When atheists read theistic books, why don’t devotees read atheistic books in addition to theistic books? Shouldn’t one understand both points of view?

From Abhijit Toley

Recently I came across a very intelligent atheist who asked me why the theists don’t read atheistic literature? He said that though an atheist, he reads Mahabharat (just like he reads any other book) and so on, but why dont the theists read atheistic literature? Shouldnt one hear both point of views?

To hear the answer

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you question from Abhijit Tole Prabhu recently I came across a very intelligent atheist who asked me why the theists don’t read atheistic literature he said that though an atheist he reads Mahabharata just like he reads any other book and so on but why don’t the theists read atheistic literature shouldn’t one hear both points of view answer this is a typical post-modern thought process where one thinks that one should have a balanced perspective by hearing all kinds of thoughts and then arrive at one’s own particular understanding the problem with this is both practical and conceptual practically most people don’t have time to even read basic books our so it is described it’s a long verse, I’m just quoting a part of it here that there are many scriptures and sometimes the same scriptures have many meanings as given by various Acharyas the time that we have is very little Krishna, there are many obstacles we can’t concentrate, whenever we read we feel sleepy the cell phone rings somebody pings on skype and we just don’t get a taste in reading so we have so many obstacles even within the limited time that we have after our hectic professional and familial commitments so in that time we can barely manage to read the books of our Acharyas that connect us with Krishna so that’s the practical problem and the conceptual problem with this is that in general it takes one to know one so if some atheist has written a book on atheism that means that person has some level of brahmanical intelligence although that person may not be having a brahmanical mindset overall in the sense that person may not have brahmanical values and goals for life so there is brahmanical guna and brahmanical karma, so karma is the competence, so there may be people who are intellectuals in their competence like brahmanas but they don’t have the guna, they don’t have the qualities or values of a brahmana, they don’t have faith in God and faith in transcendental principles so most people are not so brahmanical in their intelligence and that’s why if we read the books of atheists, we will get influenced by those books not because those books are having brilliant arguments but because logic is a tool and some people are more skilled in logic than others and that’s why they can deceive others so in general if somebody is having a service of preaching even in the traditional schools of thought in the madhva sampradaya, they have their whole purpose is to refute mayavad but for the purpose of refuting mayavad they read books which are written by their acharyas about mayavad and after reading these books for 10, 15, 20 years, when they are convinced about their philosophies thoroughly and have realized all the loopholes in the philosophy of mayavad, then they may read mayavadi books directly because otherwise the person will get completely confused and the person may get completely lost by that so similarly, there is actually an example in the times of Shri Jiva Goswami there is a contemporary of his name, Madhusudana Saraswati so he was greatly inspired by Shri Jaitanya Mahaprabhu and then he decided to go to Varanasi to learn mayavad from the mayavadis so that he could refute it but when he went and studied mayavad, he got so influenced by that mayavad that he became a mayavadi at the same time he had got such devotional principles from Shri Jaitanya Mahaprabhu’s example and teachings that he could not give up his bhakti and that’s why he tried to come up with some blend of mayavad and bhakti which is quite peculiar and somewhat inconsistent so although philosophically he refuted mayavad at the same time, he also said that he also says in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita in the 15th chapter, 20th was that, I don’t know any truth higher than Krishna so at one level his heart could not give up his bhakti to Krishna, at the same time his head was lost because of all the mayavadi speculation so Shri Prabhupada also told us that one gets ruined by hearing mayavad so now, most of the references that our acharyas give out to mayavad, because mayavad was the prominent misconception in our during the time when our sampradaya has been active, say in the last 500,000 years, atheism has never been a major intellectual opponent in India it is only after the theory of evolution became popular that atheism started having intellectual pretensions and started becoming intellectually aggressive so the principle of being careful about hearing opposing schools of thought is important to protect our own faith so it is basically, it’s like a gyana yuddha it’s like a war so if a food soldier is going to fight with an elephant warrior it’s not a matter of whether the food soldier has courage or not even if the food soldier has courage he will be slaughtered, because he is not empowered for that that’s why if a young devotee who has not understood the principles of logic who has not got experiences in Krishna consciousness, who doesn’t have knowledge about how logic can be used as a tool deceptively to mislead people to propagate one’s own schools of thought without actually exposing honestly the deficiencies of the schools of thought, covering them up and just aggressively portraying one’s own seeming strong points then such a person will get slaughtered in his faith by reading atheistic books so it is not that the food soldier cannot read atheistic books the food soldier should get trained and become an elephant warrior himself and then he can confront the elephant warrior on the opposite side that is when the person can read these books otherwise till then a person will get completely misplaced he will get misdirected now if an atheist says that I read atheistic books well, Mahabharata is hardly a theistic book Mahabharata may have some pastimes of Krishna within that but without the commentaries of the Acharyas without the broader philosophical perspective given by the Acharyas actually speaking, reading a book like that will only deepen one’s further misunderstandings in fact one will get more reasons for disbelieving in Krishna as God and blaming Krishna for being immoral by reading Mahabharata if one is truly honest atheist honest in the sense that one is actually thinking of trying to understand a theistic perspective then one should read books by devotee scientists who understand the mindset of atheistic people and have written about Krishna consciousness from that perspective reading books of pastimes like Mahabharata or Ramayana that is certainly not a sign of open mindedness because such reading often easily degenerates into an exercise in compiling faults for launching attacks on future atheists on future theists that one meets therefore this sort of reading is not something which is especially a sign of broad mindedness if the atheist wants to read then the person can read books which specifically talk about atheism and about the flaws in atheism the limitations of atheism and deal with them and most atheists will chicken out when they get this sort of books to read and if at all they get this sort of books to read, if they read them many of them get transformed and convinced and become then theistic propagators of spiritual wisdom because they see that atheism is much more intellectually defensible and emotionally satisfying