Are all ungodly people vicious?

Answer Podcast

Are all ungodly people vicious? Yes. Some people have virtuous moral behavior, but they may not have faith in God.
So how do the two correlate? Answer, the Bhagavad Gita’s 16th chapter talks about two extreme natures, Daiva, Asura, Sampad, Vibhaga, Yoga, the divine and the demoniac natures. So we could say that, if we consider tree of material existence, at elevated position in that tree, that means that elevated position in the material world exists the divine, they are very much in the mode of goodness. And at the bottom most position are the vicious.
They are in the mode of, very low modes of passion and ignorance. If you consider the description of the demoniac described in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is not describing there simply ordinary materialistic people. We may consider that the people who break the regularity principles, we may call them as demons.
However, Krishna is talking specifically about people who are murderous. He talks about in verses 14 and 15, how for gaining money, असो मयाहतः शत्रु अनिष्य जापर आनपी ईश्वरो अहम अहम भोगी सिद्धो अम बल्वान सुखी So, how a person kills one person and kills another person and delights, nor doesn’t even repent while killing anyone like that. So, that is a very serious issue.
How can anyone kill someone like that and still stay pious. So, that is something which is, which needs to be carefully understood that actually, it’s not that Krishna is, the demonic people which Krishna is talking about in the Gita, they are not the today’s average people on the street. Yes, there are some people who are in the underworld and who may kill nonchalantly for money.
But they are not average people. The Bhagavad Gita talks about three modes of material nature. And in fact, after the 16th chapter, the 17th chapter talks about in between the two, in between goodness and ignorance, sorry, or between the divine and the demonic nature.
Krishna, Arjuna asks the question that there are people who faithfully follow Shastra and there are people who faithlessly reject Shastra. What about people who are faithful but not to Shastra? Then the whole 17th chapter gives us guidelines to analyze such people according to three modes of material nature. So, we need to, in the process of education, sometimes lines are drawn in black and white.
And then after that, the shades of grey are introduced. When we say study the map of two countries which have conflicts among them like India and Pakistan, we may see on a map, okay, this is India, this is Pakistan. And on a map, the demarcation seems very clear.
But if you actually go to the border, in most places, there is no well-defined fence that is the border. So, sometimes there may be a natural landmark like a river that is the border. But then is it that there is a line in the middle of the river which is the border? No.
This side of the land on this side belongs to this country, the land on that side belongs to that country. What about the river? Well, it is the property of both. And sometimes both may fight over that water in the river also.
The point here is that at a particular level in education, a black and white demarcation is helpful to gain comprehension. And at a particular stage in our education, we need to go beyond this black and white demarcation to recognize the many shades of grey. So, we could say there are divine people and there are demoniac people.
And Krishna seems to make this classification when he says there are two kinds of people, dāvabhūta-sargau-lokaisman, dāiva āsura eva ca. Especially when he is talking about the demonic people, we could say that he is very well thinking about Duryodhana. Because Duryodhana was the person who had schemes, you know, I got this much money now.
And if I kill the Pandavas, I’ll get this much wealth more. All their kingdom will become mine. Duryodhana was far more villainous than common people in today’s world.
It’s not that common people are nice necessarily. It’s just that they are not necessarily demoniac the way the Bhagavad Gita describes. So, we have to look at people, broadly speaking, the divine and demonic nature.
We could say that if you want to introduce shades of grey, then there could be people who are under demonic influence and people who are under divine influence or likely to be divinely influenced. So, we see that the madhyamadhikārī is supposed to classify people in different categories. He makes friendship with the devotees and he is compassionate towards the bali sheshu, who is innocent.
So, now, the innocent, are they godly? They are not, but they can become godly. And he said that one should neglect the envious. But while dealing with people, how do you differentiate between who is envious and who is ignorant, innocent? Some people might be on the borderline between the two.
And depending on how we present Krishna bhakti, they may be receptive or they may become unreceptive or they may become anti also. So, in the real world, we cannot have simplistic frames of analysis being indiscriminately applied to all situations. We have to understand that reality has many nuances and taking those nuances into consideration, we have to function appropriately.
So, can ungodly people be good? Yes, they can be good if they are functioning in the higher modes. And sometimes some people in their past lives may have been, may have lived a life of goodness and thus in their life, this life also they live in the mode of goodness. And therefore, those people, they may not, but they may have had some bad experiences about religion, about religious people, they might have seen hypocrisy or they might have seen scandals or whatever in religious circles and that’s how, that’s what made them averse to religion and averse thereby to God.
But they, by their past life’s samskaras or past life’s impressions or this life’s upbringing, they may still be very much inclined towards living piously. So, rather than using a certain, any categorization in scripture as a, as a something we have to impose on the real world, we have to see that there is a dynamic interaction between scripture and the world and scripture itself may give us different frameworks at different times to look at the world and we have to understand which framework works in which situation and where, especially in the real world, we can’t apply black and white categorization. We have to always acknowledge shades of grey, and function accordingly.
Thank you.