The Good, The Bad and The Inexplicable

“Our connection to reality is never just perception. It's always theory-laden. Scientific knowledge isn't derived from anything. It's like all knowledge. It's conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it.”-----Karl Popper

So, were ‘testable conjectures’ the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates? No. Contrary to what's usually said, testability is common, in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking. Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction. Until proved, any intellectual and any simpleton has equal comportment for his declaration.

Consider the ancient Greek myth explaining seasons. Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. And each year, she is magically compelled to return. And her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren. That myth is testable. If winter is caused by Demeter's sadness, then it must happen everywhere on Earth, simultaneously. So if the ancient Greeks had only known that Australia is at its warmest when Demeter is at her saddest, they'd have known that their theory is false.

What was it that made this explanation false....its the testability, the scientific contemplation. If there is some defecting in any story that you are told (not just a logical defect....any bad explanation), what does that mean? As David Deutsch said, “Explanation is an assertion about what's there, unseen, that accounts for what's seen.”

The myth of Persephone’s forced marriage might appear poise with the logic of weather cycle...or it might appear so at the first glimpse but it fails on the scientific balance....because the explanatory role of the marriage can be replaced by infinitely many ad-hoc explanations. Why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual occurrence? Here is one. Persephone wasn't released. She escaped, and returns every spring to take revenge on Hades, with her Spring powers. She cools his domain with Spring air, venting heat up to the surface, creating summer. That accounts for the same phenomena as the original myth. It's equally testable. Yet what it asserts about reality is, in many ways, the opposite.

This easy variability is a precursor of bad explanations. Until you have some strong reason to prefer any one variable over many others available.....your explanation is bad. Good explanations can’t be easily varied while still explaining the phenomenon. Our explanation of seasons connecting the earth’s tilt and sun’s inclination is a good one....because every detail in there has a functional importance and ‘hard to vary’.

Now if the Greeks would have discovered that seasons in Australia are out of phase, they could have easily varied their myth to predict that. For instance, when Demeter is upset, she banishes heat from her vicinity, into the other hemisphere, where it makes summer. But altering their theory wouldn't have got the ancient Greeks one jot closer to understanding seasons, because their explanation was bad ‘easy to vary’. If the axis-tilt theory had been refuted, its defenders would have had nowhere to go. No easily implemented change could make that tilt cause the same seasons in both hemispheres.

This ever-redolent quest for hard-to-vary theories is the basis of all progress. Two approaches blight progress. One is easy-to-vary theories and the other is explanation-less theories. If you told about some occurrence or phenomenon unarmed with a hard-to-vary explanation....its just like they’re telling you that a wizard did it.

When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes -- but not how gene percentages confer rights -- wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing.

That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is, itself, unseen, yet impossible to vary.—Bertrand Russell

Supermarket and Suicide

The idea of being able to choose a sudden exit fascinates me on many levels. For example, I may be at a party having a good time and suddenly the thought crosses my mind that I could actually just walk out and leave it. Sometimes once I get this thought in my mind I become possessed by my own curiosity. Then I may feel compelled to immediately leave the party and walk to some random spot where I could not have predicted I would be at that moment. I may touch a mailbox and think to myself 'I could easily have never touched this mailbox. I could easily still be inside. But instead, because a random thought possessed my mind, I am having this completely different experience now, one which could never have been foreseen.'

In a way I guess it seems totally ridiculous that I get this amazing high from walking out of a good time and touching a mailbox by myself, but it gives me this surreal sense of being a free agent that operates my mind at its own whim, as opposed to being led into predictable patterns of behavior designed by evolved instincts or learned behaviors. And leaving in itself is so sudden - a complete change to the senses - there is something so exciting to me for a moment when an exit is made and suddenly I am standing outside in the vast wild world.

Once I was at the supermarket when I got an attack of this type of thinking. I started to fantasize about walking away from my shopping cart and going out into the parking lot and exploring the suburban streets behind the supermarket- being somewhere completely unexpected and not being in the supermarket at all. The thoughts overtook me and I abandoned my full cart of groceries to get the rush of walking out into the parking lot where the world could not have expected me to be coming- to penetrate a moment in that lot which never thought it would see me.

