Poll Daddy post – 2

A random thought

Days of geographically well spread sporadic cases of fatal terrorism are seeing no end. Is civilization being gradually overrun by terrorism? Pak government is befriending them on papers now. US government is hinting at leaving NWFP and Afghan extremists in peace, due to shortage of funds. Africa has still not stopped being a mockery to democracy. There are separatist movements throughout the length and breadth of third world and communist dictatorship is yet to be eradicated. Are we living in perfectly normal times or are we already in the middle of the third world war, a war against civilization. We should better be pondering now.

Attempts to relate all the violence news in your newspaper can be mentally disastrous

If we consider the entire span of human civilization right from the iron age, men have been looking for excuses to hate others. We have always been most interested in dividing ourselves up into fragments on the basis of race, nationality, religion, community, region and what not. These are intertwined. A man today has so many unique identities to defend, and so many to look down upon. Distinction is good, for governance, for cultural preservation and richness. But there should be a lower limit to the basic unit of this distinction. That’s where we have all messed up.  But we are learning and may be in near future we would be genuinely trying too. As of now we sure can dream of a day when all governments would co-exist in peace and there would be a greater morality and consciousness among people. Human life and rights would be universally respected. People would stop hating others who are different from them. But then again, this would happen only when the humanity would have a common object to loathe and fear. Something deadly and totally alien  challenging and threatning the entire humanity.

The Physics of God

Often I wonder why God still exists. Shouldn’t reason and knowledge that we boast of today have long before made the existence of God far less obvious to us? I mean, let us have a picture of our universe, now, where does God fits in ? No telescope has ever found a heaven. The concept of  The God being a human lookalike who roams around freely in space and has an offspring is nothing more than an aesthetically appealing art form or a hilarious joke today. The necessity of the  existence of  God is often traced back to the creation of the universe, the question being, if there was no God, who created this universe?.

Celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, who had made abstract physics concepts blonde friendly through his popular science books began his famous “A Brief History of Time” with

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

A similar path of arguments would lead us into pondering over who created him who created our universe. So it’s turtles all the way down here too.

If we consider Him to be an omnipresent non-entity, He must be similar to the all pervading weightless medium, ether, which kept our 19th century physicists so awfully obsessed.  Its a very funny situation  here, because in this case we need to have a God Who is growing. Well, at least since our universe is expanding and God might not consider it healthy to become less dense in order to remain omnipresent, so, He too must grow! And this concept of a growing God is neither quite favorable to entropy decrease nor in compliance with any known conservation laws. (Not even our medieval ancestors would have liked it. )

I also do have questions regarding God’s communication interface with the human. How do our prayers reach the God. An omnipresent audio signal receptor (or an omnipresent SQUID like instrument to decipher silent prayers) attached to a language processing and interpretation unit which also retains the source spacetime co-ordinates, is  not quite gullible a concept. The next point of introspection is how does God exercise His control over us?  Making way for some rationality we can rule out abstract figments of imagination that our revered holy texts would ask us to believe in. If  God interacts, it has to be at a very fundamental level, through the elementary particles. Well, that might even lead us to a fifth fundamental force, the God force. Also, in that case, The Almighty is sure to punish me for denying his existence by making his God-particles interact with  my body particles, as the High Energy Physicists would sit by drawing the Feynman diagrams of the interaction process.  Long after my demise, when their tumultuous financial situation would get salvaged, those High Energy Physicists would even build a Large Godron Collider.

Bad query processing example of an overloaded server with non upgradable, limited back-end processes

Strong egocentric nature of human beings have made the God, (they have so carefully developed over millenniums)  highly biased, in spite of his supposedly ideal sense of justice. He only favors good over evil in the context which man and his society deems fit. We set our own moral parameters and assume it to have naturally descended upon us by the  divine providence. And we also automatically believe without any arguments that along with the human cultural and political evolution, God’s sense of justice has kept changing over the time and from country to country.  There are places  in today’s world where rape and subsequent public flogging of the victim is a social practice while at other places skipping a ‘thank you’ is comparable to a crime. And apparently its our God has made these rules up and is constantly moral policing us on that basis.  Isn’t it ridiculous.  Couldn’t it be so that God’s sense of justice is just the same as when He was created 1000s of years ago. And there is no provision for punishing a bank robber today because there were no banks back in those days ans so no laws laid down for its robbing. I mean, do we really expect our fabled God to be maintaining a log of  our sins according to our user defined protocols. Throughout the infinite space of the universe there are gas clouds of nascent stars, billions and billions time larger in size  than us, possessed with the power of gravitational force, rampantly creating havoc. There are massive supernovae explosions, the all engulfing black holes, destruction and creation in scales so enormously huge that it won’t make the slightest difference if we remain religiously obedient or  our planet succumbs to a red giant  Sun.  Our  being intelligent is not a cause powerful enough to reserve God’s special attention for us because we are insignificantly microscopic and hardly contribute to the cosmos at any dimensions.

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Being a religious and conservative person myself, I can’t convince myself into losing my faith in God. But I rather see God as a source of my completeness, an institution within myself. She is my friend and motherlike to me. I rather love Her than worship Her and imagine Her than believe in her. And that’s what keeps reason and all allied disbelief away from us.  Throughout time, the concept of God and the fear of God has kept order in the society and sustained the civilization. Its for the same reason that although we don’t carry stone weapons with us any longer we bear the very same God in our minds that our ancestors had invented, in the ‘beginning of time’.