Man’s Search for Truth
The famous French thinker, Jean Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1712. He is considered a great advocate of freedom. In his autobiography, he acknowledges that he was a great sinner. He left the Catholic faith for some worldly interest, adopted the Protestant religion, and then returned to the former. In his autobiography, he writes that a house where he lived had been miraculously saved from a fire by a bishop’s prayers.
The reality, however, is that events such as this always happen because of some of the other known or unknown material causes. However, believers attribute them to some ‘miracle’ of persons they hold in great reverence. This incorrect attribution is the actual source of all miraculous tales.
The well-known German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), spent a sizeable portion of his last days in Switzerland. His health was generally bad. Finally, in 1888, he went insane, and later, he died in this state of madness.
I have found in my studies that many ‘big’ scholars have faced this sort of tragic fate. This happens because such people are sunk deep in an extreme mental contradiction. They fail to discover any certain truth at the level of thought. However, to maintain their so-called intellectual image or stature, they continuously try to present themselves as someone who has discovered the absolute truth intellectually. This inner contradiction probably finally drives them to go mad.
It is doubtlessly the greatest blessing for a person with a great mind to discover a truth on which he can live with certainty and confidence. However, unfortunately, the tragedy mentioned above mostly happens with those ‘intelligent’ persons whose intellectual roots are not founded on divine truths.
Indian leader, Gandhi Ji, came to the Swiss city of Geneva in December 1931. There, he delivered a speech at Victor Hall. Among the things he said in the speech was that ‘Truth is God’.
French writer, Romain Rolland, commenting on this concept of Truth, has written, ‘If it is correct, that “Truth is God”, it appears to me that it lacks one important attribute of God: Joy.’ (Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence by Romain Rolland, p. 3)
To say that Truth is God is a negation of God’s Being. God is a conscious Being. If God is not a conscious Being, He is not God. Truth is an abstract quality. It is not some living Being or existence. That is why to say that God is Truth or Truth is God is not a correct interpretation of God’s acknowledgement.
In medieval Europe, the Church exercised widespread domination. Many people were killed on the orders of the Church only because they critiqued some of the dogmas that the Church had established. One of these people was a person named, Michael Servetus. In 1553, a Spanish religious court decided that he should be hanged. His ‘crime’ was simply that he used to say that the concept of the Trinity is not present in the Bible. When the religious court passed the death sentence against him, he fled and arrived in Switzerland, which had become a predominantly Protestant country under the influence of Calvin.
The concept of the Trinity is considered to be a fundamental dogma of the Christian religion. However, strangely, there is no definite mention of the Trinity in the Bible. I once asked a European Christian priest where the concept of the Trinity was mentioned in the Bible. He kept flipping through a copy of an English translation of the Bible for around an hour. He presented some verses. However, I said to him that in these verses, Bible makes no explicit mention of the concept of the Trinity and that the primary or foundational concepts or dogmas of any religion ought to emerge clearly from its scriptures and not through some self-made interpretations. Finally, acknowledging his failure, the priest silently went away.
I shared that man is a born seeker. Every human being regards himself as incomplete until he has found that supreme principle by which he can explain his existence in this world and discover the purpose and meaning of his life. If one is sincere and honest in his search for Truth, he will discover the Creation Plan of human existence. According to this plan, God–the Creator of man–created him as an eternal creature and has divided his life into two stages—the pre-death period or the limited life in this world for a test and the post-death period or the eternal life after death. The period of life before death is meant to be a test for man, while the eternal period after his death will be the period for his reward or punishment, based on his performance in the test in this life.
