"Religion is Opium"

The study of history will justify the theory that religion is a form of insanity, immorality and murder. No sane and healthy minds could have waged the bloody religious wars and crusades where the conquered were slaughtered; men, women, and children, even infants, all were put to the sword simply because they were "infidels" or "heretics".

The dungeons and torture chambers of the Holy Inquisiotion could not have been run by sane or healthy minds. And it had to be the insane mind, the religious mind, that would tie a woman to a stake, pile wood and fagots around her and burn her alive for the impossible crime of being a witch, or to force her become a so-called "Sati".

No sane person could read of the horrors, rape and slaughter in a savage book and call that book "the word of God". Today, Religions choose to ignore, or to hide and deny, its own bloody history and to claim that they are the very foundation of our morals, and even of our civilization!!

I whole-heartedly support the view that the great Bengali poet Qazi Nazrul Islam had once put across, "Religion is Opium".

The balance

Dad says “The more knowledge one gains, the more humble he/she should get”. It’s a beautiful thought. I pondered on it. Here's what came about: What’s always needed is a balance. It’s amazing how the beautiful principle works itself in different ways.

Life needs to find a balance in order to keep running smoothly. And if you let that sway to either side, then there are bound to be repercussions. Let’s take a phenomenal financial expert for example. Let’s says that he always has the right investment advice and is a complete sensation at his subject. He loves his wife dearly, who generally likes to devote all her time to her household and is probably not the kind of financial wizard he could have an ‘intellectual’ discussion with. There could be times he finds something gone amiss in his relationship as he cannot come back home one fine evening and share with his wife, the positive impact his decision had on a major business plan. It’s definitely something that would affect him adversely in the long run, as he would feel that the thing that’s closest to his life is something that his life partner finds difficult to appreciate. This might be a situation one needs to look a little more deeply at. I mentioned earlier that life needs to find a balance. In the higher realm of things, everything places itself the way it does because of that same balance. If you take the example of the investment advisor: He might have a really close friend who is in a similar career and encourages and applauds him on all his successes. Or tomorrow he might have a daughter who grows up to be a financial genius and discusses and appreciates all those market insights with her dad.

And you’l see these if you look around and reflect on it a little. I have personally seen people who have lost their loved ones and find that they get that kind of love and support from other people who probably play a different role in your life. A girl who loses her father might find a guide in a friend or life-partner who is a father-figure. A woman who lost her dear sister finds that she shares that intimate bonding with a friend now.

I heard a friend saying, that if an IIT pass out woman wants to choose a life partner, she needs to find a man who is at least an IIT graduate or a student of some college ranked higher than that. And the reason she felt that way was because the men end up having ego issues with a woman who is intellectually superior to them. I understand and admire the IIT’ians for the way they are a class apart and also agree that they are intellectually sound and extremely hardworking people. To the women, - do you really want to make that decision behind a brand name that is attached to you. If you brought in modesty and humbleness along with the peaks of your career achievements, there is every way that you can have a harmonious and fulfilling relationship with your husband. To the men, I know that there are those fragile egos and other people’s words that can fire you up. But do you want your self-respect to be affected by anyone else. If you are self-assured and contented, nothing will really touch you.

If you are the most intelligent thinker, or the most proficient person, there’s every effort you should make to be the most self-effacing person as well. Knowledge is power and that knowledge includes this awareness and letting go of the ego, the “I”, too. If you can be the best at the job you have taken up, why not be the best at being humblest as well. True awareness comes from striking that ‘balance’.

There are people who let themselves be affected by the society’s definition of successful, rich, intelligent and talented in that they feel they cannot have beautiful interactions with certain people because they either do not share the same wave length with them or they do not have common interests. It helps to understand that every person who comes your way is there because you and he/she are to share some messages between each other and whether you find someone who complements your thoughts or is a negation to all your convictions, there will something you will take back from them anyway. So bless everything that comes your way and trust the process of life and the universe to bring you everything that’s best for you.

Am I significant in the universe, or just an accident?

Are we alone in the universe? Less than two meters tall and only lasting about 70 years, can we matter in a universe that is so big and so old, so dark and so cold?

Philosophers have argued both for and against our uniqueness in space.

