Old Worship
For all their propaganda machines and temporal power, the Western churches' intervention in cultural and social matters, and their religious preaching to refine morality and make men's hearts pure, has had little effect. It has not redeemed the bankruptcy of spirit, nor reined in the untrammelled self-indulgence that besets Westerners. How can a religion which permits its adherents unlimited freedom to commit shameful deeds hope to wrench their collar out of the talons of the subversives' grip on the polluted, or uproot the noxious growths of immorality?
Worship and godliness and true humanity must be approached with the sole aim of drawing near to God in purity of intent. But these practitioners have left the track and been perverted.
Religious leaders, who should constitute a staunch dam to hold back the floods of corruption, have themselves fallen victims to the prevailing fashion of permissiveness. How then can Christianity possibly produce renascence and moral revolution in the West? How can such institutions recall mankind to that purity of heart without which no man can know the Lord? Yet the world can only emerge from its crisis of morals by that road of purity via revolution and renascence.
The "Tehran Weekly Journal" (No. 1089) reported : "Church Fathers entice the errant into the church with dancing and music. The Revd. Francis Mieux of Montreal, Canada, 35 years ordained, is a skilled musician, both as composer and player, author of 1,500 popular melodies, a priest who combines the two callings of religion and art."
Surely to perform such works in a place of worship is to make a mockery of religion? Amongst the most solemn pronouncements made by all the prophets of God have been the asseverations that no man can serve both God and Mammon; and that there is no escape from the pollutions of the world, the flesh and the devil except by a resolute concentration of the attention on God. Inordinate attachment to materialist considerations must be set aside in favour of the quest for a personal knowledge of God's being, if human life is to be soundly equilibrated. This is the rock on which to build the house of life. All else is shifting sand.
True worship frees a man from the bondage of fleshly lusts, and draws him into God's presence and to spiritual joys. Observe how this truth of priceless inestimable worth has been squeezed out by the permissives' preaching primacy of carnal desire.
Islamic worship has many aims. One of them is to rip away the curtains of negligence and ignorance and so to usher in a mighty moral and spiritual re-armament and revolution.
Stahwood Cobb, Christian savant, in his book "Lord of the Two Ka'abas" p.227, compares Muslim and Christian worship thus : "I was," he writes, "allowed to be present in Hagia Sofia Mosque in Stambul to witness a service of prayer and worship there. In such services repeated genuflections (Rukoo') and prostrations (Sujood) play a large part as the accompaniment to fixed forms of prayer and adoration. I was deeply impressed by the solemnity, humility and reverence of the worshippers. It far surpassed anything I have ever met in any Christian church in its sincerity of veneration, depth of self-surrender, and dedicated devotion to the Divine Essence. I shared with other foreigners the privilege of watching the ceremonies of the Night of Power (Leilat-ul-Qadr) on which the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. From a balcony in one of the squinches we looked down on the 5,000 worshippers who crowded Hagia Sofia, performing their rukoo's and sujoods in perfect unison, rhythm and order. The rustle of their bending to genuflect or prostrate themselves, the sound of their hands being placed on the floor before them, their united uprising, made deep quiet waves of reverence fill the vast dome, and ascend heavenward. The sight was splendid, matchless; dignified, numinous, humble, reverent, expressive of a sense of individual freedom, democracy, equality, which allowed no discrimination of persons or classes. I saw an itinerant carpet-vendor cheek by jowl with a Pasha in gorgeous robes, in concord, without fear or favour, standing, kneeling, prostrating themselves in common worship, while big-bellied dark-faced Negroes busied themselves with their religious observances alongside the most chic of the Turks of Stambul. For Islam from its inception has pursued a creed of brotherhood which it preserves today."
Western religion's biggest error has lain in treating faith as an individual private affair, unrelated to daily life. This mistaken doctrine casts its shadow over all aspects of Western society. Pollution, national crises, permissiveness, corruption, are all ills directly due to this divorce of religion from practical affairs.
Hence, too, the tug-of-war between inner spiritual values and the outward struggle for a livelihood. A sound creed dictates a man's code of conduct and draws guidelines for him which apply to every practical eventuality of living.
