Friday, September 16, 2011

National Anthems - Souls Of Nations In Words And Song

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, 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.

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:





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/