A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"Ask"Have346 BHAKTI OR DEVOTION.God was Vishnu, and so on, and there was no end to theirdiscussions. A sage was passing that way, and he wasinvited by the disputants to join with them. He wontthere, and the first question he asked was of the man who"was claiming Siva as the greatest God ;Have you seenSiva ? Are you acquainted with Him ? If not, how do youknow He is the greatest God ?" He asked the same questionof the other party ; you seen Yishnu ?",,And afterasking this question of all of them, it was found out thatnot one of them had known anything of God ;and that waswhy they were disputing so much had; they really known,they would not have been disputing. When a jar is beingit isfilled, it makes all sorts of noises, but when it is full,calm and silent ;it has known the truth. So, the veryfact of these disputations and cT fightings among sects, showsthat they do not know anything about religion ; religion,to them, is a mere mass of frothy words, to be written inbooks. Each one hurries to write a big book, to make itas massive as possible, to steal from everybody he can layhis hands on, and never acknowledges his indebtedness,and then he wants to launch this book on the world, tomake one more disturbance in these already existinghundred thousand fights.The vast majority of men are atheists. I am gladthat, in modern times, another set of atheists has comeup in the Western world, the materialists, because theyare sincere atheists ; they are better than these religiousatheists, who are insincere, who talk about religion, andfight about it,and yet never want it,never try to realizeit, never try to understand it. Remember those words ofChrist and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find,knock and it shall be opened unto you."Those words wereliterally true, not figures, or fictions. They were ground