Of late, I have been listening to some national anthems on youtube. I never listened to many before, but internet is a good tool to dig them out and one can listen to them and understand the depth of lyrics and music. All national anthems are very intriguing and thought provoking.
Some show the struggles of their people, their hopes, their aspirations, their tears and suffering and all the unsurmountable odds their people had to overcome to build their nations. Some represent revolution, some represent a long standing spiritual quest to lead their people to enlightenment, while others represent the beauty of their land. Anthems that represent the beauty of the land are very thought provoking as they subtly tell you that what these people are singing is infact about the earth and not just a country, listen carefully and understand, these anthems gently nudge you to the thought of a global union, even though they were not meant to be so by their creators.
Here are some of the anthems that keep inspiring me.
The Polish anthem......this anthem is one of those that directly show the struggles Poles have gone through, over the centuries and their unwavering will to save the nation. This anthem reminds Poles of their violent and turbulent past, being at the cross roads of Eastern and Western Europe. These words show some poignant memories of Poles:
"Poland has not perished yet
So long as we still live
What foreign force has taken from us
We shall take back with the sword...............
Father, in tears
Says to his Basia
Just listen, it seems that our people
Are beating the drums
March, march"
The Indian anthem...this is a unique anthem(anthem of my nation) which reminds the spiritual quest of Indians over the millenia, the lyrics that truly represent the soul of India. This anthem directly praises God and asks Him to lead and unite the people and mould their destinies. Some words from the anthem:
"Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people,
Dispenser of India's destiny.........
They pray for thy blessings and sing thy praise.
The saving of all people waits in thy hand,
Thou dispenser of India's destiny.
Victory, victory, victory to thee"
The Finnish anthem......this anthem sings about the beauty of Finland and urges it's people to love and cherish and strive for it's glory. Here are parts of the lyric:
"No mount that meets the heaven's band,
No hidden vale, no waterwashed strand,
Is loved as our native North, our own forefathers' earth"
This is the kind of anthem that is most thought provoking, it is because, these anthems though not really intended, sing about the beauty of not just one country but the whole earth. There would be no one who would be awestruck after witnessing such beauty and not love it, not just the people living there.
Our collective acions globally are changing the planet, and only collective action can save it. This kind of anthems make me long for a global union, where everybody is equal and everybody is the child of this beautiful and only home we have.
The anthem of erstwhile USSR.....this one has long inspired me, it packs a force, in that it refelcts the thought of a nation born out of one of the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind. Here are parts of the lyric:
"In the victory of the immortal ideas of Communism
We see the future of our country,
And to the Red banner of our glorious Fatherland
We shall always be selflessly true."
Communism is more or less dead as the mainstay of political ideology of many nations. But it represents one extreme of human socio-economic thought, the other being capitalism. Both are almost the same end of extreme at their individual extreme selves, in that both are anarchist and chaotic.
I haven't listened to all the anthems, but as I uncover each one of them, each is a treasure in itself representing human thought, I love each one of them. These anthems should have also been on the list of cargo on Voyager1 spacecraft with intensions to showcase earth to a possible intelligent alien who might pick it up.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Should God Take Center Stage In Our Lives ?
The question seems really irrelevant to a lot of people, it seems superstitious and something out of the fantasies!! Yes, there are a lot of people I've come across who ask this question and this irrelevance seems more relevant to an increasing number of people these days.
I was reading this really complex book "Can Man Live Without God?' by Ravi Zacharias, which is kind of an answer to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical expression "God Is Dead!" I too have been forced to think about the same question. Should an entity so fanciful, an entity that never really manifests itself in the physical world we see, the many reasons given for why the entity never manifests itself, all the unkindness in the world only seem to intensify the argument against why God has to take center stage in anyone's life.
But here is one question, attempts to find answers to which, really changes the perception of God's role in our lives. The question goes thus...."What is the meaning of all our struggle?" Is it just to stay alive another day so that we can make another generation of human beings? And for what? Why do we even need to care about another generation of human beings? What would they do? When they are just another whimsy flick of evolutionary process, why do we really need to care about them?
The cosmos is so expansive that our planet and even our galaxy are mere specks of dust in this universe. So, does it really matter that we keep struggling to continue our generation on this despicable little speck, that can at any moment be erased?
All these are dangerous ideas but really make sense when there seems to be no sense around our existence and purpose, wait a second, what's that word 'purpose'? There even doesn't seem a meaning to that word and it seems equally fanciful like the word God.
The moment God is taken out of the equation, there isn't any meaning to what we do. There is no reason to show any kindness to the person next to you, there isn't any reason to show the same to your own self. The world we see could just be erased like scribbles on a slate and all suffering would end. This is the greatest question that Nietzsche faced after his triumphal declaration that God is dead. How could someone make sense to all that's happening around? Without a purpose behind all this, all this doesn't make sense at all. 'Purpose' is a very important word, the very word that drew men throughout the ages to get closer to the entity that made us. The only reason why millions of suffering people are still alive is the hope that there is a higher power to redeem them one day from all suffering, and that there is a grand machine in motion, one of the cogs of which is suffering and that there is a meaning to all that's happening. There is an old saying which goes thus........."we understand the importance of something only when it's place is void". The importance of the entity called God also seems evident only when we see the world taking Him out of the equation. Only when God is brought into picture do things start to make sense.