Belief shapes thought and action. Living cannot evade the formative effect of creed. Hence the downright sinfulness of separating religion from practical life. Such a separation runs directly in the face of the law of nature. As Dampierre writes in his book "The Conflict between Science and Religion": "Constantine decreed that Christianity was an official religion of the Roman Empire ; and, to please his pagan subjects, permitted many customs of the earlier paganism to be taken up into Christianity. Thus arose the idea, which prevailed in medieval religious days, and still prevails in modern irreligious days, that `religion is a private matter' concerned solely with the individual soul and its relations with God."
Alcohol
A frenetic consumption of alcoholic beverages augments our social ills, daily producing sinister perversions in manners and morals, and in religious, psychological and medical health.
No sane thinking person can fail to remark these bitter facts. Hospitals are filled with D.T. patients and with mentally deranged alcoholics, while outside them thousands, under the influence of drink, take to murder, suicide, theft, blackmail and character assassination.
Alcohol offers an escape from problems and worries: but always ends by multiplying them. Instead of diminishing life's sufferings, it adds material and moral bankruptcy to them, and crushes rather than relieves the sufferer. It makes the bells of doom and disaster toll even louder in his ears. He flees from their clamour back to his alcoholic solace. He seeks to drown his sorrows, in the hope of enjoying an imaginary paradise where his burdens will roll away, in the brief span of his drunken stupor.
"Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Spirit" is the motto of a wise man who realises that to resort to means which dull reason may lead to insanity, and to the loss of all those intellectual powers which raise man above the level of the beasts. For alcohol is indeed "the poison that men put into their mouths to take away their brains."
In Hamburg I was able to gain admission to view the inside of a synagogue to which I had been drawn by its splendid exterior. A guide showed us its various parts. To our surprise, these included a special room for wine and cheese parties. In consternation I asked: "Is wine drunk even on these sacred premises?" He replied with serious mien: "Only by a select group who have the right to drink wine in this room!"
So widespread has alcohol consumption become that universities and health authorities have set up organisations to check it. But they have not yet penetrated to the root of the problem — the cancer at the heart of Western creeds which leaves individual free-will too much rein in matters which should be of social concern, and so allows people to imbibe a poison that breaks up sound family life and ruins nations. The fear is growing that the working classes and the youth of tomorrow will be turned into an alcoholic mob, to the tragic disaster of the sufferers and of the peoples of the world.
Doctors attending the 24th International Congress for the Combating of Alcoholism in France issued the following statement concerning the effects of alcohol on mind and spirit : "20% of women and 60% of men entering hospital are alcohol addicts: 70% of mental patients and 40% of venereal patients were so afflicted as a consequence of misuse of
alcohol. In England, experts affirm, 95% of mental cases are due to mental disease induced by alcoholic drinks." ('Health Magazine'). And the same magazine (No. 12, p.5) states : "French newspapers headline as 'shaking' the report of the French Minister of Health on the number of deaths due to alcohol, for it said that in one year 20,000 deaths in France were due to excessive alcohol-consumption, and cited the Secretary- General of the Committee for Combating Alcoholism as authority for the statistic that 25% of industrial accidents and 57% of automobile accidents in France were due to alcohol."
The former French President Poincaré was also head of the anti- alcohol society, and stated in a book on the World War : "French youth! Your biggest enemy is drink! Do more than skirmish with Germany! Take up arms against drink! Drink caused more spiritual and material damage in 1870 than the war with Germany then cost France. The drink which pleases your palate is a deadly poison. It ages you prematurely and robs you of half your lifetime, rendering your body far more vulnerable to the attacks of disease and infirmity of all kinds."
"The Reader's Digest" Persian edition reported that in Germany "in one year some 150,000 cases are tried in the criminal courts on charges arising from misuse of alcoholic drinks." A United States Cabinet Secretary said, according to "Health Magazine" (No. 12, Year 5): "We must keep on eye on the effect of alcoholism on our finances. Experts tell us that their research fixes the cost to the state (apart from private costs) at $15,000,000,000 in one year. Of this one billion dollars goes to hospitalisation, five billion to public assistance and charity, two billion to police and similar costs, seven billion to courts and prison charges. Over and above this must be set the fact that the tax on alcohol only brings in $8 billion to the Treasury."
