Godly E-mails

Among the many e-mail forwards one gets, there are many celebrating the greatness of god. I treat them as propaganda material. Atheists of all hues and intensities are often asked, "why don't you keep your ideas to yourself? Why do you impose your ideas on others?" But the question does not seem to apply to the mails referred above. No, I am not cribbing. I am amused and am stating a fact.

One such questioner asked the question of Richard Dawkins about his book "The God Delusion" after having bought the book and read it!

My reaction to such mails varies from quick read > delete to pointing out a fallacy in it, as gently as I can to an angry cutting retort.

The last mail I got was actually a good joke. It ran something like this. An atheist is walking in the woods and enjoying the beauty of nature. A bear attacks him and he tries to run but falls. As he is about to be bitten by the bear, he exclaims "Oh my god!". Time stands still and god appears and challenges him. "When you are in deep danger you want to cry for my help having denied my existence all the while?"

The atheist thinks a while and asks god to make the bear a Christian. Hey presto, the bear christian.

The bear starts, "Bless this food which I am about to partake..."

Now, that is very unfair of god, don't you think? He would have really known what the atheist meant. God let a christian become a man eater? Did he do that to teach a lesson to an atheist and was sure that other christians would not be watching?

This is why Richard Dawkins says, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

In this case, I replied to the mail, pointing out that someone calls him "a capriciously malevolent bully” for exactly these kinds of actions.

Now, people who know what religion I was born into may still think that I am targetting another religion. So, let me cushion that with another anecdote.

A friend of my father was invited to a "satyanaaraayana pUje". The myth around this pUje is that you do not even need an invitation to attend. If you come to know that the pUje is happening someplace you must attend. Otherwise the particular god would be angry and do unspeakable things. A part of the rituals is the telling of stories about this god who punished those who were not true to him or broke promises made to him.

When invited, the man said, "I do not want to attend the pUje and listen to the stories about that cruel, vindictive god. I will attend the lunch that follows, though, since I have no quarrels with that!" and did exactly that.

This man, to the best of my knowledge, cannot be classified an atheist. If he believes in any god at all, he expects him to be above such petty vindictiveness and cruelty. If god be like the local loan shark who wreaks havoc with a borrower that does not return a loan, why have gods at all?

Has Darwin Failed?

This year is a year for a double celebration - in science.

• 150 years since Charles Darwin published his "The Origin of Species"

• 400 years since Galileo turned his telescope towards the skies and changed man's concept of the world and himself.

Both brought man down from the pedestal he had placed himself on. There are debates about who did more in that direction. Galileo showed that we are not the centre of the Universe and Darwin showed that god did not create man after his own image.

In honour of these two events, there are many interesting articles in the press. I came across one of them and decided to translate it for myself. I did and here it is for your reading pleasure - hopefully.

The Original German Article from Spiegel Online: Ist Darwin Gescheitert?

My liberal translation of it: Has Darwin Failed?

Pragmatism

I was reminded of
Cromwell's admonition
To his troops,
"Put your trust in god,
But, keep the powder dry",
When I saw
The three spikes
Of a lightning arrestor
Atop the tall tower
Of a house worship

Topsy Turvy

I got the following story by mail. I have made some small changes , for instance, removing the capitals from words like church and bar!

In a small town in America, a man decided to open a bar right opposite a church. The church and its congregation started a campaign to block the bar from opening, with petitions and prayed daily against his business.

Work progressed, nevertheless. However, when it was almost complete and about to open in a few days, a bolt of lightning struck the bar and it was burnt to ground.

The church folk were rather smug after that, until the bar owner sued the church authorities for $10 million on the grounds that the church, through its congregation &and prayers, was responsible for the destruction of his bar, either through direct or indirect actions or means.

In its reply to the court, the church vehemently denied all responsibility and any connection between their prayers and the bar's fate. In support of their claim they referred to the Benson Study at Harvard that intercessionery prayer had no impact!

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented: "I don't know how I am going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, that we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire church and its devotees that doesn't!"

This made me curious and I looked for references to the Benson study and found some contradictory web sites and also a post by "Stimulus" with the same story!

This story reminds me of a quote of Osho - "Acharya" Rajaneesh. - only the priest knows that there is no god!

Another friend tells me a story about a begger finding that the habitués of taverns are more munificent than the people coming out of places of worship! I will get that story from him again and post that too - later.

Einstein and Religion III

After I wrote Einsten and Religion I wrote Einstein and Religion II. Recently there was a report on the auctioning of Einstein's letter to Gutkind in which he expresses more clearly what he felt about the subject. Here is an abridged version of the letter.

Einstein has expressed himself far more unambiguously here.

People on both sides of the religious fence seem to cite Einstein's apparently contradictory expressions in support of their arguments.

Both seem to be saying 'the great Einstein himself has said...' .

It is a fundamental tenet of scientific method that who has supported a certain theory has no bearing on the 'correctness' or otherwise of it. Applying this principle, what Einstein has said about religion or god is no conclusive evidence.

Einstein famously said, "god does not play dice". Niels Bohr is supposed to have retorted that Einstein should not tell god what he should or should not do. In the end, it turned out that god indeed played dice at least in the context of Quantum Mechanics. So much for Einstein's opinion on the subject.