Here is one intriguing fact about atheistically oriented scientific research...the theory of evolution which sparked the idea that there isn't anything of a supernatural force, while being advanced to explain human behavior came to this important question of why humans have traits like sympathy, kindness and a willingness to give up once life for the love of another. What role do these traits have in increasing the odds that humans survive natural selection? An attempt was made by evolutionary biologist George R. Price, who devised the mathematical theory of altruism which made attempts at explaining why organisms show kindness to fellow organisms. But theories couldn't fully explain the real magnitude of kindness that people are capable of. Price, finally unable to bear the brunt of his ideas and the in-congruence they had with the real world, converted to being a New Testament follower and committed suicide, being depressed of not being able to help others enough through his works.
The purpose of our lives and the meaning of all the struggles that we go through only make sense when God is brought into the equation. The reason for having God in our lives only seems important when we understand the dangerous void that would be there without Him. After I have come to understand the void and desperate feelings, I've only come to understand that the most important work of our life to seek God, because, without Him nothing makes sense.
I was reading this really complex book "Can Man Live Without God?' by Ravi Zacharias, which is kind of an answer to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical expression "God Is Dead!" I too have been forced to think about the same question. Should an entity so fanciful, an entity that never really manifests itself in the physical world we see, the many reasons given for why the entity never manifests itself, all the unkindness in the world only seem to intensify the argument against why God has to take center stage in anyone's life.
But here is one question, attempts to find answers to which, really changes the perception of God's role in our lives. The question goes thus...."What is the meaning of all our struggle?" Is it just to stay alive another day so that we can make another generation of human beings? And for what? Why do we even need to care about another generation of human beings? What would they do? When they are just another whimsy flick of evolutionary process, why do we really need to care about them?
The cosmos is so expansive that our planet and even our galaxy are mere specks of dust in this universe. So, does it really matter that we keep struggling to continue our generation on this despicable little speck, that can at any moment be erased?
All these are dangerous ideas but really make sense when there seems to be no sense around our existence and purpose, wait a second, what's that word 'purpose'? There even doesn't seem a meaning to that word and it seems equally fanciful like the word God.
The moment God is taken out of the equation, there isn't any meaning to what we do. There is no reason to show any kindness to the person next to you, there isn't any reason to show the same to your own self. The world we see could just be erased like scribbles on a slate and all suffering would end. This is the greatest question that Nietzsche faced after his triumphal declaration that God is dead. How could someone make sense to all that's happening around? Without a purpose behind all this, all this doesn't make sense at all. 'Purpose' is a very important word, the very word that drew men throughout the ages to get closer to the entity that made us. The only reason why millions of suffering people are still alive is the hope that there is a higher power to redeem them one day from all suffering, and that there is a grand machine in motion, one of the cogs of which is suffering and that there is a meaning to all that's happening. There is an old saying which goes thus........."we understand the importance of something only when it's place is void". The importance of the entity called God also seems evident only when we see the world taking Him out of the equation. Only when God is brought into picture do things start to make sense.
Here is one intriguing fact about atheistically oriented scientific research...the theory of evolution which sparked the idea that there isn't anything of a supernatural force, while being advanced to explain human behavior came to this important question of why humans have traits like sympathy, kindness and a willingness to give up once life for the love of another. What role do these traits have in increasing the odds that humans survive natural selection? An attempt was made by evolutionary biologist George R. Price, who devised the mathematical theory of altruism which made attempts at explaining why organisms show kindness to fellow organisms. But theories couldn't fully explain the real magnitude of kindness that people are capable of. Price, finally unable to bear the brunt of his ideas and the in-congruence they had with the real world, converted to being a New Testament follower and committed suicide, being depressed of not being able to help others enough through his works.
The purpose of our lives and the meaning of all the struggles that we go through only make sense when God is brought into the equation. The reason for having God in our lives only seems important when we understand the dangerous void that would be there without Him. After I have come to understand the void and desperate feelings, I've only come to understand that the most important work of our life to seek God, because, without Him nothing makes sense.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Did God Curse Us?
This post is about something disturbing I have come to think about for some time now. Incidentally this came up for discussion in my own home, my mom and dad asked me the same thing during the same day.
I have been troubled for sometime about the question of whether God actually blessed human kind or He subtly cursed us when He said........."Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
To understand my predicament, one should first come to know why the above words from God actually could be a curse as well. Human population, globally, has swelled to it's greatest. All that was said in those words from the Bible has come true. Humans are now truly spread around the globe, people are now able to see what is there around the world, people are able to travel, people have conquered most of the terrible diseases and can be seen in every nook and cranny on the face of the planet.
So, where is the curse? It's surprising if we haven't felt it so far, and the fact is most people are still oblivious to it. It is said that a frog in a jar of water wouldn't know if the temperature is steadily raised and would eventually die in the jar instead of jumping out of it. The same is true of us at the moment. We have conquered the globe, but we have also started to put enormous pressure on it's limited resources. There simply isn't enough for all of our collective greed, if every country in the world desires to reach the benchmark of development now seen in North America and Europe, we would simply extinguish all resources on the planet and would force extinction upon us.
According to some estimates, the current rate of growth of global temperatures is to make most of earth unlivable by 2050, we would start to witness severe food shortages by 2020 and so on. Current estimates by some scientists show that if everyone in the world is to live like Indians do, earth can support 15 billion people, like Rwandans, upto 18 billion and like people in the US, not more than 1.5 billion. With India and China racing to reach living standards in US and Europe, we would soon start choking on ourselves. As if this is not enough there is a lot of research still going on to increase longevity of people. So, if the impending doom of the curse is still not evident, it does put a serious question upon our mental faculties. On a lighter note, if you had noticed those famous words from Bible, they don't say anything about us colonizing the outer space, they only say that we fill this planet of ours'.
