Darwin's "Survival of the fittest" theory & Hindu Vedanta

If the above Darwinian theory is applied to only the corporeal body, what happens to the soul, if there is one?

Hindu philosophy gives a shocking answer.

The goal of human life is release from the cycle of life & death as postulated by Sankara "Punarapi jananam, punarapi maranam...." (पुनरपि जननं, पुनरपि मरणं) So the soul, in its perfection, should not don a body again, that is in Darwinian terms, should not be corporeal again. Only those "fittest" (still not having achieved spiritual perfection) do "survive" (the unending cycle of birth & death). 

So the Hindu Vedanta also signifies the "anta" of the corporeal body as such.

A variant of this idea was also present in the Roman Catholic monastic order. Instead of struggling to corporeally survive, the highest goal of both monks & nuns was "martyrdom."

In a lighter vein, listeners to a talk by a monk of the Ramakrishna Order were shocked to hear him declare the goal of human life is "Birth Control"! What he meant was, the spiritual aspirant should lead such a life that there is no next (corporeal) birth for him!

Religion & Reform

Given that the Roman Catholic Church had become corrupt, instead of removing the excrescences, the foundations  themselves were tampered with by Martin Luther. He threw out the baby (of spirituality) along with the bathwater (of corruption.) As preached by Moses in his Ten Commandments & confirmed by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, the first duty of mankind was to love & obey God. All others like honouring parents & helping the poor & sick were only secondary & aids to the above, like the Computer aiding most human activities now. Incidentally this fundamental truth exists even in the youngest Semitic religion, Islam (the meaning of which is surrender to the Will of God).The fall-out was, the earlier Christian Saints were those who were in communion with God (mystics) like St.Teresa (of Avila) & the later ones only social service providers under a religious garb, like St.Teresa (of Kolkata). This led to a loss of spirituality & a corresponding increase in worldliness. Worse, demonising the Pope & Catholics was institutionalized by others even after significant reforms in the Catholic Church, symbolically stoning them like the Muslims do during Haj in Mecca. The schisms among the Christians were brilliantly parodied in Jonathan Swift's satire, "The Tale of a Tub."

Fortunately in Hinduism, the oldest of them all, any minor aberrations were taken care of by periodical appearances of religious reformers. In the nineteenth century, the most dramatic of them, Sri Ramakrishna, was the first to proclaim that all religions are true, putting to rest irrational ideas like "One True religion" & "Chosen people", propagated by the Semitic religions. This Universal Truth of all religions got global currency first by his disciple Swami Vivekananda & later in the twentieth century by Sri Satya Sai Baba, who by his charisma & miracles gave a quantum jump to the inclusiveness of Hinduism.

Utopian Societies

The problem of human evil has always occupied the mind of mankind. Even religious leaders have opined that it is inherent in human nature. Hindu cosmology states that it is cyclic & righteousness declines with the Yugas.

But the American writer Richard Bach wondered what if a culture grew up without evil? What would it do with all the energy that is now spent on destructive activities? A world where we choose our highest right & not our darkest wrong & where we lift each other up instead of always putting each other down? The result was a book called "Curious Lives" where these ideas are worked out by a society of ferrets.

A similar idea was worked out in Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" (1853). This was specific to a semi-rural town in pre-industrial England. Interestingly, this town was inhabited mostly by spinsters of independent means where economy was virtue & waste & ostentation were anathema. The mindset of these dear ladies could not comprehend a small (presumed) theft without alarm. They would rush to the aid of any one of them in dire straits unanimously. They were so naive that they would not enter into a business enterprise, even for livelihood, without taking the permission of the established traders. Even more surprisingly, the established traders would gladly allow them & even send some of their customers, recommending that better goods were sold there!

Sadly this was the only work of Gaskell in these lines, her other novels dealing with ordinary humans in all their exasperating diversity.