Tomorrow, if everything goes well, I will be home by this time. Bangalore is cold in the morning. I am thinking of wearing a sweater. But Kochi will be all nostalgic and christmassy with clear skies.
Swadeshi Freak: I am proud of belonging to the oldest surviving line of philosophers, mystics and poets. Does that make me a casteist?
Me: Yes, because you’re evincing pride in achievements you haven’t made, by people you had no way of influencing. You’ve done nothing to deserve the pride you feel. It’s this innate and undeserved feeling of superiority that makes you a casteist.
The question atheists & theists are trying to answer is: “Why there is something instead of nothing?”
Atheists like me like to believe that there is no need for a complex initial cause like a God or an intelligence to explain the amazing complexity & efficiency found in biology OR the fine-tuned nature of fundamental physical constants. We always delegate purpose & the “illusion of design” found in nature to much simpler causes like necessity (e.g. survival of the fittest) & chance. We believe this planet is just right for evolution of life because there are billions of planets and this planet just happens to be good enough for life. We also like to “believe” in string theory which explains that this universe is just right for life because it is one among many universes which is part of much larger multiverse. As of now we like to “believe” multiverse is the end of it all and there is no need of a multi- multiverse because … at higher dimensions like the 10th dimension everything has happened and everything will happen.. and we are just part one set of happenings. But we are always open minded on our beliefs and willing to continually change it.
We continually invoke the one-among-many and survival-of-fittest type arguments because we believe that will take us to the truth. And we are right because history has shown that scientific curiosity is good for the betterment of human lives.
But if you have noticed: We have not been able to explain why there is something (multiverse) instead of nothing. Neither can you.
We (theists & atheists alike) are all running for the same goal – the truth. But in the process of it none of us should resort to non- altruistic acts and destroy ourselves or the tranquility of our minds. I am sure both theists and atheists can agree on this. Nobody wants to die. Even (most) people who believe in a heaven don’t want to die to get there. Because in case you didn’t know life is the best things that happened to all of you
A bunch of (biased?) Italian researchers from Catholic University of Campobasso found out that moderate drinking may extend life. Their conclusion is based on pooled data from 34 large studies involving more than 1 million people and 94,000 deaths.
Correlation does not always imply causation. But usually it does. I for one, have found alcohol extremely effective against migraines. In fact, when I consume during the “peak pain” period the pain goes away and I find myself more productive than those times with no migraines.
I think most of the bad image for 10,000 year old recipes like beer and wine were made by hypocrites – Christian evangelists, Islamic fundamentalists & Gandhi.
Why do good things happen to bad people? Answer: That is because God is kind enough to let it happen. Besides, on the long run, they suffer for their sins too.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Answer: My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.” Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons (then are ye bastards, and not sons, KJV) (Heb.12:5-8)
I am going to rely on my talents, intelligence & mental acumen to do great things in life. Is that OK? Answer: No. Recently(August 14, 2005), holding his weekly general audience at the Vatican, the pope offered reflections on Psalm 131’s opening verses, which reject pride in one’s self-sufficiency: LORD, my heart is not proud; nor are my eyes haughty. I do not busy myself with great matters, with things too sublime for me.Rather, I have stilled my soul, hushed it like a weaned child. Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap, so is my soul within me. Israel, hope in the LORD, now and forever (Psalms Chapter 131). There are 100s of other verses that say that you should trust God to do things fo you and never rely on yourelf.
Should I take revenge when someone causes pain to me? Answer: No God will do it for you. You must love you enemies and let them slap on your other cheek, And eventually, the losers will be they themselves, because they will get fed up without seeing any reaction from you.
So what about those people who take a lot of pleasure in causing pain to me? Answer: I have been watching their lives for a long time and they seem to be OK… in fact they are having a better life than mine? God will punish them sooner or later, you shouldn’t keep waiting for that to happen.. You should forgive them and forget it. Besides, you suffer because of your sins and the sins of your ancestors… hey, you are a sinner remember?, you are worser sinner than they are, so it is obvious why you suffer more.
What about those friends of mine, who go to drink, smoke & flirt, why do they get better grades & scholarships and have a great life with a lot of friends than me? Why don’t I at least get those grades and scholarships? Answer: Actually, they just seem to be having a nice time. They suffer on the inside. Besides, God is the great checkbook balancer… He will let punishment on them. The last laugh will be yours. Besides, it is very hard to get god-fearing friends these days.. so it is better to be spend times of solitude in prayer. BTW, it seems you are not spending enough time in prayer, that is why you are having these thoughts. Why don’t you join the “Jesus Youth”?
There are at least 2 members from “Jesus Youth” that I know of who went cuckoo. Why should I risk loosing my sanity? Answer: Oh.. Satan tempts these people of God now and then. Some fall for his cheap tricks. If you think “Jesus Youth” is not good. Try joining “Ted Haggards” church.