So, is this truly a curse? Is God such a cruel guy to have cursed us at the same time that He so dearly blessed us? Was He shortsighted when He blessed humanity? I don't think so, He blessed us, gave us intelligence above every other creature and from time to time He has taught us to think out of the box. If you notice carefully, just at the time we began developing cures to deadly medicines, just as we began increasing agricultural output and just as human population began to explode exponentially........we also found ways of controlling birth rates, which starkly, are being ignored even now. Well, some ignore it because they are drowned in religious dogma, some because they don't have access to contraception and some because they keep waiting for children of either sexes and many more reasons.
When I look around, it is ridiculous to notice that even during 80s and 90s there have been a lot of people who had more than two children per couple. It is even more ridiculous to notice that many of these are educated people. I have personally come across people hanging on to skewed religious doctrines leading to uncontrolled births. Gifts are to be kept dearly, not spoiled and Earth is the only thing of it's kind gifted to mankind. I'm personally against abortion, but methods to avoid pregnancy neither break nor bend any rules. It is time we thought out of the box, Jesus himself taught this when He asked only the person who never sinned to stone the prostitute!! God truly gave us the choices to make and the roads to take, amazingly He did give us ways to control our population just at the time it really began to explode, don't you see that He hasn't really cursed us? It is our narrow thoughts that have the potential to turn it into a curse. This reminds me of a dialogue from an eminent movie "at the precipice we evolve and change", I sincerely hope that we change before it is not too late for us to notice that we have already slipped beyond the point of no return.
Here is where some content in this article has been picked up from and believe me, it is truly scarier than most horror films:
I have been troubled for sometime about the question of whether God actually blessed human kind or He subtly cursed us when He said........."Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
To understand my predicament, one should first come to know why the above words from God actually could be a curse as well. Human population, globally, has swelled to it's greatest. All that was said in those words from the Bible has come true. Humans are now truly spread around the globe, people are now able to see what is there around the world, people are able to travel, people have conquered most of the terrible diseases and can be seen in every nook and cranny on the face of the planet.
So, where is the curse? It's surprising if we haven't felt it so far, and the fact is most people are still oblivious to it. It is said that a frog in a jar of water wouldn't know if the temperature is steadily raised and would eventually die in the jar instead of jumping out of it. The same is true of us at the moment. We have conquered the globe, but we have also started to put enormous pressure on it's limited resources. There simply isn't enough for all of our collective greed, if every country in the world desires to reach the benchmark of development now seen in North America and Europe, we would simply extinguish all resources on the planet and would force extinction upon us.
According to some estimates, the current rate of growth of global temperatures is to make most of earth unlivable by 2050, we would start to witness severe food shortages by 2020 and so on. Current estimates by some scientists show that if everyone in the world is to live like Indians do, earth can support 15 billion people, like Rwandans, upto 18 billion and like people in the US, not more than 1.5 billion. With India and China racing to reach living standards in US and Europe, we would soon start choking on ourselves. As if this is not enough there is a lot of research still going on to increase longevity of people. So, if the impending doom of the curse is still not evident, it does put a serious question upon our mental faculties. On a lighter note, if you had noticed those famous words from Bible, they don't say anything about us colonizing the outer space, they only say that we fill this planet of ours'.
So, is this truly a curse? Is God such a cruel guy to have cursed us at the same time that He so dearly blessed us? Was He shortsighted when He blessed humanity? I don't think so, He blessed us, gave us intelligence above every other creature and from time to time He has taught us to think out of the box. If you notice carefully, just at the time we began developing cures to deadly medicines, just as we began increasing agricultural output and just as human population began to explode exponentially........we also found ways of controlling birth rates, which starkly, are being ignored even now. Well, some ignore it because they are drowned in religious dogma, some because they don't have access to contraception and some because they keep waiting for children of either sexes and many more reasons.
When I look around, it is ridiculous to notice that even during 80s and 90s there have been a lot of people who had more than two children per couple. It is even more ridiculous to notice that many of these are educated people. I have personally come across people hanging on to skewed religious doctrines leading to uncontrolled births. Gifts are to be kept dearly, not spoiled and Earth is the only thing of it's kind gifted to mankind. I'm personally against abortion, but methods to avoid pregnancy neither break nor bend any rules. It is time we thought out of the box, Jesus himself taught this when He asked only the person who never sinned to stone the prostitute!! God truly gave us the choices to make and the roads to take, amazingly He did give us ways to control our population just at the time it really began to explode, don't you see that He hasn't really cursed us? It is our narrow thoughts that have the potential to turn it into a curse. This reminds me of a dialogue from an eminent movie "at the precipice we evolve and change", I sincerely hope that we change before it is not too late for us to notice that we have already slipped beyond the point of no return.
Here is where some content in this article has been picked up from and believe me, it is truly scarier than most horror films:
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Do Other Worlds and God exist?
For ages, for as long as we know we existed, we have believed that there are worlds beyond our comprehension and there are beings who move across those inexplicable realms and back and forth between our and their worlds. We have been told of these entities, we were told to respect some and fear others. We were also told that there is one being above every other being from whom permeate all things, both comprehensible and incomprehensible. We named this ultimate of all beings, God. This being, God, and every other being of the other realms has caught our imagination for long. Human beings made war and peace in these beings' name.
Along the course of history there have been very few people who questioned the veracity of these beings, laws of our society are thought to have been created and passed down by these beings. All this went along until the dawn of reasoning in Europe in the middle ages. People started seeking explanations to everything they saw around, this was good as it started providing solutions to many problems that were hitherto thought to be insurmountable. As more problems were being solved, people began questioning more and more things which ultimately also lead to the questioning of alternate worlds and gods. Finally, the idea that there exists anything beyond what our senses can perceive was dropped and became a blasphemy to be talked about in educational institutions.
