Harihi Om Dear Rajagopalan: Your colleague does not seem to have grown out of his childhood. I don't know if it still true but when I grew up, it was customary for the elders to instill some fear in the hearts of little children with words such as "God will get angry if you do bad things, etc". You are absolutely correct in saying that if one has faith in God (Srimannarayana) one will not be tempted to do wrong things. But again, in this age of "moral relativism", people will argue about what is wrong and what is not. It depends on whether one takes conservative view of things or a liberal view. The bottomline is that we are all provided with a mind and intellect. We are expected to use them to shape our lives. The answer to your colleague therefore, should be that " the fear is not what Narayana would to us but what we might do to ourselves by not exercising self-control and principles of ethics and falling prey to the temptations of our times. We have as a guide, what we have been taught by our Poorvaachryas well versed in the scriptures. Since these teachings are sometimes voluminous and overwhelming in the sense that we cannot know it all in one lifetime, we tend to take easy way out seeking instant solutions. Some modern day thinkers such as Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Chinmaya, and so on, realized this predicament of the humanity and attempted to provide us with solutions to the day-to-day problems. They however, appealed to the so called elite in the society. Saints such as Basavanna, Sarvajnya, Purandaradasa, Sant Surdas, Sant Kabirdas and so on attempted to bring the values of Truth and Ethics to the people not so intellectual. Present day New age religiosity represented by Sathya Saibaba, Swami Narayan and so on in the East, Self-realization, Ammachi, many a meditation center and so on in the West are all attempting to provide instant solutions and hence, are more appealing to the masses. It is my humble opinion that our contemporary acharyas may consider attempting to bring the spirit of scriptural message to our day-today lives as we live them in this day-and-age. Unfortunately, without this happening, for the sake of "changing with times", people have been losing track of moral absolutes that Narayana is endowed with and which we are expected to emulate. At least if those of us who have understood the value of the teachings of our poorvaacharyas maintain that as a goal, we can hardly go wrong. The realization has to come from within and is not something that one can win in an argument. Adiyen Narayana Dasan Keshava Prasad
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