This much of philosophy! I would not like to elaborate on the complexities of scientific logic and god. My question, rather is, why a thinker of mathematics, a rationalist, needed to prove the existence of god. Why was Spinoza using science to validate divinity? With many such thinkers and writers, religious ethics has always been a major concern because from time to time the underlying emphasis with great cultures has been to seek moral order in the society. From Plato to Radhakrishnan, there are thousands of thinkers of science and religion who have tried to bring ethical concerns to the fore.
The absence of ethics in public sphere is one of the major problems with Nepali culture from the locations of education to politics, business to religion. Among many other kinds of overall decadence, an overt one is that we are in the most unethical times. Moral values rarely determine human behavior from the streets to business dealings. The misery of the nation is a gross failure to understand that moral values are the guiding principle of our practical action. Practical action leads to establishing a good society. I have not said anything striking: There is nothing new to what I have written. The issues of ethics is never new to us, it is rarely interesting, it does not attract us, it has no spectacular message, and it is one of the oldest modes of making man a social being. The problem with ethical values in our societies is that it is taken as something old, handed down to us from our long traditions. People thus are bored by ideas on morality.
The problem with ethical values in our societies is that it is taken as something old, handed down to us from our long traditions. People thus are bored by ideas on morality.
But very few of us talk and show concern about simple moral values in the context of perennial philosophical and literary discourses on the subject. I take two examples of moral decadence in the public sphere. One is very casual and frequent and the other too is similar if linguistically studied. From peddlers to students, grown up people to bus drivers, there has been a disturbing increase in either inserting statement with foul remarks on mother or using such expressions as a communicative habit without indicating a person. Another commonly spoken general language is political. Leaders use unlawful language to justify acts like kidnapping and torturing.
Mother-slangs are so frequently used that people walking around with elders and kids do not even care to notice. This is a very serious manneristic problem of how we use language and how we do not care about such expressions. Such slangs are universally spoken and they are going to remain with us as long as we are social animals. My point of argument is different: That such an expression has become common from public places to schools and colleges. At times, there are longer slangs in a verbal statement than there are meaningful sentences. We seem to have internalized such expressions whether as the addresser or addressee, and as the listener.
An electrician recently told me that while he was fixing a gadget at home, he expressed mother-slang when he failed to fix it. A class five son, who was watching his father working, asked him why he scolded his grandmother while working. He asked me how to train oneself to stop using such expressions. I said show dissatisfaction if others use such expressions. He said it would be difficult. I said then notice when people use such expressions and look at them, it may correct your language. I liked my idea for being a moral teacher.
The other example is more than public; the languages used by the politicians emphatically influence the common collective psychological space. Leaders, from time to time, use unethical and unlawful language to express their justified or unjustified ideas and opinions. Listen to an aggressive speaker in the public and you find how he miserably uses words, phrases and sentences. You find communication at its wretched mode of being; language almost ceases to express itself rationally. How a former prime minister justifies kidnapping as a form of punishment! How a student leader asks his cadres in Lumbini to kick the teacher on his back if he does not admit his youths in the school. And notice how I write!
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