This perception is once again being challenged because of events that we are coming across in scientifically sound areas of research, being carried out by some very credible scientists.
There are unanswerable questions that have sprung up as a result of this research. The two most interesting areas where the most difficult questions or theories have sprung up are research about Near Death Experiences (NDE) and computer simulation.
Computer simulation sounds like a very unlikely candidate that might have implications towards the propositions for a creator. But it really is, it perhaps is the only theory that inadvertently proposes that there is intelligence at work behind everything we see. The theory has been made quite famous by the movies 'The Thirteenth Floor' and 'Matrix Trilogy'. The theory goes like this......if our computing power increases exponentially like the way it is today, we will eventually reach a point where we will be able to simulate instances of the real things happening around us, and further on, we may even run the entire universe as a simulation inside a large computer.
This is no mean joke! it is a current phenomenon, we today have such immense computing power that we can simulate climatic conditions with millions of parameters only thought of in science fiction a few decades ago. We certainly will reach a point in time where we would be able to create thinking entities inside computers and randomize their thought process to finally create a simulation that would spawn real instances and real scenarios that spring up while cognizant entities interact with one another. From this prospect arises a proposition........the world we see today could actually be a simulation inside a super colossal computer whose program has been pieced together by a single or multiple intelligent entities!! This theory does inadvertently point to the possibility of intelligent creation.
The other kind of research that also points to a creator and other forms of alternate worlds is the research into Near Death Experiences. NDEs are the most intriguing phenomenon ever to have been witnesses by human beings. NDEs were being reported by a lot of people since time immemorial but only in recent decades have caught the eyes of scientific researchers. They started being discussed in scientific circles after we had improved methods of resuscitating patients from failures related to heart and various other organs in the body.
Let me explain NDEs a bit, these are reported by people who are on the brink of death. It is to be noted that the definition of death is open to debate as we keep mastering various techniques of increasing people's lives and improve various medical treatments to conditions that were previously thought to be fatal. Some people who are on the brink of death report that they have left their bodies, seen what was happening around them, felt going through a tunnel towards a light, felt overwhelming peace, seen their entire lives roll before them in a jiffy, and most importantly.....met a being of light whose presence itself creates overwhelming joy and peace. People who come back to life post this experience, experience a change in perception towards life and other people around.
NDEs have been most extensively studied by the Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim Van Lommel. Van Lommel reports that NDEs were reported by people who were clinically dead with no brain activity whatsoever and heart activity as well. It is reported that people blind from birth were able to see what happened to them on operation tables when they could never have imagined what real world objects look like to the eye.
This is overwhelming evidence to the fact that consciousness exists outside of the brain and independent of it and that it continues it's existence post death. Classical theories about consciousness stipulate that consciousness is a by-product of the brain function and that consciousness would cease to exist after death.
These things discussed so far unequivocally point to the fact that there are things beyond out materialistic comprehension, there are things that can only be explained if we break the barrier of materialism imposed upon us for the past couple of centuries.
Finally an instance from a controversial documentary by Ben Stein, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"....Richard Dawkins, probably the most ardent atheist and rationalist of our times goes on to say in the interview to Ben Stein that life on earth could have been planted here by some higher form of intelligent beings, who themselves would have been brought into existence by some explicable process, inturn again, by some other form of intelligence!! . But Richards Dawkins refuses to call the intelligence 'GOD'. This leaves a lot of room for thought, only thing needed is a will to step out of the horizontal and think vertical as has always been urged by the most illuminated minds in human history.
Some content that inspired this article:
Dr. Pim Van Lommel's articles:
http://www.towardthelight.org/pimvanlommel.html
A compelling documentary about NDEs:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/day-i-died/
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/expelled-no-intelligence-allowed/
Along the course of history there have been very few people who questioned the veracity of these beings, laws of our society are thought to have been created and passed down by these beings. All this went along until the dawn of reasoning in Europe in the middle ages. People started seeking explanations to everything they saw around, this was good as it started providing solutions to many problems that were hitherto thought to be insurmountable. As more problems were being solved, people began questioning more and more things which ultimately also lead to the questioning of alternate worlds and gods. Finally, the idea that there exists anything beyond what our senses can perceive was dropped and became a blasphemy to be talked about in educational institutions.
This perception is once again being challenged because of events that we are coming across in scientifically sound areas of research, being carried out by some very credible scientists.
There are unanswerable questions that have sprung up as a result of this research. The two most interesting areas where the most difficult questions or theories have sprung up are research about Near Death Experiences (NDE) and computer simulation.
Computer simulation sounds like a very unlikely candidate that might have implications towards the propositions for a creator. But it really is, it perhaps is the only theory that inadvertently proposes that there is intelligence at work behind everything we see. The theory has been made quite famous by the movies 'The Thirteenth Floor' and 'Matrix Trilogy'. The theory goes like this......if our computing power increases exponentially like the way it is today, we will eventually reach a point where we will be able to simulate instances of the real things happening around us, and further on, we may even run the entire universe as a simulation inside a large computer.
This is no mean joke! it is a current phenomenon, we today have such immense computing power that we can simulate climatic conditions with millions of parameters only thought of in science fiction a few decades ago. We certainly will reach a point in time where we would be able to create thinking entities inside computers and randomize their thought process to finally create a simulation that would spawn real instances and real scenarios that spring up while cognizant entities interact with one another. From this prospect arises a proposition........the world we see today could actually be a simulation inside a super colossal computer whose program has been pieced together by a single or multiple intelligent entities!! This theory does inadvertently point to the possibility of intelligent creation.
