An Athiest rant

My Logical/Scientific Issues with religion:

1) The total lack of evidence. There are many things in life that we choose to believe in, without evidence or supporting facts. For instance, when was the last time we called the local news station to ask them to prove that today there is a 60% chance of showers followed by clear skies in the evening? But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to support them. For example, if our friend came in from outside and told us that it is raining, for the most part, we would believe this person, because we know that rain happens all the time. But if that same friend came inside and told us that it is raining cats and dogs outside, we would of course either tell him to prove it, or go see for ourself, because that is not a normal occurrence. Conversely, when someone is trying to tell me that women were created by some deity pulling a rib bone out of a man's body, I feel strongly inclined to tell them to prove it.
The Bible makes MANY extraordinary claims, and offers not a shred of evidence to support them. Granted, there is no physical evidence out there that proves that there is no such thing as God, per se (and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying), but there is also none to prove that he does exist either.
Simply put, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

2) Reality works fine without deities or magic. Simply put, evolution and most of our models for the emergence of the universe itself work just fine without needing to introduce any gods or magic into it-- they explain the phenomena we witness and they explain all of the evidence. Evolution and the big bang should not conflict with religion (even though it does contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible), as even the Pope himself accepts it as fact, and a good portion of the folks out there studying evolution and the big bang are religious themselves.

My Ethical Issues with religion:

1) God's omnipotence vs mankind's free will. Religious will often tell us that God gave mankind the free-will to choose between sinning and not-sinning, so that the guilt is on us. That sounds nice and all, but lets think about this. God is supposed to be omnipotent (which includes omniscient), so he knows every decision and action we will make before he even created us-- he knows the past, present, and future. So why would he go ahead and create a living, thinking, feeling being, knowing that he would end up sending that being to an eternal BBQ to suffer unimaginably for all eternity? He has knowingly created evil (unless you are one of those special people who has no problem with an infinite punishment for finite crimes), and there is really no such thing as free will be this thinking. Or, is God not omnipotent, so that our decisions really are our own?

2) The moral ambiguity of the Bible/ Gita/ Quran. While most religious that I have met in my travels are some of the best folk out there, I believe it is because they have chosen to not interpret the Bible literally. In the Bible, we find a god who repetitively claims to be all-loving and merciful, yet he has a strange habit of destroying everything that doesn't work out the way he planned. This particular loving deity routinely orders his followers to commit genocide (ask the Canaanites and Amelykites) down to "the last suckling", condones slavery (so long as you only beat your slaves to the point of losing consciousness for no more than three days, following a beating), created a race of beings knowing that he would end up sending two thirds of them to suffer unimaginably for all eternity, destroyed a whole city because they didn't just choose to participate in missionary-only sex (the notion that a mean, lean, universe-creating god, would care that a bunch of ants on a backwater planet in a backwater galaxy in a backwater corner of the universe, are doing sexually, and would be willing to punish them for not having missionary sex, is not only unlikely, it is preposterous), and for some reason made the rules so that to forgive sins requires the sacrifice of innocent blood. The deity I just described, sounds a lot more like a tyrant than an all-loving creator.
The only way to avoid the realities of such a contradiction, most Christians today agree that parts of the Bible were intended to teach a lesson, not to be scientifically or logically plausible, so one must interpret some parts of the Bible figuratively. I agree, but that thinking brings me to my next point....

3) The total lack of a baseline or system of checks and balances. There are a large number of
separate denominations of religion, all with their own interpretations of the same scripture, and these denominations are themselves made up of individuals who also believe in their own personal version of God, meaning that there are almost as many versions of religion as there are believers.
Why would a God who had a definite and specific plan for his people allow them to splinter into so many different groups, most of them mutually exclusive? Who is to say which interpretation is more accurate? By what baseline can we measure the accuracy or validity of one's personal interpretation against all the other interpretations?
Without any kind of quantifying evidence or data, there really is no way of knowing who is right and who is wrong, because there is nothing to compare it to. In science, we can easily tell which theory or explanation is wrong, based on the evidence and whether that interpretation fits all the evidence, but religion has no such measuring stick, so to be perfectly logical, since we know that the Bible makes at least some claims which are contrary to reality, how can we place any trust in any of what it says? So much of the Bible has to be interpreted "figuratively" to make it still relevant, that it begs one to ask the next question:
At what point do we take the next step and just say, "Since so much of this book can't be taken at face value, and there is no way to validate any of its claims at all, why not just do away with it, because as a source of knowledge, the Bible is inconsistent, contradicts itself almost constantly, and there is no baseline by which to measure the accuracy of any of its claims"?
The lack of an appearance by God to rectify the path of his own religion strongly suggests to me that there is no God to worry about whether his religion has gone astray or not, due to human errors. If there was a God, he definitely would have intervened during some of religion’s most heinous atrocities, like the Inquisitions, the Crusades, and slavery in the American South (all of which were done in the name of God and supposedly with his endorsement), to tell his followers, "NO, you are hurting many people, what you are doing is evil, and you have it all wrong. Here's what I want from you from now on..."