Standing in the parking lot I was truly heady, intoxicated by own freedom, feeling that I was seeing some secret surreal moment. For several minutes I stood there on top of the world enthralled by own consciousness and the sensation that I had been newly born by walking out the automatic doors. I was communing with the branches of the trees and the cracks in the pavement as if I was in the midst of an intense acid trip. I was thinking about making memories and making memories of making memories and the memories of doing that some more (yes, these are those very memories!)

But after these wild sensations wore down, I became more conscious of the other reality. The reality that I really did need to buy groceries in the near future was the same one that had propelled me toward the supermarket in the first place. Now that reality came back more strongly to my mind. I sighed to realize that although I was free to go off and do whatever I pleased, that it would only mean that I would have to come back to the supermarket tomorrow and start back over with all the shopping. Finally I had to concede that the only thing to do was to go back in and buy my groceries and I may as well just go back and get my cart right now so I wouldn't have to start all the way back at the beginning tomorrow.

When I went back into the supermarket, though, my cart was not in the aisle where I had left it. Because I had only been outside for a few minutes, it surprised me that my cart would have been already moved, and I searched for it in vain throughout the store. After going up and down each aisle several times in search of the work I had done assembling my groceries, I began to feel incredibly lost. At that moment it occurred to me that the entire experience was a perfect description of suicide. I had suddenly chosen to walk away from my unfinished work and jump into a different reality. Then I had experienced a euphoric freedom, which was followed by the return of the original need to perform my human duty. Then, realizing the error of my whim, I had attempted to return to my human body, only to be devastated by the loss and the finality of what I had done and forced to begin from the beginning.

After that experience I decided to resist the urge to leave at such moments. Instead I make it a point to experience suburban supermarket parking lots in a psychedelic sense during my walk in and out from the car. That way I still get to chuckle to myself in knowing euphoria without slowing down my chore in the slightest.

Specialisation

Well well.....I took a loooooong break this time. Though I thought no one cared but breathtakingly some did!!! they asked me why I didn't update it.....

I thought that better than answering them I should probably write something....so I just sat before my computer and thought I should write on something.....

I was listening to some songs and this one song by Oasis named 'Specialise'.....struck me.....a great deal about specialisation started coming into my mind....so I thought that my 'topic hunt' is over...

So.....

The universe in which we live is said to have started from nothing.......nothingness exploded into so much that it is still expanding. What was that force which caused this explosion....is not the question I wish to discuss right now... but the topic of discussion is that what materialized it?? Why aren’t we spiritual and religious and why are we material in our day-to-day practise?? I contemplated a lot and thought that the answer might be ‘Specialisation’.

So, at the beginning it was all nothing....then occurred ‘Big Bang’ and eventually specialisation took place. The things which specialized in energy were called energy and things specialising in matter were called matter. In matter; things specialised in planets, stars, satellites and other celestial things. The ones which didn’t specialize in anything formed the vacuum......the space. Matter also specialised into Living and Non-Living. Life first came in water and then few cells specialised to walk on land, some specialised in flying!!...and the evolutionary specialisation continued. Some specialised into plants and diversified our environment. Darwin’s theory of evolution has its keyline saying ‘Survival of the fittest’ but it should have been ‘Survival of the Specialised’.

After several specialisations man was born. He specialised into tribes and civilizations. Some specialised in their works into carpenters, farmer, labourers etc. Some specialised in power to become coons, leaders, soldiers, social servants etc. Some specialised in their views and became sophists, teachers, philosophers etc. Some in exchange and economics and became businessmen, traders, exporters etc.

Some specialised in worship and eventually into religions, and then gradually specialisations occurred within these religions, like Catholics, Protestants, shia, sunni, shaiv, vaishnav etc. Initially we worshipped one God then these Gods started to specialise into several other sub-gods.....some for wars, some for love, some for prosperity etc....... though these specialisations were brought about by Man alone but he boldly establishes that they were due to the Gods themselves!!! Knowledge also specialised into philosophy and science and they were further developed into an assortment of groupings. Then these subjects specialised into several sub-divisions. I could only imagine the extent of specialisation when my dentist asked me to consult some other dentist because I had problem in my 19^th tooth whereas he dealt only in the first 14!!!

Our houses specialised according to our habitats. Now there are several specialisations in food....seasoning, baking, sizzling, mixing etc.

