Religion, Science and Spirituality – Breaking Out of Belief

Many people seek solace in religion, but what if, rather than showing us to a higher truth, religion blinkers us to the real world we live in? Trying to nurture our souls, we may instead become caught in the trappings of organised religion and charismatic spiritual leaders. What if our religions have got it all wrong?
 
In a series of dialogues, Vijay Narain Shankar and Bill K. Koul provoke and prompt each other to bring their open-minded questioning to bear on the tenets of karma and destiny in Hinduism, the doctrine of non-materialism in religious belief, the uses of God to make sense of natural disasters and extinction events, how we adapt religion to suit our times, and the dangers of seeking absolute truth. They also discuss how to balance forgiveness with anger, realism with idealism, and science with intuition, illustrating their points with quotes from philosophers and poets and from the Hindu scriptures.
 
The Charmed Triangle does not give answers but invites readers to also question how our beliefs can confine and constrict our thinking. Shankar and Koul offer this as their contribution to an ongoing global conversation about finding purpose in our lives and living well. As their dialogues unfold, they outline a path to a pragmatic spiritualism grounded in respect for each other and for the world we live in.

About the Authors

Vijay Narain Shankar has published over a dozen fiction, nonfiction and poetry books, and his short stories have been widely published and anthologised in India and internationally. As a career journalist, Shankar was the youngest war correspondent in India when he covered the Indo-Pakistani war in the mid-1960s. 
 
An engineer by profession, Perth-based Bill K. Koul is an author and a regular blogger and contributor to Indian newspapers and magazines, and a lecturer on Kashmir, where he is originally from. He has published several nonfiction books, applying his decades of experience as an engineer to philosophical musings on Indian politics and broader questions about life.
 

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