Nor is the Soviet Union immune. The Tehran Daily "Ettela'at" (No. 13108) reports the institution of severe measures to diminish the dangerous levels of alcohol consumption there, since, the Premier of the U.S.S.R. declared: "Alcohol has caused an increase in the crime level, a rise in absenteeism from factories, and a fall in production such that the state must perforce undertake a far more severe campaign against this."
The same addiction must be blamed for many air-accidents. The industrial psychology specialist Dr. Clement Korn Gould, in an article in the Persian edition of "The Reader's Digest" (No. 37, Year 26), lays the majority of accidents of U.S.A. airlines to this account, both amongst hired pilots and private owners of planes and helicopters. He adds: "Research has established that the majority of air crashes are due to inattention, often due to alcoholic after-effects on the minds of pilots and co-pilots, and this more among Americans than any other nationality.
"Further, investigation has demonstrated that a majority of pilots involved in crashes had imbibed during the flight. The increase in air crashes has made responsible authorities determined to get to the root of the causes; and their researches have shown that a large number of accidents during the last few years have been due to drunkenness in the pilots or to their sexual indulgence before the flight."
Shortages and Uncharitablenesses
Daily increasing affluence and the technological revolution have produced deep divisions in human living. One group of human beings rakes in huge dividends from investments in trusts or cartels or companies, and seems able to have anything it wants, to such an incredible extent that some even provide luxury accommodation for their dogs and cats. Another group scrapes up a miserable livelihood at subsistence level, hardly able to lay hold of the barest essentials of life.
All thinking people feel pangs of conscience at the desperate sufferings allowed in all parts of the world by modern social conditions. Many misfortunes, which in the past would in a very short time have been alleviated, now fester on as uncured tragedies. No wonder a violent hate against those who enjoy excess riches invades the hearts of the underprivileged!
The developed countries make a global effort to improve their economic conditions: but with no advantage to the masses—indeed, even to the disadvantage and decline of poorer lands. So the class difference gapes wider. Many lands groan under poverty and famine.
"The Ferdosi Magazine" of July 28th, 1948, in an article on "Nutrition", makes the following points:
1. Underdeveloped lands number 2,500 million inhabitants, of whom 500,000,000 suffer from undernourishment;
2. 1,500 million suffer from malnutrition;
3. As a direct or indirect consequence, 8,000,000 die of hunger annually.
In Brazil alone a quarter of a million infants die annually from under nourishment. In India infant mortality balances the natural increase of population. The food an average American family throws away as waste daily, equals the food of the average Indian family for four days.
Worse, some unscrupulous and frivolous persons cause artificial shortages of foodstuffs in order to raise prices and line their own pockets, hard-heartedly ignoring the fact that these foodstuffs might lengthen the lives of untold millions. Legislation to suppress such inhuman prodigal self-indulgence could end hunger in the world very quickly. So says the periodical "Enlightened Thought" (719): "In 1960 125 million tons of grain for bread disappeared from the warehouses of America. It would have sufficed to fill the bellies of India's more than 500 million inhabitants for a year. America destroys a great deal of her harvest annually simply to keep prices up. Capitalist institutions in the West have deliberately caused starvation to increase throughout the world. America
fills silos and warehouses with foodstuffs. They then compel poor nations to purchase at high prices to the detriment of their economy. Thus a few selfish power-hungry persons pile up fortunes while being, in fact, guilty of the murder —no less—of millions of innocent fellow-humans."
Philosopher Bertrand Russell writes: "During the last 14 years America has spent 4,000 million dollars on purchasing its farmers' surplus wheat crops. Millions of tons of wheat, barley, maize, cheese, butter have piled up in American storehouses and rotted, simply to keep up prices on the world market : and now they are marking mountains of butter and cheese 'unfit' with a colour-code, to prevent the price of dairy products falling."
Sociologist and philosopher Stahwood Cobb writes in his "Lord of Two Ka'abas" (p.145/6): "Expansion in technology, industry and scientific instruments has produced a deeper sense of our moral poverty. Developed lands cannot boast of ethical superiority over backward nations. Modern materialist civilisation is full of inner contradictions and incongruities, between words and actions, between thought and speech, between reason and feeling. Materialist culture in its various manifestations proclaims the theoretical equality of all human beings; but in practice produces inequities and injustices in the ethical, intellectual, social, spiritual and family spheres, and fanatically vindicates these wrongs.