At the outset only one king managed the whole kingdom but now we have several departments and portfolios to manage smaller areas like that of roads, bridges, malaria, transport etc. Thus you can deduce easily that whatever you do is specialised, in this manner you are a specialist....no matter if your work is petty or you are some thug!!!! You a thief....you are a specialist; you a clerk you are a specialist!!! Because only you can do your work, no one else can do it better than you.

Right now we are developing new specialisations everyday. That is why we say that ‘Universe is Expanding’. The moment this specialisation stops our world will start to shrink and we will say that the ‘Universe is Contracting’.

One nice morning it just struck me that I could easily define meditation, pride and salvation on the basis of specialisation.

Pride is simply to feel that your specialisation is unique or is rare.

Meditation is to discard the sense of superiority of your specialisation. The moment you forget your specialisation.....you are meditating. People have tried several ways to meditate and elevate but this is the best and simplest.....you just forget the reason you think you are unique for and you are meditating.

And

Salvation......when you discard the thought of your specialisation you are meditating but when you discard your specialisation as a whole you attain salvation because specialisation is a material thing and discarding it completely would take you to the divine level.

We humans are only using a certain part of our brains; just a small percentage; a major part of our gray matter is a waste; but when we start using more and more of it.....our dimensions of specialisations would increase and after several specialisations maybe we would see that all the specialisations which we did were identical.......... it was just that we couldn’t see their unity!! But presently we are progressing on the Specialisation road and it might be that after the ‘Dead End’ we would have to return back. Then new specialisations will have to be made so that we could return. For instance, we specialised on how to clear villages and forests to develop towns and cities and now we are specialising on how to clear townships to develop villages and forests. English.....the universal language is spreading throughout the world thus decreasing specialisation.

One might ask me that why am I so much opposed to specialisation??.....there can be two answers to this......

1. 1. I oppose specialisation in the same manner as people oppose materialism.

2. 2. Maybe criticising specialisation is my specialisation!!!!

The Blue Pill or The Red Pill??

“You take the blue pill -- the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe." Morpheus, The Matrix ------http://www.youtube.com/v/uGQF8LAmiaE

In The Matrix Universe, an authorized member of a Zion crew offers a prospective human in the Matrix a choice of ingesting a red pill. Doing so activates a trace program that allows the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant. Once the person is found, commands are sent to the pod to awaken the person.

Red pills appear to have either seen "glitches" from the Matrix (e.g. a book continuously respawning on a shelf, regardless of attempts to remove the book), or have such a nature and/or awareness as to question their life within the Matrix, and refuse to dismiss the strange events - basically those who have figured out the illusion of the Matrix.

According to the character Morpheus, exiting the Matrix can be traumatic, particularly to those who have lived in it for too long. As a rule, crews normally only offer the red pill to those no older than teenage. After that, the risk of denial and psychotic episodes from the reality of separation could increase. This rule was violated by Morpheus in rescuing Neo, who was approximately 30 years old.—from Wikipedia

The BLUE Pill or the RED Pill??

The RED Pill is the path of Philosophy and Reasoning and Critical Thinking and Science and testing.  The BLUE Pill is that of belief and emotional decision making.   Which shall it be?

One of the core themes of The Matrix is the concept that if you want to transform your world, you must first identify how you have been programmed, decide whether the programming is accurate, then decide whether to reprogram yourself.

As a simple start to the Red Pill path or some further steps along that path you might  go to http://www.snopes.com and find five of the beliefs that you have held to be true that are not true and you have just learned that they are not true by going to this site.

Another exercise would be to realize that you already should be aware that things are not always as they appear to be or as we are led to believe. Name one such thing in your life.

This should open up to the possibility that not all beliefs that we hold to be true are actually true and that it might be of some value to question beliefs and to examine them to determine which beliefs have more evidence and reason to support them and distinguish them from others with less support.   Philosophy is a method for doing that examination concerning some of the most basic questions and issues human have ever confronted.