The other kind of research that also points to a creator and other forms of alternate worlds is the research into Near Death Experiences. NDEs are the most intriguing phenomenon ever to have been witnesses by human beings. NDEs were being reported by a lot of people since time immemorial but only in recent decades have caught the eyes of scientific researchers. They started being discussed in scientific circles after we had improved methods of resuscitating patients from failures related to heart and various other organs in the body.
Let me explain NDEs a bit, these are reported by people who are on the brink of death. It is to be noted that the definition of death is open to debate as we keep mastering various techniques of increasing people's lives and improve various medical treatments to conditions that were previously thought to be fatal. Some people who are on the brink of death report that they have left their bodies, seen what was happening around them, felt going through a tunnel towards a light, felt overwhelming peace, seen their entire lives roll before them in a jiffy, and most importantly.....met a being of light whose presence itself creates overwhelming joy and peace. People who come back to life post this experience, experience a change in perception towards life and other people around.
NDEs have been most extensively studied by the Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim Van Lommel. Van Lommel reports that NDEs were reported by people who were clinically dead with no brain activity whatsoever and heart activity as well. It is reported that people blind from birth were able to see what happened to them on operation tables when they could never have imagined what real world objects look like to the eye.
This is overwhelming evidence to the fact that consciousness exists outside of the brain and independent of it and that it continues it's existence post death. Classical theories about consciousness stipulate that consciousness is a by-product of the brain function and that consciousness would cease to exist after death.
These things discussed so far unequivocally point to the fact that there are things beyond out materialistic comprehension, there are things that can only be explained if we break the barrier of materialism imposed upon us for the past couple of centuries.
Finally an instance from a controversial documentary by Ben Stein, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"....Richard Dawkins, probably the most ardent atheist and rationalist of our times goes on to say in the interview to Ben Stein that life on earth could have been planted here by some higher form of intelligent beings, who themselves would have been brought into existence by some explicable process, inturn again, by some other form of intelligence!! . But Richards Dawkins refuses to call the intelligence 'GOD'. This leaves a lot of room for thought, only thing needed is a will to step out of the horizontal and think vertical as has always been urged by the most illuminated minds in human history.
Some content that inspired this article:
Dr. Pim Van Lommel's articles:
http://www.towardthelight.org/pimvanlommel.html
A compelling documentary about NDEs:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/day-i-died/
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/expelled-no-intelligence-allowed/
Friday, December 31, 2010
The Middle Earth
Middle Earth.......this article is not about the place from J R R Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings.
This is about a Middle Earth, rather a 'Middle Ground' that I fantasy would someday exist.
So, let me put forth my fantasy and the world that I dream of.
Yes, it is a 'dream' as nothing like it exists today and possibly, no one today knows about how to achieve this. So, what is this middle ground about?
It is about a system between Marxism and Capitalism. Why am I still harping about Communism when it's almost gone from the face of the earth? Well, two decades after the Soviet Union has dramatically ceased to exist and Socialism is deemed hopeless by almost every government in the world, and after much of the old capitalist world rejoiced the downfall of Communism, the world is a very different place today and not what it was thought to have been.
The world economy and political condition are not in a good shape and a lot of people have been disillusioned by the promises of a prosperous free world, where, trade barriers are broken and there are ever more new opportunities over the horizon.
The world as we see it today, is not ruled by the governments we elect ( as this has mostly been an illusion in democracies) but by the huge corporations and banks who are driven by just one elemental urge........increase profit. In this maverick run for profit, companies seem to no longer have loyalties, they have truly becoming global and the true rulers of people's destinies.
This can't be forgotten as we see companies the world over hopping their jobs around the world between cheap places. What really is done in these 'cheap' places is........ move jobs, bolster a temporary local boom, increase competition and speculation (as it goes with all capitalist markets) and as the place becomes costlier...hop on to another country where things are still cheap.
What have we seen as they went along? A trail of sorrow and lost lost opportunities in lives people in these countries. The irony is, this trail started in the very nations that so ardently supported a free world with no trade barriers!!
Automobile companies and banks in the US ultimately had to be bailed out by people's hard-earned cash for fear of losing more jobs while their bosses still received hefty bonus packages. So who's running the show? definitely not the governments!
After the discussion about affects of a reckless economic system, let's see whether we lost any opportunities after the demise of socialist system.
Compared to the capitalist countries, there were no economic cycles in the Soviet block. The economies were more or less stable and grew in size (though not on par with the capitalist economies). People had a sense of security, and I have seen this with the people of my father's generation, though they were not prosperous. There is one strange thing that happened through 2009 and 2010.....most of the world's economy shrunk during these years but only one nation saw a growth in economy, it is the most notorious country on US foreign policy list viz., North Korea!! Yes it did, because it's economy has no elements of capitalism in it.
If you read through blogs about the Soviet Union, people still long to go back those years of socialism when there was a sense of direction and stability. We can have it too if only we can implement such a system without the greed of evermore prosperous lives.
So why can't we implement it? It is because people won't stop to be greedy and people won't stop to be complacent when there is no competition. Yes, the biggest problem that a socialist system will have is complacency and corruption. These problems were rampant in Socialist and Socialist inspired economies, even in the Soviet Union. There is no better example of complacency in Soviet Union than the incident of Mathias Rust landing his small plane next to Red Square, evading radar all along the East Germany and Western USSR. It is a fact that this incident helped Gorbachev speed up reforms in USSR!
