MAN AND RELIGION

   Realizing life's value depends on the presence of an important sensible reality, that is to feel happy. Happiness, as a supreme vital value, cannot be estimated through sensual practices, nor through the abundance of luxuries. So there are many nations, although materially developed, with numerous sensual pleasures exceeding their needs, yet, a high percentage of their nationals are found suffering from a most dangerous crisis of mental strain which often drives them to commit crimes and aggression just to ease themselves from their complexes. Sometimes this tension reaches its highest, driving them to commit suicide, as is the case with the man of the modern materialistic civilization in the countries of Europe, America and elsewhere all over the world.

   The secret behind all this is that this man is suffering from a crushing spiritual vacancy, and is in quest for an unknown truth which he cannot find. He continues trying, groping about, suffering, feelings self- tortured, despite drowning himself and his feelings in different pleasures, physical satisfaction and sensual expressions.

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    Statistics speak every year of tens of thousands of suicidal and other criminal events. Streets, squares and parks are crowded with hundreds of thousands of aimless roamers and social dropouts running away from this torturing hell of life, individually and in groups, calling themselves different names. The one, who is plunged into the filth of this modern material culture, does his best to run away from the hell of this life and tries to escape it, even by resorting to a world of imagination and hallucination, enjoying oneself with shadowy happiness, and to burying the world of reality in the cemetery of illusion, through addiction to drugs and narcotics, such as morphine, heroin, alcohol etc. By this, man loses the joy of life and buries the spirit of happiness in the formidable grave of materialism, and deprives himself of all the beautiful spiritual joys and pleasures. He deprives himself even of the pleasure of sound sleep in the lap of a comfortable slumber. Thus, millions of inhabitants of the major cities of the world, such as Washington, London and Paris, are unable to sleep even with the help of tranquillizers. Tens of millions of human beings are now suffering from nervous sicknesses and diverse psychological complexes, and the number of the mental homes go parallel to the number of hospitals in most parts of the world, the means of physical satisfaction, though numerous and varied, cannot provide them with relief or mental calmness. On the contrary, as statistics confirm, man's psychological crisis and its result on society are getting more complex day after day as the ways of satisfying get more sophisticated, because the sensual expressions are actually void of any spiritual and moral values.

   So, what is, then, happiness?