Is it better to live a harsh reality or a comfortable fantasy? And why? This is one interpretation of a key question faced by Neo, the hero of the movie The Matrix. Neo has a conversation with Morpheus, who explains that what Neo has always perceived as “reality,” including his friends, his job, and his entire existence in 20^thcentury America, is actually a simulation caused by a race of computers that has taken over earth long ago and has enslaved human beings. Our brains, according to Morpheus, are simply kept alive in a fantasy world so that we can provide electricity to the machines. But a few individuals are occasionally able to disconnect themselves from this matrix of fantasy and regain control of their body, thereby fighting a desperate battle for supremacy on the planet. Now, Morpheus says, Neo has two choices. If he takes a blue pill that he is being offered, he will forget about the matrix and go back to his illusory but relatively safe and predictable life. Take the red pill, however, and you will see the world as it really is. The trade-off is clear: comfortable fantasy or harsh reality? What would you choose, and why?

Some may question the assumptions underlying the choice. What makes us think that Morpheus is telling the truth? What if it is the red pill that leads to an imaginary world? This is a valid epistemological point. How do you know what is real and what is not? What kind of evidence do you have that you were dreaming last night of being a butterfly, and are you not in fact a butterfly who is now dreaming of being a human being? There are some reasonable, though by no means foolproof, ways out of this basic dilemma. For example, dreams—unlike what we consider reality—have no temporal continuity and are often characterized by arbitrary rules of engagement (contrary to, say, the laws of physics). But Neo did not have such a luxury, since in his case both situations felt very real. Furthermore, some people on drugs, or affected by particular brain disorders, really do have a hard time distinguishing between reality and hallucinations.

However, this kind of existential response based on radical skepticism skirts an interesting question. Let us assume that we have good reasons to believe Morpheus (as Neo does in the movie, given some recent disturbing experiences that had shaken his conception of reality); what would you then do about it?

In essence, the choice can be seen as one between truth and happiness (albeit the latter may be of a rather limited variety). In this sense, the question becomes of utmost interest and of surprising practical relevance. For example, you are faced by this dilemma when you examine your religious beliefs. Since there is no more evidence for the existence of a god than for the existence of unicorns, but believing in god makes you feel more comfortable and gives eternal meaning to your life, should you believe the unbelievable or attempt to find your way through the tortuous road of secular morality and meaning? Of course, most people don’t really choose to believe in a god, they rather culturally inherit such belief from their parents and friends; but most of us do arrive at the rejection of god by an often long process of questioning during which we are faced with terrible questions of existential meaning and of good and evil. In this sense, consciously becoming an agnostic or atheist is indeed more difficult than the other path, and it is like taking Neo’s red pill.

Less controversial (if you actually believe in god and don’t therefore buy the above argument) but equally dramatic is the choice of taking or not taking drugs. The “reality” offered by drugs is more pleasurable (at least temporarily) than the real life out there, especially for poor or psychologically damaged people. Why not avoid the pain and go for the blue option? The same question could be framed in terms of why spend your time reading this blog which is talking of some elusive and out of the place things rather than watching ,say, some video on youtube?

Surveys show that most people chose the red pill, yet I found quite a bit of disagreement on the motives. Essentially, however, there are two main reasons that can be advanced for taking red over blue: pragmatic and ethical ones.

The pragmatic motive is that living in an imaginary world can be pretty dangerous. One of the reasons human beings have been so successful during evolution is precisely because our large brains have an uncanny capability of assessing reality, of finding cause-effect connections, and therefore of manipulating the world to our advantage. One could object that plenty of people in modern society believe all sorts of weird things, from astrology to gods, and yet seem to function reasonably well. But this is because, in fact, most of the time they do not act on their beliefs. For example, while many people would claim to leave their lives in god’s hands when they are so questioned, they nevertheless take out insurance policies, look on both sides of the road before crossing, and go regularly to the doctor, if they can afford it. When they do behave according to a strict adherence to fantastic beliefs, bad things happen. A recurrent example is offered by Christian Scientists who die (or, worse, let their children die) because they do not believe in getting medical attention when they are sick. Reality does have a way of biting your back side!!!

The ethical reason represents an even more general answer to Neo’s question: regardless of practical consequences or of feelings of pleasure and discomfort, it is simply right to choose the red pill. We are social beings, and by nature we have a tendency to relate to other humans and to help them out, especially if they are our kin or friends. This tendency constitutes the basis of most of our ethical systems, and it implies that it is our duty not to shut ourselves out of the world in order to simply seek pleasure or avoid pain. This, however, begs the question of what is right to begin with and of how we determine it. Essentially, we are now faced with the radical moral skeptic question: why bother, if it does not affect your own happiness?