Surely, say some, God would not have put all his animals and plants on one planet, leaving all others empty. Other people have regarded life-as-we-know-it as unique.
Some who are unsympathetic to God claim that if Earth is the only planet of its kind, life must have been an unlikely cosmic accident and cannot have been divinely planned.

Others, equally unsympathetic, have maintained that if there are other inhabited planets, Earth cannot be special or have been visited by God in the Incarnation (heads I win; tails you lose!).

Whether or not there is a plurality of inhabited worlds, many people feel insignificant when looking up on a clear night. The psalmist, awed by what he saw, said ‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars… what is man …?’.
He could have counted about 1,500 stars with the naked eye, if he had bothered. We now know that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 100,000,000,000 stars. And there are another 100,000,000,000 galaxies each of 100,000,000,000 stars! The numbers are impossible to imagine. The old Wembley Stadium could hold 100,000 people, but it is difficult to picture a million Wembley Stadiums - and that is only the number of stars in one galaxy. What about the other 99,999,999,999 galaxies?

But some 30 years ago it was realized that if the constants of nature, like the gravitational constant, were minutely different, life as we know it could not have arisen. The existence of these ‘cosmic coincidences’ has been dubbed the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. To estimate just how small the differences in the constants would have to be for life not to have arisen requires a look at how, according to current thinking, we were created:

In 1965, two scientists, Penzias and Wilson were investigating radio signals from space when their experiments were frustrated by persistent radio background interference. It turned out to be a hugely important discovery. It was as if some warm ashes had been found which showed there had been a fire earlier. The ‘fire’ was the Big Bang itself and the ‘warmth’ was actually only 2.7 degree C above the lowest possible temperature of –273 degree C.
This discovery gave strong support for the ‘Big Bang’, which is currently thought to have signaled the beginning of space and time, something which is almost impossible to imagine.

In the Big Bang there is a tug-of-war between the outward explosion and the force of gravity trying to stop it.

According to Professor Stephen Hawking:
‘If the density of the universe one second after the big bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion the universe would have recollapsed after ten years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty since it was about ten years old.’

Professor Paul Davies theorized that:
‘… had the explosion differed in strength at the outset by only one part in 10 to the power 60 [1 followed by 60 zeroes!], the universe we now perceive would not exist.’

The early universe was dominated by energy. From this, within about three minutes, the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium were formed. From these elements, stars developed as gravity brought the unevenly distributed matter together into clumps until there was enough for a star to ‘ignite’.
Stars are like controlled hydrogen bombs, gigantic nuclear furnaces in which the collisions of the lighter particles under huge pressures and temperatures fuse them into heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen - the elements necessary for life.
This process requires a long time — about 15 thousand million years — after which, if the star is big enough, it ends its life in a gigantic explosion which scatters the new elements for life into space — the beginning of us!

If you are romantic you can think of your body as made of ‘star dust’; if you are more prosaic you could consider it as composed of ‘reprocessed nuclear waste’!

All sorts of explanations have been advanced for the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
One suggested explanation is the existence of ‘Multiverses’, among which the constants of our universe just happen to be right for life.
Another is as a consequence of an earlier inflationary phase in our universe in which the universe rapidly expanded to the size of a grapefruit.
The first is at present, to use the jargon, a piece of ‘speculative metaphysics’; while the second simply pushes the question ‘why the Anthropic Cosmological Principle’ one stage further back to ‘why were the properties of the early universe such that an early inflationary phase occurred which resulted in the Anthropic Cosmological Principle which gave rise to us?’

What does emerge from what has been said is that the claim that we must be insignificant because the universe is so huge and ancient, can be stood on its head. Since it takes a long time to make the elements for life, and space is expanding at nearly the speed of light the universe is enormous.
Because it expands so rapidly, it is very cold and very dark. If this were not so we could not be here. Philosophers can see this as pointing to God taking a lot of time and care in making us and of having a purpose for each of our lives.

My insight: Don't feel insignificant even if you can't mark your presence in this overwhelmingly vast world. All the seeds don't germinate and all the flowers don't blossom into fruits. Your presence is a unique proof for Nature's abundance of wealth and that's quite a satisfying reason that you are there!