But Ted Haggard was caught to be homosexual? Answer: Why don’t you join the Benny Hinn’s church then?
But Benny Hinn is being investigated by IRS for using non-taxable church money for buying a mansion, 2 royal cars and a lot of expensive clothes? Answer: Then there is always the 2000 year old “Big Church”.
Why is that, after 20 years as a true christian, I feel like a loser, with a lot of regret that I could have done better had I been a “sinner” like others? Trust me, you are not a loser. You will have the last laugh. Just pray, confess your sins and stay away from sin.
“Marriage is a big deal in India. One of my cousins back in India wasn’t allowed to marry because we hadn’t given the brides family enough cows! Not enough cows!! You see, in India it is a pick up line to go up to a girl in a bar and say, ‘[Indian accent]Hey, I got 5 cows out back that say you are coming home with me.’ “
“I love the reaction I get from people when they learn I am Indian. I go ‘I’m Indian.’ The other guy goes ‘Oh, Indian… I like curry.’ ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ Now non-Indian people think they know all about arranged marriages. ‘So I hear that when you’re born, the first thing your parents do is chose a nice girl for you to marry when you’re old enough.’ ‘No, No! It doesn’t work like that. Arranged marriages are more like going to a car show. Your dad lets you look at, and compare all the cars. ‘[Indian accent]Oh that one is nice. You would like that one, you like it? Ya, you are going to get that one.’ – ‘Don’t I get to test drive it?’ – ‘[Indian accent]No, not now, wait until you are married, then you can test drive it all you want.”
Dude… this guy is the coolest comedian HAHA!. But: too bad that he hates his dad for being so strict with him. Hmm..
[There is a strong pathological association of déjà vu with temporal lobe epilepsy. This correlation has led some researchers to speculate that the experience of déjà vu is possibly a neurological anomaly related to improper electrical discharge in the brain. As most people suffer a mild (i.e. non-pathological) epileptic episode regularly (e.g. the sudden "jolt", a hypnagogic jerk, that frequently occurs just prior to falling asleep), it is conjectured that a similar (mild) neurological aberration occurs in the experience of déjà vu, resulting in an erroneous sensation of memory.]
Sentience is perhaps the opposite of Déjà vu combined with “our” ability to sense the future using the prefrontal cortex which ultimately gives “us” the ability to feel the present, feel our existence. (It is interesting to note how the purpose of language breaks down here. There is no “me”, “I” … it is just an illusion created by the temporary constructs of “our” minds.)
In other words, the non-fallacious memory that “we were there” or “we have been through this” combined with the simulated feeling of “what it would be like if” gives us sentience. The more accurate those feelings are w.r.t the reality; i.e. the more similar the consciousness arrow of time is to the thermodynamic arrow of time, the more sentient we are.
From evolutionary point of view, a life-form with a consciousness arrow of time (i.e. a record of events that has happened and will happen) which is very similar to the thermodynamic arrow of time (i.e. events that really happened and will happen as the entropy increases); is the best thing that the environment would like to have because such an entity would not only preserve its existence but also the existence of the entire ecosystem.
Animals of today that has evolved through time has an excellent mechanisms to have non-fallacious memories but, if I paraphrase Daniel Gilbert right: Human beings are the one & only latest models of evolutionary improvement that are capable of planning and simulating the future because of our larger prefrontal cortex.
That makes us more sentient than Orangutans. But there is still a long way to go. Recent research conducted by Daniel Gilbert (a professor of psychology at Harvard) shows us that we are still terrible at predicting & planning. We are awful at predicting what will give us happiness. Do you expect that a new car or home will give you happiness? Certainly it will, just not as much as you expect. The same is true in the opposite. Do you think that getting rejected by your crush or losing a game will make you unhappy? It will, just not as much as you expect.
Today is my birthday. I like to think this is the only day that is worth celebrating because this is (incorrectly) the day on which I started to exist. I was lucky enough to have won the genetic lottery that made me a human.
But I ask myself, what is “I”? What is this sense of existence, that makes me want to think that it is something that is worth cherishing every year of my life? Why is it that I feel that there is a roll of film/canvas in me where the “now” gets imprinted continuously? Why do I feel that I am an observer who unaffected by the laws of the universe, looks into it, from outside? Why do I feel like a little God?
Whilst life has always been full of nightmares & irrevocable situations, I still like to think that it is the best thing that happened to me.
Recently, Greg Kroah-Hartman made a patch to the Linux kernel that made loading binary blobs impossible. And Linus made a cool remark that made Greg remove the patch.