As society and humanity continued to grow, and our technology gained more and more power to accurately describe the natural world, more and more of the Bible became at odds with what science had been discovering, and believers continue to be forced to revise their religious beliefs to meet reality half-way, cherry-picking out wholesale sections that are not to be interpreted literally, lest one find oneself believing in absurdities that clearly contradict reality.

Even today, religious beliefs continue to lose ground at every step. So far, science has disproved the geocentric universe, the great flood, a flat earth with a tent-like canopy over it and Shoal underneath the dish, and that people didn't live to be 900 years old in the Dark Ages.

At what point do you stop backpedaling in your beliefs and just decide, that since this religion thing seems to be wrong at almost every turn, and is obviously a product of the Bronze-Aged culture that produced it, why not just get rid of it altogether instead of hanging on to it like a drowning swimmer groping for any handhold he can find? When do we decide that this arcane set of primitive superstitions has no relevance to today's issues and that it has outlived its usefulness?

My anxiety was taking the better of me when I was walking home last midnight from the screening of Taare Zameen Pe (TZP). The movie hall is about a mile from my home and instead of driving and indulging in finding-a-parking-spot affair I decided to talk a walk.

It did help me clear my thoughts. Not completely because I am still undecided, still ambiguous. Uncertainty is a killer and it rips right through your heart. You live but you are not breathing. You think but you cannot decide. Should I let go or should I not? If I delve on the former my heart shrinks. I have gone too far. If I try to turn and trace my steps back I cannot because the tears blur my vision. I have devoted myself and it hurts to know the feeling not being reciprocated. Not even close. I contemplate what drives me there. I find no answer. I see the light at the end of the tunnel but it is that of an oncoming train.
And then I think whether I should not let go. Fight my way through the adversaries. But somewhere in the back of my mind I know I am fighting a lost battle. I will only be delaying the inevitable. The more I delay the more pain I will inflict upon myself.
I close my eyes every night thinking about the choice I have to make and I wake up every morning perplexed.

And while I started with TZP let me end with TZP. I believe it is a film well made. I seemed a stretch during times but the message was delivered loud and clear. Worth every penny.

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

The past few months have been the most exciting, well, zealous would the right word. There were few lessons learned. Expectations narrowed and horizons limited.

Let go of all the hopes that I have had so far. I realized that maybe I am just holding on to that chunk of sand and the tighter I hold onto it, the more faster it slips away. As much as I am reluctant, I would rather let go of the chase.

Life on the professional front has always been appealing for me. I still maintain that I am lucky enough to have a job for which I could have given an arm and a leg. Not exactly my dream job (a sports journalist) but I can for sure say that this job is close.
Ever since it was announced by our CEO that the company is on sale, we were no longer en masse. Feeling of loss of security crept in on many, including myself.
Now that we are no longer on sale, decided to remain independent all we can do is look back and laugh at ourself seeing how miserable we were during those times. Drinks and dinners are more fun.
I realized never to delve deep into the intricacies of the future.

I will be going home after 18 months. A part of me is glad at the idea of a much needed vacation. A part of me is anxious about the trip. Will this be one of those jaunts, at the end of which you wished you never should have started?

India the Superpower? Think again.

Plug in the words "India" and "superpower" into an Internet search engine and it's happy to oblige - with 1.3 million hits. I confess that I did not check each one, but I suspect that almost all of these entries date from the last couple of years.

This is understandable. For the first time ever, India has posted four straight years of 8 percent growth; since it cracked open its economy in 1991, it has averaged growth of 6 percent a year - not in the same league as China, but twice the derisory "Hindu rate of growth" that had marked the first 45 years of independence.

India has gone nuclear, and even gotten the United States to accept that status. Its movies are crossing over to become international hits. The recent $11.3 billion takeover of Corus by Mumbai based Tata steel was the biggest acquisition ever by an Indian firm.

No wonder the idea of India as the next superpower is fast becoming conventional wisdom. "Our Time is Now," asserts The Times of India. And in an October survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, Indians said they saw their country as the second most influential in the world.

Sorry: India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some statistics.

• 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
  The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
• Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
• The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
• About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India.
• More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
• India has more people with HIV than any other country.

You get the idea.

The 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India 126th out of 177 countries. India was only a few places ahead of rival Pakistan (134th) and hapless Cambodia (129) and behind such not-about-to-be-superpowers as Equatorial Guinea (120), and Tajikistan (122).

As these and other numbers suggest, Indian triumphalism (a notable 126,000 hits on Google) is not only premature, it is misguided. Yes, growth has been brisk, and of course growth is necessary to make a dent in poverty. But as Edward Luce, author of the excellent, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India," noted in a recent talk, poverty in India is not falling nearly as fast as its brisk rate of growth might anticipate.