There is one fact that I discovered over the years as I read and discussed about Communism and Socialism, it is the fact that no one knows how to achieve a Communist society. The biggest hurdles are complacency and greed, we can never skim these traits out of the human psyche.
Before 1990 the world was between two poles for about 50 years, now we have just one and many were happy about it when it happened. But we now see that we are in a tangle that is getting evermore complex and no one really knows how money behaves, as was evident from the British economic crisis of the 70s. There is talk of a double-dip recession while we still are struggling to get out of the present one.
My dream is of a world where we have struck a balance between Socialism and Capitalism for the good of the masses. We need to find a way where there is a healthy competition between industries while still they are responsible socially and not just look at profits being the sole urge driving their existence. The very requisite for a capitalist system,that economies should keep growing, we see today, is stripping our planet bare. Socialism seems to be a savior on the horizon, but it will in it's previous forms we've seen, overtime, sink the society into decay.
We need to find the 'Middle Earth' between these poles of human thought, a place where all people are equal in the literal sense, not just in elaborate constitutions written on paper, where all people have a stable future not robbed of livelihood and where our children are true masters of their destiny and not slaves to the whims of a wealthy few.
This is about a Middle Earth, rather a 'Middle Ground' that I fantasy would someday exist.
So, let me put forth my fantasy and the world that I dream of.
Yes, it is a 'dream' as nothing like it exists today and possibly, no one today knows about how to achieve this. So, what is this middle ground about?
It is about a system between Marxism and Capitalism. Why am I still harping about Communism when it's almost gone from the face of the earth? Well, two decades after the Soviet Union has dramatically ceased to exist and Socialism is deemed hopeless by almost every government in the world, and after much of the old capitalist world rejoiced the downfall of Communism, the world is a very different place today and not what it was thought to have been.
The world economy and political condition are not in a good shape and a lot of people have been disillusioned by the promises of a prosperous free world, where, trade barriers are broken and there are ever more new opportunities over the horizon.
The world as we see it today, is not ruled by the governments we elect ( as this has mostly been an illusion in democracies) but by the huge corporations and banks who are driven by just one elemental urge........increase profit. In this maverick run for profit, companies seem to no longer have loyalties, they have truly becoming global and the true rulers of people's destinies.
This can't be forgotten as we see companies the world over hopping their jobs around the world between cheap places. What really is done in these 'cheap' places is........ move jobs, bolster a temporary local boom, increase competition and speculation (as it goes with all capitalist markets) and as the place becomes costlier...hop on to another country where things are still cheap.
What have we seen as they went along? A trail of sorrow and lost lost opportunities in lives people in these countries. The irony is, this trail started in the very nations that so ardently supported a free world with no trade barriers!!
Automobile companies and banks in the US ultimately had to be bailed out by people's hard-earned cash for fear of losing more jobs while their bosses still received hefty bonus packages. So who's running the show? definitely not the governments!
After the discussion about affects of a reckless economic system, let's see whether we lost any opportunities after the demise of socialist system.
Compared to the capitalist countries, there were no economic cycles in the Soviet block. The economies were more or less stable and grew in size (though not on par with the capitalist economies). People had a sense of security, and I have seen this with the people of my father's generation, though they were not prosperous. There is one strange thing that happened through 2009 and 2010.....most of the world's economy shrunk during these years but only one nation saw a growth in economy, it is the most notorious country on US foreign policy list viz., North Korea!! Yes it did, because it's economy has no elements of capitalism in it.
If you read through blogs about the Soviet Union, people still long to go back those years of socialism when there was a sense of direction and stability. We can have it too if only we can implement such a system without the greed of evermore prosperous lives.
So why can't we implement it? It is because people won't stop to be greedy and people won't stop to be complacent when there is no competition. Yes, the biggest problem that a socialist system will have is complacency and corruption. These problems were rampant in Socialist and Socialist inspired economies, even in the Soviet Union. There is no better example of complacency in Soviet Union than the incident of Mathias Rust landing his small plane next to Red Square, evading radar all along the East Germany and Western USSR. It is a fact that this incident helped Gorbachev speed up reforms in USSR!
There is one fact that I discovered over the years as I read and discussed about Communism and Socialism, it is the fact that no one knows how to achieve a Communist society. The biggest hurdles are complacency and greed, we can never skim these traits out of the human psyche.
Before 1990 the world was between two poles for about 50 years, now we have just one and many were happy about it when it happened. But we now see that we are in a tangle that is getting evermore complex and no one really knows how money behaves, as was evident from the British economic crisis of the 70s. There is talk of a double-dip recession while we still are struggling to get out of the present one.
My dream is of a world where we have struck a balance between Socialism and Capitalism for the good of the masses. We need to find a way where there is a healthy competition between industries while still they are responsible socially and not just look at profits being the sole urge driving their existence. The very requisite for a capitalist system,that economies should keep growing, we see today, is stripping our planet bare. Socialism seems to be a savior on the horizon, but it will in it's previous forms we've seen, overtime, sink the society into decay.
We need to find the 'Middle Earth' between these poles of human thought, a place where all people are equal in the literal sense, not just in elaborate constitutions written on paper, where all people have a stable future not robbed of livelihood and where our children are true masters of their destiny and not slaves to the whims of a wealthy few.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The Primordial Soup
Ah!! here we go again.....another discussion about the same old topic, a very heady one and not to mention about the people who hold this soup with great disdain. Hold the soup in disdain? Well what kind of soup is this and who are the other set of people who like the soup? To know these we got to know what this soup actually is.......nah..it is no dish to get onto a menu....but the recipe has all got to do with an attempt at explaining how life came to earth and how it developed into what we see today.