The point is, even a science fiction movie can generate profound philosophical questions, and these in turn are not necessarily idle speculations on the sex of angels but give us the opportunity to examine some of our most basic choices and their often far-reaching consequences. And remember, an unexamined life is not worth living. Or is it? And finally you answer honestly in the comments that which pill would you take???...The Blue Or The Red??

Ant and the Red-Tape

In my childhood my granny used to tell me a story........

Once in a country, fell a drought. There lived a parrot and a sparrow. They flew off to another country in search of food; unfortunately it was also struck by a famine. But there they found a single grain of food. They started to break it into two. After a long struggle they broke it with the help of a  crack in the trunk of a tree. Half of it got stuck in the crack itself and the parrot flew away with the other half. Desperate to have that half grain, the sparrow went to a woodcutter and asked him to open that crack so that it could take that grain.

The woodcutter refused. The sparrow went to the king and asked him to scold the woodcutter for he didn’t open the crack for it.

 The king refused. The sparrow went to the queen and asked her to divorce the king ‘coz he didn’t scold the woodcutter  ‘coz ........and the queen refused.

 So the sparrow went to a snake and asked him to bite the queen ‘coz she ........;.

The snake refused. So it went to a wooden cane and asked it to kill the snake ‘coz.......;.

The cane refused. The sparrow went to the fire and asked it to burn the cane because......;.

Fire declined the request, so the sparrow went to the river and asked it to extinguish the fire but the river refused. So the sparrow now went to the elephant and asked it to drink the waters of the river but the elephant too turned it down.

After losing all hope the sparrow was crying and an ant saw it. It asked the sparrow the reason for its sadness.....the sparrow explained. The ant took the initiative and went into the elephant’s trunk. The elephant said that it will have to drink the whole river only then the scratching might end. The river was petrified and said that it would rather extinguish the fire......and so on the trail went up to the woodcutter and he opened the crack ; finally the sparrow got its half-grain.

In this folklore, we observe that all the trouble was caused for nothing. The woodcutter would have easily opened the crack in the first place.....or if not him the king would have just scolded and ordered him to open it......but no one did his job correctly and finally a feeble and minute ant had to take the enterprise and help the sparrow get its part. Although this is a bedtime story told every alternate night by my Granma and might have no meaning for her but it contains a very significant message in the frame of today’s scenario.  The elephant here represents the red-tape, the sparrow- victim and the feeble and insignificant ant, overtook by pity for the sparrow’s heartache, took the initiative against a very “authoritative” elephant. The ant improved the way things were going and made sparrow’s work easy. The ant in a way here is representing the common man......who is very small in this red-tape world and is scared to heave its say. But he forgets the advantages of his minuteness.

This myth also tells us some other points worth noting like the emotional turn-on of the ant. The ant became emotionally attached with the sparrow and committed itself to bring justice to the ‘victim’. If it would not have done this emotionally it might have backed off due to the fear of the mighty elephant. The other thing is that this sentiment cropped up spontaneously. It didn’t need any external persuasion and the sparrow didn’t have to beg it for help. The ant came out on itself and changed the minds of all those who were certainly burly and brawny than it was and no one blamed it because no one was able to track it down. The same is the case with us people.

Now-a-days many of us are victims of the mechanics of the complicatedly knit red-tape and we are going on to be the sufferers if we don’t rise up. There is a possibility that the woodcutter, king, queen, snake et al had a syndicate of their own and had conspired against the petty sparrow. And we see that they succeeded in their task.....but had to finally give in to the determination of the ant. The chain of reformation which the ant had started continued up and up to the level of the king and even influenced him to kneel.

The ant here was just like a small point, an iota at the foot of a large pyramid. Our beauraucracy is constructed like a pyramid. At the base it is very vast and just like spotting an ant at a pyramid’s base could be a Herculean task by the same token tracking a common man at the clerical level could be difficult....that’s the advantage of minuteness I was talking about earlier. But all it takes is the ‘mettle to enkindle’. You have to take the risk on yourself to start this reformation and decontaminate the system. Although it was difficult for the colossal elephant to spot the tiny ant but the possibility of the elephant spotting the ant and crushing it, never dies. So if you rise, you’ve got to risk yourself. One more thing to be pointed out is that if in ant’s place there would have been some dog or tiger (symbolising some popular people in the system) the same would have been difficult.....because it would have been easier for the elephant to kill that dog and that tiger.

