs — no longer exist.

Source: The Hindu May 05, 2018 18:35 UTC