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?There is no conflict between religion and science. Whatever conflict appears today has been generated by the West. The issue needs to be looked at in totality and the best way to look at it is through integral humanism as shown by Pandit Deendayal Upadhayaya,? said Shri Suresh Soni, Sahsarkaryavah of Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh (RSS). He was delivering the Deendayal Memorial Lecture on Dharma, Science and Ekatma Manavvad, held by Deendayal Research Institute (DRI) and Ekatm Manav Darshan Anusandhan and Vikas Pratisthan, in New Delhi on September 25. Shri Soni said that religion and science were like the banks of a river and if one of the banks broke, the flow of the river stopped. Therefore both were necessary.
Shri Soni said the conflict between religion and science had always been there in the West. ?The Old Testament claims that planets move around the earth. When Galileo rejected this view he was put behind bars. We can find various such examples in Western history. Unlike the West, no conflict between religion and science appears in Indian history.?
Shri Soni said and cited the example of Jagadguru Shankra-charya, who had said that he would not accept it if the Shastras claimed that the fire was cold. Because the feeling on touching fire, was different. Shri Soni said, ?Indian thinkers had the courage to reject the wrong facts. That is why there has never been conflict between religion and science in India. The research process in the West says that the mystery of anything can be understood properly only by studying it in pieces. On the other hand, the Indian scholars have studied science in totality. The science that had developed in the West considered man as a machine that developed problems before humanity the world over,? he said, adding that the so-called modern progressive intellectuals consider science as development and Dharma as superstition.
Presiding over the function, Shri Sunder Singh Bhandari, senior BJP leader and former Governor of Gujarat, said that narrow thinking created conflicts that cannot be removed until people start thinking in totality. He stressed the need to follow the ideals of Pandit Deendayal Upadhayaya in practical life.