There has always been one traditional way of looking at explaining how life came to earth, simply say, "God made it". It held sway and even today to a large extent until Charles Darwin shook it from the roots. He proposed for the first time that life on earth evolved and is continuing to evolve on it's own and that nobody made it with their hands and that life was not created in a giffy and that it is not the whim of God who was sitting bored, up in the heavens. This theory also challenged the existence of God itself. I've met a lot if people on either sideof the line, holding to their theories dearly and going to great lengths to show that the other is faulty. I've always thought of what the actuality behind all this could be.
The theory of evolution says that life was planted as organic substances into the earth's oceans by probably a comet or a meteor that crashed in. It is said that life most probably evolved from the oceans and from the substances that grouped or were planted into them, and so stuck the phrase "The Primordial Soup". I've seen that there is a lot of bickering about origins of life on our planet. There are people who terribly disagree with the idea of evolution and there are a equally good number of people who don't like the idea of "God has made" everything.
Here is my take on the subject......I believe that God made everything around and I also believe that life is evolving and has evolved into he current state just as Darwin proposed.
First, this is the face of coin I'd like to show to those who believe God made everything.......yes of course God made everything, but the fact is that He never told anyone how he made it, He is making an attempt at teaching it now and we are just closing our ears to it. In all the world's religious books I've never come across any passage where God described an algorithm to how life and everything else came into being. All the stories we see are just figments of our imagination and attempts by our ancestors to explain things, how can we possibly rely on them? All the world's religious books are aimed at one thing......teaching men how to get close to God....they are never attempts at explaining creation to mankind. Just look at this example.....how do you think, a jumbled set of numbers can be sorted? The brain uses a different approach each time we try to sort a set of numbers ,ah!! and I remember what pain in the neck learning computer algorithms about sorting numbers is. The algorithms to sorting numbers are so complex, a layman will find it very difficult to understand. Even today, there are very few people who can understand anything about genetics.......so how in God's name can we understand the algorithm to the creation of the universe if it were explained to us?? Definitely not, even the best minds in the world will find this a stumbling block. I believe God is slowly making mankind understand how He made things and we are just closing our eyes to it. Look around, we see new microbes coming up all the time, striking examples are AIDS virus and the new drug resistant TB. There is evolution happening before our eyes and how can we deny that something like this doesn't exist at all?
And here is the face of the coin for those who don't believe God exists....... http://maworldmamuse.blogspot.com/2008/11/god.html
This discussion also is a very complex one. It is a fact that the world we see is not random and chance or not, people have communicated with an invisible force since mankind existed. We just call this harmonizing force, God. For all the knowledge we've accumulated since Renaissance, we've just seen a few more grains of sand better and how can we say we understand every grain of sand in this great desert we see ? Something to be really thought of........in essence "The Primordial Soup" is a savory dish of somebody's incalculable ingenuity, spanning all time. The more you think about it the more you'll only get closer to knowing the dish better and the one who made it!!
There has always been one traditional way of looking at explaining how life came to earth, simply say, "God made it". It held sway and even today to a large extent until Charles Darwin shook it from the roots. He proposed for the first time that life on earth evolved and is continuing to evolve on it's own and that nobody made it with their hands and that life was not created in a giffy and that it is not the whim of God who was sitting bored, up in the heavens. This theory also challenged the existence of God itself. I've met a lot if people on either sideof the line, holding to their theories dearly and going to great lengths to show that the other is faulty. I've always thought of what the actuality behind all this could be.
The theory of evolution says that life was planted as organic substances into the earth's oceans by probably a comet or a meteor that crashed in. It is said that life most probably evolved from the oceans and from the substances that grouped or were planted into them, and so stuck the phrase "The Primordial Soup". I've seen that there is a lot of bickering about origins of life on our planet. There are people who terribly disagree with the idea of evolution and there are a equally good number of people who don't like the idea of "God has made" everything.
Here is my take on the subject......I believe that God made everything around and I also believe that life is evolving and has evolved into he current state just as Darwin proposed.
First, this is the face of coin I'd like to show to those who believe God made everything.......yes of course God made everything, but the fact is that He never told anyone how he made it, He is making an attempt at teaching it now and we are just closing our ears to it. In all the world's religious books I've never come across any passage where God described an algorithm to how life and everything else came into being. All the stories we see are just figments of our imagination and attempts by our ancestors to explain things, how can we possibly rely on them? All the world's religious books are aimed at one thing......teaching men how to get close to God....they are never attempts at explaining creation to mankind. Just look at this example.....how do you think, a jumbled set of numbers can be sorted? The brain uses a different approach each time we try to sort a set of numbers ,ah!! and I remember what pain in the neck learning computer algorithms about sorting numbers is. The algorithms to sorting numbers are so complex, a layman will find it very difficult to understand. Even today, there are very few people who can understand anything about genetics.......so how in God's name can we understand the algorithm to the creation of the universe if it were explained to us?? Definitely not, even the best minds in the world will find this a stumbling block. I believe God is slowly making mankind understand how He made things and we are just closing our eyes to it. Look around, we see new microbes coming up all the time, striking examples are AIDS virus and the new drug resistant TB. There is evolution happening before our eyes and how can we deny that something like this doesn't exist at all?
And here is the face of the coin for those who don't believe God exists....... http://maworldmamuse.blogspot.com/2008/11/god.html
This discussion also is a very complex one. It is a fact that the world we see is not random and chance or not, people have communicated with an invisible force since mankind existed. We just call this harmonizing force, God. For all the knowledge we've accumulated since Renaissance, we've just seen a few more grains of sand better and how can we say we understand every grain of sand in this great desert we see ? Something to be really thought of........in essence "The Primordial Soup" is a savory dish of somebody's incalculable ingenuity, spanning all time. The more you think about it the more you'll only get closer to knowing the dish better and the one who made it!!