While in this fable we see that the sparrow had an easy access to the king, it is not the same these days. You must ‘know someone’ to approach the high levels unswervingly.....or you’ll just be stuck in the cobweb of the ‘babus’. This fact alone renders the story as theoretical, but the message is very clear and we should learn from it. The ant made the whole system going. So if the red-tape could work then why shouldn’t we take the enterprise? And not just one such sacrifice but we need many volunteers who are not afraid to be trampled beneath the elephant. I know its the ‘easier to say than do’ thing so I don’t put it as a mandatory thing; its not easy to play that ant; but you could at least compress your ‘ego’ the size of the ant instead of the elephant. The society might then be purged of all the ‘scum’ of the red-tape and system.

Science and Religion

Without Religion, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods. ~ W. H. Auden

Religion, if opposed by anything the most, is by science (that’s what we think). Science relies on thorough analysis, on speculation, on inspection. It believes on what you actually see and that can be proved by experimentation, logic and calculation. A scientist might never find a testimony of god in his laboratory. He is able to see the farthest star in the sky and the smallest atom but in all this material things will he see anything like God? Therefore, he very confidently rejects the presence of any such entity as God. Strong believers in science accept this inference without one iota of counter-argument. They forget that the scientist is also a human being and he is ordained to slip-ups. The rejection of great theories of Euclid and Newton are an evidence of the brittleness of our thinking and the constraints in our approach.

 

The conflict between science and religion has been centuries old. Science has always been one-eighty to religion. Science talks about benefits in the real world while religion talks about them in the abstract. The upshots of science are real and swift and science is so fascinating. Just evoke your experience when you’d first saw through a telescope lens or when you’d first played a video game….with these things in the first place who has got time think about some intangible thing or a spiritual miracle?

 

Two things are compared only when they are of same nature. But you might argue that how can we compare science and religion? But after weighing the pros and cons of the matter you will find that religion too is a kind of science!! The only difference lies in the fact that science’s inventions are perceptible externally and can be showed to everyone, you could inspect it whenever you want whereas religious inventions are internal and its you and only you who has who has to put all endeavors and experience it. No one else can make you feel it. No one can build feeling inside you unlike a scientific theory. A scientist is always eager to reveal his inventions to you which is quite analogous to the case with a spiritualist. Scientific theories are being made ad infinitum while destroying the older ones whereas religious theories have not changed one iota to what they were thousands of years ago. But the glitch is that the people want proofs for all that they see. You can’t use a microscope to view a distant star; similarly you can’t use a materialistic reason to speculate a spiritual certainty.

 

Nowadays you may find many people using religion for their own interest, but they are mere imposters and should not be trusted. On the contrary; fake coins only imply the presence of real ones. In this aspect science has helped religion very much by proving that these imposters are phony. Those shams had once reached the peak of the religions and had modified it (the Catholic Church’s saying that earth’s orbit is round and earth is the centre of the universe was completely to their aesthetic tastes; but when someone challenged their dogma, he was overpowered by them). For many years they misguided us. Take Hinduism, for instance….in Ramayana instead of paying attention that whether Ravana had ten heads or Hanuman’s tail was a mile long, we should focus on its aesthetic value and absorb the characters of Ram, Laxman and Sita.

Science has also helped religion in one more term…it has given us a temper to hypothesize and inspect. Certainly science is not an advisable vehicle in the road of spirituality; but nevertheless we can use it limitedly to inspect the legitimacy of a thing.

The disappointment of people from their spiritual leader arises when we start mulling him on a material balance. Jesus knew and taught about spiritual things; but this doesn’t mean that he knew about the movements of celestial bodies, about gravity.

 

Religion is said to have evolved due to dissatisfaction from materialism. If it is this then hasn’t science strengthened the notions of religion by unfolding the mysteries of this universe? Just envision the beauty of this universe!!! It all started from nothingness; a small point exploded with such intensity (Big Bang) that its reminiscent is continuing till now and will continue; light and its speed(299458792 miles a sec); the complex structure of universe(The Perfect Design); Island Universes; atom—so small!! Yet it can destroy a whole country. We know all this because of science and when we reflect upon it we certainly wanna know about its Creator. This “Perfect Design” happened, because it just happened or was their really a controlling force, some “Uncaused Cause”, some “Unmoved Mover”, something like God.