Linus is a person with the right attitude. That is why I use Linux a lot. His remarks demonstrate how he is against mechanisms that enforce politics & policy. Of course, locks & logins screens are necessary, but they should protect the individual ambition of the consumer/user of the technology and not ambitions of a group of people (community/company) that made the technology. Greg’s patch is similar to DRM in that it takes away freedom of choice to adhere or to rebel, that the GPL promised to give the users in the first place.
For those of us, who thought science is all about believing a man in a wheel chair who keeps changing his theories; let me tell you this: what media has to say is not science; The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time. If it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes the problem controversial and attracts all the media attention. So the reporters show up, and hear the scientists speak fascinating words. The reporters are told that “particles” are “waves”, but there is no understanding of math for the words to invoke. What the physicist means by “wave” is not what the reporters hear, even if the physicist’s math applies also to the structure of water as it crashes on the shore.
Science is about evidence, not just one evidence, but tonnes of cross-linking evidence that asserts the existence of the same underlying truth. It continually improvises on the understanding of truth with no reliance on authority figure or text.[BTW although science does not rely on authority it does have its heroes whose beliefs (a.k.a theories) are more likely to considered for the investigation for an experimental evidence. e.g. Albert Einstein. But students who learn relativity today understand relativity better than Einstein did because of the evidence available. They don't refer back to the original works of Einstein in German, like theologians who read original Hebrew texts.] This form of continual improvisation where older theories are at times proved false, may lead some of us to question the need to believe in todays scientists.
I think it is time that we need a Believability Index edited by scientists around the world. It should work like the Rapture Index. It should be something like the following:
Should we believe in Big Bang? Yes. There is sufficient experimental evidence as of now that makes a Big Bang as plausible as the 3 laws of motion. Huge advances in Big Bang cosmology were made in the late 1990s and the early 21st century as a result of major advances in telescope technology in combination with large amounts of satellite data such as that from COBE, the Hubble Space Telescope and WMAP. Such data have allowed cosmologists to calculate many of the parameters of the Big Bang to a new level of precision and led to the unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating.
Based on measurements of the expansion of the universe using Type 1a supernovae, measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and measurements of the correlation function of galaxies, the universe has a calculated age of 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years. The agreement of these three independent measurements is considered strong evidence for the so-called ΛCDM model that describes the detailed nature of the contents of the universe.
Should we believe in Evolution? Yes. The most easiest and believable way to see evolution is understand the evidences for it in molecular genetics. The development of molecular genetics, and particularly of DNA sequencing, has allowed biologists to study the record of evolution left in organisms’ genetic structures. The degrees of similarity and difference in the DNA sequences of modern species allows geneticists to reconstruct their lineages. It is from DNA sequence comparisons that figures such as the 95% genotypic similarity between humans and chimpanzees are obtained. Genetic sequence evidence thus allows inference and quantification of genetic relatedness between humans and other apes. The sequence of the 16S rRNA gene, a vital gene encoding a part of the ribosome, was used to find the broad phylogenetic relationships between all extant life. The analysis, originally done by Carl Woese, resulted in the three-domain system, arguing for two major splits in the early evolution of life. The first split led to modern Bacteria and the subsequent split led to modern Archaea and Eukaryote.
Should we believe God? Please bear with this before the answer: Once we (Jews & Early Christians) believed that God is just above the place we now recognize as the ozone layer. Next, we placed the God out of the skies that covered the Earth… but the remaining believers believed that the then spherical Earth was still at center of the known universe; after all shouldn’t the cosmic stage of sin & salvation be center stage? Once that changed, the believers of today still believe in a God that exists outside the universe the physical constants of which sound miraculously just right for the evolution of intelligent life because the highly improbable conditions on Earth that lead to life, could in fact be highly probable because of the evidence of billions of planets in the universe of which, only those planets where the conditions are right are there people asking questions about it. But science does what it has always done; it continually downgrades the need for the influence of God; as a result of chaotic inflation theory of Andrei Linde, it is quite plausible (but not proved) that there exists a multiverse; and the physical of constants of this universe are nothing but one set of constants among the multitude of universes which just so happens to be right for life.
But even if Andrei Linde is proved right there will still be room for a God in our minds; a God that is “a Spirit that moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), a God that moved upon the face of the sea of universes in the multi-verse where he just happens to have created our universe in the salty multivers-ian higher dimensional froth.
The bottomline is, God is a vague concept which highly portable no matter what science proves to be true. In the words of Cardinal of Austria, Christoph Schönborn -
“Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of “chance and necessity” are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.”
The good news is that science has not yet disproved the existence of a God (who btw, may have gone through evolution & evolved himself from a cruder form). I don’t think science ever will because the truth is extremely complex for that kind of analysis. So it is still up to the personal choice of the individual whether to believe in a God.
I for one, can’t wait till we prove the existence of multiverse, and the existence of a multi-multi-verse because that is the way I am.
