FROM THE WORLD OF RELIGION

Over the centuries, Christianity and Islam have been spreading their wings all over the world. In the process, which continues to this day, they have both brought in much good, but they have also caused the decimation of local religions which, at the core, were not much different from most ancient belief systems. Here and there, and inevitably, Christianity and Islam have come into confrontations. This is because their goal is not simply to introduce the people of the region to the grand notions of Creator, ethical systems, and after-life. Rather, it is to make them accept these and related beliefs as a function of this Savior or that Prophet: the only ones who are supposed to be licensed to bring religion to a sinning and ignorant humanity.

This pattern has been universal in the propagation of Christianity and Islam. Let us recall it, in particular, in the Uganda of the last quarter of the 19th century. The people of the region had a variety of local religions which accepted the existence of a Creator whom they called Ntu (or Muntu). They believed in the spirits of the dead to whom they paid homage, not unlike ancient Romans, Confucians, Shintos, and Hindus. They also generally believed, as did 19th century European spiritualists who held s=C7ances in salons, that some of these spirits communicated with the living. Again, as elsewhere in the ancient world, only men could see the spirits, though women could receive information on social ills. It was accepted that the members of the priestly class - the Elders - had the power to effectively curse bad people, similar to Atharva Vedic chanters, and cure diseases by appropriate utterances, like some faith-healers in Christian world.

But the Ugandans had not heard about Allah or Mohammed, Christ or the Holy Spirit. This, in the view of Muslim and Christian intruders into Uganda, was a problem that needed to be rectified. So, in the latter half of the 19th century, Arab traders from Zanzibar tried to engulf Bugandans and Ugandans into the Islamic fold, and replace their spears with swords. They were followed by British, German, and French traders, who brought guns along with Christian preachers. Whereas only one Islamic sect brought the Word, two brands of Christianity showed up: Anglicans and Catholics. And these had their mutual rivalries.

In 1884, a king by the name of Mwanga came to power in Uganda. Neither Muslim nor Christian, he wanted to keep his people from the influence of all alien religions. Unfortunately, he was also an chronic pedophile. He is said to have had 200 pages for his lustful needs. He was ruthless in his treatment of European evangelists as well as of Ugandan converts to Christianity. He had some of them murdered, and many were also tortured. But, in the spirit of the ancient Christians under Roman dictators, his victims suffered it all with great courage and deep faith, and calm acceptance.

After Mwanga killed a young Catholic leader by the name of Mkasa for protesting the murder of Christians, an even more ardent Christian took up the lead. His name was Lwanga. Lwanga was charged with obstructing the king's ways by converting his pages to Christianity. In May 1886, the king became so furious that he ordered a whole a whole caravan of Christians to walk a 37 mile trek to a place called Namugongo where they were incarcerated. On 3 June of that year, all the Christians were burned to death. One was the unrelenting son of one of the executioners. It is said that, with customary confidence, the martyrs declared: "You may burn our bodies, but you cannot harm our souls!" Lwanga was canonized later as St. Charles Lwanga. June 3 is the Day of Ugandan Martyrs.

A hundred years later, two thirds of the population of Uganda had become Christian, and barely a fifth were affiliated to their ancient religion. How the world had changed in that country! Such is the power of evangelism.

FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE

We walk on land and sail on water, but how often do we reflect on how land or water came to be. We see soft soil and feel hard rock, but how many of us wonder about their origins? Yet such wonderment is what leads to science. One person who probed into such matters was James Hutton (born: 3 June 1726) who studied law, switched to medicine, did some farming, and then got interested in the nature and formation of rocks. Others before him had considered these topics too. For example, there was the eminent Abraham Werner at the time, who saw the action of water in the formation of layered strata of rocks. His ideas were based more on interesting speculation than on field observations. Because of their stress on the role of water, Werner and his followers came to be called Neptunists.

But Hutton was a good deal more. He carefully observed the form and structure of rocky protrusions, whether in his native Scottish highlands or in the Alps. He recognized that the science of the earth must be studied as a slow process over long periods of time rather than as a sudden event. In other words, what Darwin was to do for life forms, Hutton did for the physical earth. He was led to believe that the rocks we see today are the results of gradual sedimentation, or melting from the fire of the earth deep below, or rocks which have changed forms, or the product of enormous pressure, etc. They are certainly not as they were eons ago. He also held the view that when rocks from the earth's interior come to the upper regions and are exposed to air and sunlight they tend to slowly degenerate and become transformed. The worn out rocks get submerged again, and are subjected to other kinds of changes, and so on.

In 1788, Hutton presented these ideas and more to the newly formed Royal Society of Edinburgh in a learned paper entitled Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe. This classic work inaugurated, it is generally agreed, the science of modern geology. (The name was popularized by De Saussure.) Hutton was also one of the first to analyze the phenomenon of rain in terms of humidity in the atmosphere. Because of his reference to heat in the earth's interior, Hutton and his followers came to be called Plutonists.

Inevitably, controversies arose between Neptunists and Plutonists, not just among scientists, but in the popular press as well. The former, because of the closeness of their ideas to Biblical Deluge, were regarded as being more faithful to religion. Goethe, whose literary genius spilled into scientific matters sometimes, devoted a dialogue in his Faust (Act IV) to the two schools of thought, making Mephistopheles the spokesman for Plutonism, revealing his own preference for the Neptunist school. Elsewhere, he spoke in harsh terms against the Plutonists. As the historian of geology Frank Adams stated: "...Goethe found in the Neptunian theory a magnificent picture of slow and stately progress in the development of the earth, while his indignant opposition to the Plutonic conception was due to the fact that it destroyed this fair picture, by introducing violent and sporadic upheavals and eruptions due to igneous forces, which marred the beauty and symmetry of the whole."

Indeed this tends to happen all too often in literary and philosophical interpretations of the world: One chooses that which is more pleasing, motivated by a desire to see the world such as it should be rather than such as it is. On the other hand Hutton wrote: "In interpreting nature, no powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admired except those of which we know the principle... "

V. V. Raman

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