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Freedom And Hardline Thinking
Freedom is something that is of paramount importance to every living being. Freedom is the sense of being expressive about one's feelings whether it be of individuals or of societies. Since the dawn of human race, countless lives have been laid on the line to defend something so awesome and which cannot be expressed in words, something so beautiful and something so mystical, something so priceless that one's life doesn't weigh heavier and something without which life would be a barren wilderness.This invisible thing only uttered from the lips of men and which can be felt in it's own light is 'freedom'.
Throughout the history of mankind there have been countless struggles to win freedom. Civilizations that didn't allow freedom have slipped into oblivion and infamy.The world now stands divided between free nations and those that are not, even though they are sovereign. There are nations continuously pushing towards greater freedom of their people while there are those nations that believe freedom for their people will not see them scaling the heights of communal success(China). But, it is to be noted that history is full of instances where societies have imploded owing to a perennial build up of discontentment.
It is an irony that the communists rose up to fight against inequality and ended up squashing the people they liberated. We have to ask ourselves why this happened, after all, the communists were dreaming of a world where there is mo master and no slave,no condescending giver and an inferior taker. The hands that toiled for and built the great pyramids of Egypt of course should equally share the glory their designers are attributed. So, why did the communists fall? what went so terribly wrong with the Utopian dream? The answer lies with the human tendency to take to extremes when there are insurmountable odds to be faced.
I have, in the past many years come across people who say India needs iron fist dictators to rid it of all it's aliments. I have, always terribly disagreed with them, well I believe a nation belongs to it's people and not to a single person. Erstwhile Soviet Union is the best example for this. The Russian revolution was spearheaded by men from different schools of thought, as is evident from the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion(which wanted democracy for Russia) and exiling and killing of Leon Trotsky. Russians were under the most severe conditions imaginable for a country that is so rich in every natural resource, most people in the revolution wanted drastic and long lasting changes and most believed that hardliners were an answer. They were all wrong, as is evident from the course of history. There's one crucial aspect people tend to forget, HOW LONG WOULD A FEW IRON MEN REMAIN SANE AND NON-PARANOID TO RUN A NATION WITHOUT PUTTING IT'S PEOPLE TO PERIL?? The answer is they will not for long, there should always be change in leadership and people should decide the course. Stalin simply believed that he was best for Russia and saw all others as a threat to Russian progress, he was right from his perspective, until he had gone paranoid and insane to send millions of people to Gulags and planting the roots for discontent that blasted out after Gorbachev decided to loosen the grip slightly. And then there are the North Korean people who were coaxed into believing that they are the most developed nation in the world by their leaders.
All people of all nations should have a say in deciding their destiny. Freedom will nurture stability and guarantee that no one is crushed under the burden of insanity of a few powerful people. Free people can contribute more to their nations and to the world, after all, there have been uncontainable rebellions for lack of freedom and long lasting stability in countries like those in Europe and North America, possible only because of their free societies.
Throughout the history of mankind there have been countless struggles to win freedom. Civilizations that didn't allow freedom have slipped into oblivion and infamy.The world now stands divided between free nations and those that are not, even though they are sovereign. There are nations continuously pushing towards greater freedom of their people while there are those nations that believe freedom for their people will not see them scaling the heights of communal success(China). But, it is to be noted that history is full of instances where societies have imploded owing to a perennial build up of discontentment.
It is an irony that the communists rose up to fight against inequality and ended up squashing the people they liberated. We have to ask ourselves why this happened, after all, the communists were dreaming of a world where there is mo master and no slave,no condescending giver and an inferior taker. The hands that toiled for and built the great pyramids of Egypt of course should equally share the glory their designers are attributed. So, why did the communists fall? what went so terribly wrong with the Utopian dream? The answer lies with the human tendency to take to extremes when there are insurmountable odds to be faced.
I have, in the past many years come across people who say India needs iron fist dictators to rid it of all it's aliments. I have, always terribly disagreed with them, well I believe a nation belongs to it's people and not to a single person. Erstwhile Soviet Union is the best example for this. The Russian revolution was spearheaded by men from different schools of thought, as is evident from the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion(which wanted democracy for Russia) and exiling and killing of Leon Trotsky. Russians were under the most severe conditions imaginable for a country that is so rich in every natural resource, most people in the revolution wanted drastic and long lasting changes and most believed that hardliners were an answer. They were all wrong, as is evident from the course of history. There's one crucial aspect people tend to forget, HOW LONG WOULD A FEW IRON MEN REMAIN SANE AND NON-PARANOID TO RUN A NATION WITHOUT PUTTING IT'S PEOPLE TO PERIL?? The answer is they will not for long, there should always be change in leadership and people should decide the course. Stalin simply believed that he was best for Russia and saw all others as a threat to Russian progress, he was right from his perspective, until he had gone paranoid and insane to send millions of people to Gulags and planting the roots for discontent that blasted out after Gorbachev decided to loosen the grip slightly. And then there are the North Korean people who were coaxed into believing that they are the most developed nation in the world by their leaders.
All people of all nations should have a say in deciding their destiny. Freedom will nurture stability and guarantee that no one is crushed under the burden of insanity of a few powerful people. Free people can contribute more to their nations and to the world, after all, there have been uncontainable rebellions for lack of freedom and long lasting stability in countries like those in Europe and North America, possible only because of their free societies.
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