 

It is baseless to argue on their compatibility. None is opposing the other. Just like meditating will not give you the Fourier series; microscope and Bunsen burner will not prove religious theories. The urge to find God is fully based on individual forces and capacity; nothing external can influence it. Buddha understood God when he was away from materialism and then spread it to all. Science is busy solving the material problems of man whereas religion is busy with his spiritual ones. They might seem a one-eighty now but who knows they might seem same at some point of time (Atomic Theory: all matter is identical at the atomic level, no matter what it looks like to our eyes). They might converge and meet somewhere in time, if we keep on bickering we might have to confess that even though we have full knowledge about both but we are blank about its Creator.

Where are we going??

If we ask the people,” is the world growing irreligious??” They would immediately answer,” YES….the world is growing irreligious day by day.” Yes if we see the world today and speculate the pros and cons of every aspect of our lives we might start thinking that where is this world actually going?? If we consider the world wars and many other wars which caused widespread destruction and loss of human life who could say that we still are very religious in our actions and thinking.

But when we see the traditional religions we see that their condition is not better either.

The number of people going to the temples, churches is decreasing day by day. To attract more and more worshippers are taking the help of music and other things. They constantly shout that to save the mankind Jesus had let himself crucified at Golgotha…..but ridiculously mankind itself doesn’t want to be saved. Not only Christianity but al other religions are having a somewhat similar story. In India anyone who is well educated would never justify the various religious practices. Today if we go to a temple, instead of paying attention to its aesthetic and spiritual value we see and appreciate its architectural and historical value.

The revolt against religion is widespread today, and seeing this one sighs, “Where is his world going!!!” and the other says “yeh kaliyug hai….now the world has irreligious people….the world is bad now.” But I ask them that when do you think was the world good?? Do you think that world never before had such kind of people!!!?? We all know that if there was one Ram there was also a Ravana. It’s just that since we haven’t ever lived in that time we think it all to be good…..it’s human nature. We constantly strive for what we don’t have and once we get that we want more…..we are never satisfied with what we have and that is one reason we constantly criticize our present. The truth being that the conditions in the past were never better than ours. We all have read that in the past when the number of sinners was increasing GOD came down in some human form to put an end to it. Once Jesus came and made Christianity…after some years came Mohammed who made Islam (and then the two fought among themselves!!!). Every religion had some shortcomings which were further eliminated by some other great person through a revolution (The Christian inquisition…in which innumerable children and women were killed….who were more irreligious? The victims or the revolutionaries). When we see the practices like child marriage and sati etc. we see that the conditions then were not better.

If you ever notice the people rebelling against the changing culture of the people are old aged or middle aged ‘coz they don’t understand the requirements of people are changing with the changing world and hence their interests. Recently, a priest in some church of the U.S. had boldly said in his Sunday mass speech,” I hereby change all my old beliefs and form new ones in which there’s no place for God.” People want such thing that fulfills their requirements. Today the neglect of people towards religion is big evidence to the fact that it is not fulfilling their requirements.

If a religion is really required it will be found out by the people themselves even if it lies in the darkest corners of this universe. A religion needs no publicity. The people who are not orthodox followers of their religion are living a very better life as compared to the orthodox ones. They should understand that religion is not the bricks and cement of a worship place but it is the belief in the Almighty. If there is a god and he created us and the universe…..then just as he controls the universe He also knows how to control the human race and will take them on the way He wants to. As I have shown earlier that there is no base to the statement that the world is growing irreligious because we don’t know the conditions of our past (on the contrary they were much similar to what they are today).

Tides keep on coming and going, moon keeps on waxing and waning and in the same way time goes on and hence the human race…..you cannot stop it!! So let it go its own way and let it decide its path itself, even if it goes a wrong way, you should not try to stop it because its part of a bigger plan created by the Almighty….’coz ‘Maqtub’ (it’s all written).

Some quotes:

“Till every dog of my country is not hungry…my religion is to feed it”

-Swami Vivekananda

“A religion is a pathway for the spiritual upliftment of a person…..Hinduism being an exception”

-Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.