understanding of life so that’s why we shouldn’t be mistaken by this pretension to broad mindedness that one is reading all these I am reading all the theistic books why don’t you read atheistic books if somebody offers you atheistic books like this you can tell them that when I get time I will read them and our own acharyas have given us so many books that we don’t have time to read them and if at all we wish that these books should be studied if we have a specific service of say refuting atheism then under the guidance of devotees who are specialized in these services then we can read these books and see what is wrong with them but there are so many erroneous schools of thought in this world and if we try to refute all possible schools of thought then there is no end to the whole process or leave alone refuting all schools of thought somebody may say that oh if you are reading to refute then you are being close minded you are not open minded actually to be open minded you should not have any preconceptions and you should read this book very open minded that basically is asking us to give up our faith while reading these books so to understand what is wrong with this we need to understand that ultimately we are practicing Krishna Consciousness not just because it is a belief system because we are practicing Krishna Consciousness because it is a transformational tool for us it is a transformational tool for us because it enables us to understand how I am a spiritual being and by following this spiritual process I personally gain deeper wisdom, gain realization of my spiritual identity and become transformed towards negative things away from negative things so Ravindraswaro Prabhu was a student of philosophy in Templeton University and other American universities earlier and as he was studying philosophy he found that there can be various philosophies which are eloquently and vehemently sometimes propagated by their founding and subsequent philosophers and then some other philosopher comes along and refutes that philosophy and then he found that this is all before he was introduced to Krishna Consciousness, he found that this whole cycle of argument and counter argument and counter counter argument and counter counter counter argument is practically endless and then he decided, he said that by my own intuition I came up with a test for checking the validity of the philosophy and that had nothing to do with its logicality he said if your philosophy is true at best by practicing your philosophy I will become like you do I want to become like you and he said just by this standard I was able to reject most philosophies even when they seem to be having a lot of lofty intellectual pretensions and this is how I rejected all philosophies till I met Srila Prabhupada when I met Srila Prabhupada I found that he radiated such a sense of warmth and compassion and there was no flippancy or doubt or skepticism or nihilism within his words he was convinced about what he was speaking and he was sharing that conviction in a compassionate way that was very transparently intended for the benefit and well being of his audience and he said more than the logicality of Krishna consciousness was the was the sublimity of the personality of Srila Prabhupada that attracted and convinced him, of course he also found the philosophy of Krishna consciousness tremendously logical but ultimately we are practicing philosophy not just because it’s an intellectual fantasy for us, we practice it because it’s a transformational tool for us it helps us discover our higher nature, in fact our highest nature and to understand what is wrong with the idea that we should look at all schools of thought before deciding which one to follow, if we understand this point that for us Krishna consciousness is like a transformational tool it’s not a tool in the sense that we will use the tool and throw it away but it will transform us and then we will continue it forever for us, so we could call it as a transformational technology for us then suppose we compare our present situation to a kind of sickness so just as there can be physical sickness, there can be spiritual and mental sickness also, so Krishna consciousness frees us from our mental sicknesses of depression, irritation tension and all other mental complexes that are there and also frees us from the spiritual sickness of forgetfulness of Krishna or aversion to Krishna even and if we go to a doctor we basically evaluate the logicality of what the doctor is saying to some extent so if I have pain in my stomach and doctor says you have to do surgery for your leg, we may have little suspicion, why does my leg have to be amputated when this pain is in the stomach but basically what doctor says makes sense then we take the treatment and when we take the treatment and we find ourselves getting cured, then we understand that this is a good treatment, I will continue that now when I am sick and I try a treatment and it works, that doesn’t mean that in the name of being open minded, I have to go to every one of the millions of doctors that are there in the world and hear whatever they have to say and then decide which doctor I have to follow or even if I say I don’t have to go to all doctors if it’s not that I have to go to all schools of medicine also that I go to allopathy, then I go to ayurveda then I go to homeopathy, then I go to naturopathy if a particular medicine doesn’t work for me then I can go to some other forms of medicine to see if they work for me but if the form of medicine that I am taking right now works for me and works wonderfully then there is no need for me to explore all other forms of medicine in the hope of finding out how they are I am getting transformed I am getting benefited by this medicine that’s what I will take so actually the idea that we should be open minded to all schools of thought before committing ourselves may seem superficially appealing but practically speaking we never do that in any other field and we don’t have the time to do it, so if we find a particular set of spiritual principles and practices beneficial and transformational for ourselves in a positive sense then we will actually practice them and it is not a sign of narrow mindedness that we don’t bother about other schools of thought, it’s just because we find that by our own intelligence and our experience we are convinced that this is the right path and we will march ahead on this path we should not, in the name of being open minded, be so open minded that our brains pop out and they fall on the street by that open mindedness essentially means that we understand that there may be other approaches to God which may also have their validity and we recognize them but approaches that completely deny the existence of God and they contradict our personal experience, so a person has had a terrible disease and the medicine has cured that person and then somebody comes along and says that this medicine is bogus whatever arguments that person is going to give we know they are flawed because we have got the experience of how the medicine has cured us similarly we have got the experience of how Krishna consciousness has transformed us positively and therefore we don’t bother about atheistic literature so much we only, if we need to specifically deal with them for the sake of helping those who are misled by atheism to come to a more correct understanding of life then we can read atheistic books under the guidance of senior devotees but otherwise both from a conceptual point of view of the danger of we getting needlessly misled and from the practical point of view that we don’t have time we avoid these literature and that is not a matter of lacking open mindedness it is just a matter of having intelligence and acting according to our experience of what is