The reason for this is that Indian growth has been capital-intensive, driven by the growth in high-value services such as IT. This is a good thing, but what it does not do is create stable and reasonably paid employment for not particularly skilled people - and this matters a lot, considering eight to 10 million Indians enter the labor force every year. Luce estimates that there are 7 million Indians working in the formal manufacturing sector in India - and 100 million in China.

To look at it another way, the 1 million Indians working in IT account for less than one-half of one percent of the entire working population. This helps build reserves (and national confidence, and tax revenues) but is not the poverty buster that labor-intensive development is. As Prime Minister Singh told Luce, "Our biggest single problem is the lack of jobs for ordinary people."

The problem with India's self-proclaimed (and wildly premature) declaration of superpower status is that it reflects a complacency about both its present - which for many people is dire - and its future. Eight percent growth for four years is wonderful, but as the saying goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And India is not doing what it needs to in order to sustain this momentum.

Consider the postwar history of East and Southeast Asia. The comparison is appropriate because India started at about the same point, and has watched just about every country in the region get ahead of it on the economic curve. All these places developed by being relatively open to trade; by investing in primary and secondary education; and by building pretty decent infrastructure (not only roads and ports, but health clinics and water supplies). India has begun to embrace one leg of this triangle - freer trade.

Even here, though, many of the worst features of the swadeshi ("self-reliance") era remain intact, including an unreformed state banking sector; labor regulations that actively discourage hiring; abstruse land laws (and consequent lack of land titles); misshapen subsidies that hurt the poor; and corruption that is broad, deep and ubiquitous. Nothing useful is being done about any of this.

As for the other two legs of this development triangle - education and infrastructure - these are still badly broken. About a third of teachers fail to show up on any given day (and, of course, are unsackable); the supply of both water and power is expensive and unreliable.
These facts of life too often go unremarked in the current euphoria about the state of the nation. "We no longer discuss the future of India," Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told the Financial Times in a typical comment. "The future is India."

Hubris, of course, is the stuff of politics everywhere. But the future will not belong to India unless it takes action to embrace it, and that means more than high-profile vanity projects like putting a man on the moon or building the world?s tallest tower. It means showing that the world's largest democracy can deliver real progress to the hundreds of millions who have never used the phone, much less the Internet. And in important ways, that just isn't happening.
India has many reasons to be proud, but considering it remains a world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV, its waxing self-satisfaction seems sadly beside the point.

-Cait Murphy, CNN Money - February 9, 2007.

Blogging, an art (?)

There you go. A new face to my blog. Change is good, change can be surprising. As I was altering my template, Arpz commented on this new look. She feels this one doesn't go with me. Maybe she is right. It might seem to have too much of a make-over, but I have tried to keep it simple. So Arpz, if you still think it doesn't go with my personality, I promise to write it on a notepad and drag that page onto here ;)

I don't exactly remember how and when did I start blogging. Interestingly, I don't even remember why. I do remember that my first blog was on rediff, the password of which I have absolutely no clue of, thus making it vanish into the world wide web.
I anchored my ship on blogger and since then I have come across numerous blogs. The experiences have been overwhelming. A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

There are writers who brace blog-o-sphere to vent out their frustration, to pen down the agony they face in their everyday life, so much so that they seem to think that they are the only one born on this earth with ill fortune. They practically have nothing to write. All they do is sit in front of their computer, split open their vein and type the self inflicted pain. Their blog will be filled with poetries and quotes obtained after typing a search, "Sad quotes" or "Sad poems" on Google. Ofcourse, while doing copy-paste of that stuff, we have Rajesh Khanna singing 'Zindagi Ka Safar' in the background.

Then there are people who just like talking to themselves. I mean, they write in a language which only they can understand. There are two windows open. One of them shows blogger, the other dictionary.com or thesaurus.com. The role of such writers is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. All the sentences have to be in passive voice.
"I woke up this morning and looked out of my window. It was a dull day, with snow coming down and streets frozen with ice".
Would become.......
"I bestirred this Ante Meridiem (AM), ogling out the pane. Arctic byways and glaciating rain spawned an addled time".

Some writers are good with words. But the presentation takes a hike. I might not know about the cool features other blogging websites provide, but blogger does seem to be generous in this aspect. The colors are yours for the taking and hence the combinations end up getting jacked-up. There are blogs with dark backgrounds, something like brown or navy blue, and the font is dark green. What are you guys? Jeetendra?
Then there are blogs with a dark blue background, the writing ending up in florescent colors. I read such blogs and look away from my computer and I see dark spots.
Some blogs are multicolored. Kudos to them but a big no-no to the sense of colors. You have purple, green, orange, pink (uff!), all sloshed together to create the world's worst potpourri ever.

For a blogger, writing is not an art. It is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Most of us blog to lay the building block of our writing career. For some it is an hobby. For some it becomes a process of discovery that they couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.

The beauty of reading a blog is in knowing about the person without talking to him. When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

Disclaimer: The blog examples written are entirely coincidental if you happen to be one of those.