"Democracy claims to be 'Government of the people by the people for the people'. But at its best it is oligarchy, and soon turns to dictatorship of an individual.
"It claims to aim at 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. In fact, it gives rise to frustration, failure, anxiety, misery.
"It encourages altruism and a social conscience in its rhetoric, but its policies are selfishness run riot, with. no regard for the fate of others. Individuals and groups that get in the way are trampled ruthlessly underfoot. This age surpasses all others known to history in exploitation, profiteering and power-hunger."
In "Sociology" (p.157), Samuel Konig writes: "The developed lands comprise 25% of the world's population and own 85% of its capital assets; leaving 15% for the remaining 75% of humanity. The lapse of time only widens this gap. In affluent lands themselves, wealth is the property of a minority only. A U.S. Senate Committee in 1946 affirmed that 5% of America's great industrial concerns owned 80% of American industrial capital, controlling 60% of the total work force and drawing 80% of the total industrial profits."
The world president of the United Nations' "Farming and Agricultural Organisation" says in an article entitled "Hungry Man" (by Jose de Castro, No. 8, p.24): "Today two thirds of the inhabitants of the earth live in constant hunger ; and about 1,500 million people live on the subsistence level, suffering constantly from this most horrible of social ills."
Savagery in a Civilised Age
Some sociologists held that war is inseparable from human life, which "was from its inception cruel, brutal and nasty." Other sociologists and psychologists deny this, holding that war can be removed from human life, since bloodshed is caused by ethical derailments, social disorders and economic disruptions; and is not an ineradicable ingredient in human nature. Instruction and education in basic truths, and an equitable ordering of social conditions, can remove the causes of war. The terrible and irreparable damage which war brings down on the devoted heads of innocent millions can thus be averted, they say.
The matchless triumphs of science and technology have made the 20th century a bloody holocaust. It is stamped as the age of greed, ambition, insurrection, violence, and of history's most inhuman wars. A glance over the first 75 years of the 20th century is enough to make manifest that in that short time our advanced and civilised peoples have perpetrated more crimes than in the whole previous course of human history.
The West possesses industrial techniques and atom bombs. Its knowledge drives man through mud and blood. It turns once fertile lands to deserts. The cry of the oppressed rises to high heaven, bewailing the West's weakness of thought and decline in morals.
The aftermath of two world wars between imperialist powers pursuing conflicting material interests has been dire for all mankind. No excuse can wash the grime of wickedness, heartlessness and cruelty from this century's warmongers' garments.
World War I lasted 1'565 days. Nine million died. Twenty-two million were maimed and left unemployable for life. Such are the statistics of casualties on the actual battlefield. The number of deaths and injuries caused in crowded cities as a side-effect of the fighting is incalculable. The cost of that war is reckoned as more than $400,000,000,000. The Carnegie Peace Trust, in its report "The Twentieth-Century World", claims that that same sum could have built, at prices of that date, a decent house for every family in England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The survivors weep, like Rachel for her children, "for they are not", and will not be comforted. Its ravages were not repaired before World War II broke out.
Statistics say that in World War million were killed; 20 million lost a limb; 17 million liters of blood were spilt ; 12 million children were born deformed; 13,000 primary and secondary schools, 6,000
universities and 8,000 science laboratories were destroyed; 319 thousand million bullets were fired.
In 1945 America dropped two small atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima 70,000 people were vaporised and 70,000 others crippled. In Nagasaki 40,000 died and 40,000 were maimed. Buildings were laid flat. Nor were innocent babes or animals spared. Within five days Japan surrendered unconditionally.
World press reports said that after the war Russian artificial-limb factories placed an order with their American counterparts for 4 million feet, to fit out those who had lost a foot in the war, since such levels of production were beyond the means of their own industrial installations. If so many feet were needed in Russia, how many irreparable injuries must have occurred amongst her people, and how many in other lands, for which no statistics can ever be affirmed?
