​Why is the atheistic West more prosperous than religious India?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So people are more atheistic in western countries, more religious in India and yet people in the west seem to be happier than in India.
Why is that? Actually there are two different things here. One is in terms of material facilities. See material things are often a product of material organization.
It is that I may be chanting Hare Krishna very regularly but when I wake up in the morning my chanting is not going to clean my teeth. I have to have a toothbrush and I have to competently clean my teeth otherwise I’ll have bad breath. So it’s not that the spiritual is a substitute for the material.
The spiritual actually if you understand properly that inspires us to organize the material better. So if I understand that actually this body is also a gift of Krishna from you I have to take care of the body. Therefore I’ll clean my teeth also properly.
So now from the material perspective the western countries are much more well organized and material facilities are much better taken care of and that’s how at a material level things are better. Now there is of course a question that materially things are better but mentally things are not better. Mentally people are in lot of stress, lot of distress, relationship conflicts and there are a lot of social parameters which indicate that things are seriously wrong.
Depression, addiction, suicide all these are in huge numbers. They are there in India also but they are in alarming significantly alarming numbers in the west and this is all the more jarring because materially people are comfortable. So we shouldn’t reduce the material to the physical.
At the physical level western countries are much more comfortable but are they materially happy really? At the mental level there is a lot of misery. That’s one thing. Another thing is in India for many centuries India has been ruled by foreign powers and that to some extent has crippled the Indian spirit for social organization.
See people have been you know when the government when the rulers were foreign people were basically caught in they didn’t have a say in the social organization so much. So people are focusing a lot on taking care of themselves and they do that very well but in terms of as a bringing about a social force of change they don’t do that much. There is a because of prolonged subjugation to foreign rules there has been an attitude of apathy that has come into the culture and that is unfortunate actually.
So because of that apathy the same Indians you know if we are in India we will throw garbage on the streets but if I am in Canada I won’t throw it on there. I will go and put it in the dustbin. So what has happened is that apathy that culture of apathy has come up and that’s why things are not well managed things are not well organized.
If you look at the natural resources India is actually quite well endowed but there is a lot of apathy which leads to apathy on one side where people don’t care and other side of course corruption is there. So see although India has a rich spiritual legacy but if we see in terms of practice many Indians are very religious but they are like culturally religious. That religion does not transform their lives because okay I may do a puja at home in the morning and then I go and do corruption in my office and people don’t really feel anything wrong in that.
People don’t feel anything wrong. Why? Because for them they have not got a philosophical understanding of religion. It’s simply a cultural understanding and cultural understanding these are my parents have been doing my grandparents have been doing so I am doing it.
But when they get a philosophical understanding then they understand that actually my religion has to pervade my entire life. So that’s why although they are religious they are not really very moral or very principled in their dealings. That happens because their religion is quite cultural.
So it’s a little not very deep and also because of that habit of apathy that is there. But I feel over a period of time things are changing. Spirituality is also resurgence that is happening and also socially also India is becoming more active.
So I feel that we should not equate we should not make the material as the test for evaluating the spiritual. It is not that material prosperity is a sign of spiritual advancement or it is not that material adversity is a sign of spiritual regress. Rather the material is a result of the way materially people are functioning.
So now as I said there are lot of people who are atheistic, lot of people who are doing wrong activities. All this will have consequences. But those people will get consequences in this life and the next life.
At a social level if things are well organized then that will be also good organization will have its good effects. So we need to see the spiritual as not just spiritual in the sense that not just nominally culturally religious but as something which should pervade our entire life.