Why are you an atheist? Today, one might answer this question in various ways:

“There is no evidence for the existence of God.”

“No one has seen God.”

“We have science, therefore we do not need God.”

“One requires to have an extraordinary amount of faith to believe in the existence of God.” And so on and so forth.

Well, I have been a student of the Vedic scriptures, especially of the Bhagavad-gita and thought that it would be an interesting topic of research to find out whether there is anything in the Gita that does not require you to have religious faith to accept it.

And what have I found out?

Experts in the field of Gita theology have discerned that the Second Chapter is like a succinct description of the entire text. Therefore, in the beginning texts of the Second Chapter I present before you some of them that fulfil our condition – and that is, these statements should have some reasonable backing from scientific research.

1. Chapter 2 Text 13:

“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.”

When someone is showing you their family album, that person is bound to use statements like, “This is me when I was only six months old…This is me when I was seven years old and learnt to use a bicycle…This is me on my school graduation day…And this is the day of my wedding ceremony, etc.

If you claim that all these are different personalities with different bodies, intellects, mental frameworks and identities, then one will protest that this is him or her.

So, what has changed? Everything except the sense of “I.” That does not change. And therefore, Sri Krishna emphasizes the point that while the body is changing, it is the owner of the body who remains unchanged.

2. Chapter 2 Text 14 :

“O son of Kunti, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”
Here Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna not to lament, but to tolerate. Arjuna should not forsake his duty because of the temporary pains and pleasures that arise. Tolerance as a scientific concept has proximity to the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment.

This experiment is conducted by presenting a child with an immediate reward (typically food, like a marshmallow) and then inform the child that if he/she waited (i.e., do not take the reward) for a specific amount of time, the child can obtain a second and larger reward. This was also known as the Delayed Gratification concept. So, Krishna extolling tolerance towards temporary pains and pleasure is simply asserting an established fact.

3. Now we shall see Chapter 2 Text 34

People will always speak of your infamy, and for a respectable person, dishonor is worse than death.

This is an interesting statement. Here Sri Krishna is behaving more like a friend and philosopher rather than a professional logician. He told Arjuna that if you leave the battlefield before the battle even begins, people will call you a coward. And if you think that people may call you bad names but that you will save your life by fleeing the battlefield, then My advice is that you’d do better to die in the battle. For a respectable man like you, ill fame is worse than death.

4. Chapter 2 Text 38:

Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat—and by so doing you shall never incur sin.

In his purport to this verse, Srila Prabhupada writes, “Sri Krishna now directly says that Arjuna should fight for the sake of fighting because He, Krishna, desires the battle. There is no consideration of happiness or distress, profit or loss, victory or defeat in purely spiritual activities. . . . He who acts for his own sense gratification, either in goodness or in passion, is subject to the reaction, good or bad.”

The closest thing Western civilization has come to this understanding is ars gratia artis, which is a Latin phrase that translates to “art for art’s sake” in English, emphasizing the intrinsic value of art and its creation, rather than any external purpose or benefit.

—Syamananda Dasa