The August 1945 bombs held 235 units of uranium, and 239 of plutonium, the equivalent of 335,000 units of T.N.T. An average atom bomb of today is 5,000 times more powerful, and a hydrogen bomb 5 million times more destructive than an atom bomb. Yet one atom bomb would suffice to flatten a city like New York, Paris, London or Moscow. They no longer need manned planes. Guided missiles can deliver them right on target 2,000 miles away. The seismographic echoes of one such explosion can be recorded 7,000 miles from its centre. The Nobel Prize-winning U.S. chemist, Dr. Linus Pauling, says that in the first hour of a new war 10,000 megaton bombs would wipe out 175 million inhabitants of densely populated lands. The U.S.A. had a stockpile of 24,000; the U.S.S.R. 80,000; England 15,000, at the moment he was writing.
A future war, U.S. Army General Neumann writes, will claim as its victims not so much soldiers as civilians. Entire communities, women and children included, will perish. Our physicists have taken war out of human hands and transferred it to fighting machines, which make no distinctions of age or sex, belligerent or non-belligerent. The new theatre of conflict will not be a field of battle or a fortress, but those cities and villages in which manufacturing and commercial centres exist. On these would hail down flying missiles filled with explosives, incendiary devices, poison gas, and disease-bearing bacteria.
These two wars have cast all humanity into the vortex of self-destruction. But their horrors have not had the slightest effect on the moral attitudes of the West, nor changed its intoxication with affluence and alcohol —witness the many regional wars today which might at any moment coalesce into one total war of world annihilation. Civilised nations use their mental, physical and financial powers, not for the proper ends of peace and prosperity for all, but to prepare and stockpile the instruments for everyone's destruction.
Bertrand Russell writes: "Governments competing in sending astronauts to the moon and beyond will between them destroy this world. In past ages sheer want drove tribes to attack their neighbours for the
scanty supplies available. Today affluent societies commit suicide in competitive insanity."
The "Economic Record" reckons that 400 billion dollars were spent on armaments in the first half of the 20th century —enough enough to feed every human stomach for the same period and simultaneously provide housing for one-third of humanity—all this in a world where two-thirds of the population live barely at subsistence level in illiteracy and indigence.
The W.F.T.U. estimates that 70% of the world's working personnel are on jobs which have some connection with armament manufacture.
So terrible are modern weapons that a Third World War would leave neither victor nor vanquished, but only a funeral for all humanity.
Sociologist Petrim A. Sorokin writes: "The key question of our day is not the superiority of capitalism or communism, nationalism or internationalism, but the replacement of a materialist culture by a superior philosophy of life. In World Wars I and II, each side claimed that peace would ensue if its rival group were wiped out. In World War I the Allies blamed Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany ; while he held that the suppression of England was necessary for world peace. In World War II differing views held that peace could only come by Hitler's resignation or death; by Churchill's removal ; by Mussolini's never having been born ; by Hirohito ceasing to be the deified ruler of Japan; by Trotsky replacing Stalin in Russia. Yet now that all these persons are departed, the fever of crisis and war still inflames the world ; and men's hearts fail them for fear. For it was not the individual Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler, or Mussolini, or Churchill, or Stalin who caused the 20th century's troubles. They merely headed up the multitude of human passions which would have produced similar leaders with other names in any case. A boiling pot produces scum. The scum can be removed. But fresh scum soon covers the brew unless a purifying element is introduced that eliminates the cause."
True, our age has produced the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" and prolonged human lives by heart-transplants. But its deadlier products like atom bombs weigh heavy in the balance. The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vindicate the 20th century's claim to be champion of the oppressed and enemy of the oppressor. Yet millions starve to death or are killed off in wars between hostile political groups, despite these idealist institutions.
Are the multifarious agencies that condemn war themselves wholly blameless? Are not those who shout that "all differences should be settled by diplomacy", themselves guilty of pressing their views on others by unjust and forceful measures? Are not Christian leaders, who preach "peace on earth and goodwill towards men" and "war shall be no more", merely adding to the cynical disillusionment of the younger generation, who see that violence and bloodshed are still countenanced as instruments of policy, and do not forget how the Roman Church turned a blind eye on the crimes of Nazism and Fascism?
