I am an Indian and I have no God

India has long been the refuge of the world. Great thinkers from all ages and directions have come here to find peace and purpose. In being the shelter of the spiritual world the country has become nefarious. Belittled by the
superfluous interpretations of the world.

This is now a country ruled by mass opinion. It does not take intelligence or hardwork to make a difference anymore. All it takes is for enough people to hear you. When a country's highlight is religion you know as a Bright that you are born in the wrong nation. When every government form asks you to state a religion and almost every other institution has reservations based on religion you begin to question the authenticity of such institutions.

I shall not debate on the age long debate about the proof of God. I shall however comment on the need for him and why I find God depressing. When I question staunch advocates of religion and/or God and attempt to blow holes in their theories they always fall back to arguments that can be counted on your fingers.

I shall address them one be one.

• In God there is Hope.
• For the love of me I cannot understand why we need God to have hope. In my opinion all this sentence is conveying is that when you are down and under all you would do is believe someone will bail you out. What is the matter? Can I not use the brain I have so carefully cultivated during my education and get out of the situation?
• For hope to exist there must be despair. During despair can I not allow myself to know that it was me that brought this mess onto myself. All God does is take a way the blame. I need to take responsibility for my actions and not cower behind an idea.
• We are God's children.
• I am my parent's child. It would be shameful if I gave that position to someone who does not even appear before me in place of the parents that have brought me up? I would not dare to spit in the face of the years of toil they put in to bring me up by saying that I am God's child.
• You have to agree someting is there. Call it by any name.
• No I do not have to agree. I think there is nothing there. That this life is the only one I have. Brought into this world by my parents, I will live for a blink in time. I will do things that shall last longer than me. I will die and cease to exist. I shall be buried and have grass growing above me, water flowing under me. I shall be the supporter of a thousand lives once I am in the soil.
• I shall cease to exis once dead. Nothing other than this life exists. There is no God. We are an accident in this universe.

Hence all I have to say is that we are no better than the mayfly that is born,eats and lays eggs. Only to die and be forgotten. The only thing for which we need to be grateful for is that we can attempt to understand this beautiful world we live in. We can attempt to know why.

It is the unknown which should be treated as God. That God is a god which is knowable. Then the purpose of our life is to know this god. To know why we are.

This society however does not permit us to have a god that is knowable. That would mean that man is alone and makes his own future. It assumes to much about god without having to prove them. Communal politics and putrid thoughtless behaviour among the masses of this land repell me. I can respect a person and their choice. I cannot however respect a man who takes shelter behind ideas without judging them by their own intellect despite being educated. I would rather live in a jungle of animals who think rather than a city of humans who do not.

This world IS. There is no need for something more.
I am an Indian. I have no God. I am proud.

India Temperature Map

Looking at the cold wave in India currently I tried to lookup at the temperatures in the various places on the map. This was of interest to me as getting visual information of the temperatures was interesting as it showed where the cold was coming from.

My google fu was useless as the data was numeric and was simply too scattered.

Python to the rescue.

Out came a python script for collecting and plotting the data on a map of India.
The closer a temperature is to 55C  the more red it is.
The closer a temperature is to 0C the more Blue it is.

With this it is clear that the cold is coming from the "Wall in the North".
It also shows that Uttar Pradesh has been cold a lot. Mostly because it is a lot of open land and nothing to stop the wind from the Himalayas.


If you want to look at the script have a look at the Git-repo.

The notion of a soul

Recently my mother had a discussion with me related to spirituality. As usual it ended with none of us getting anywhere. I could not convince her of the futility of God and she could not convince me otherwise.

During this conversation she said some thing which once put in perspective led me to a thread of thought which I had previously not percieved.Let us do a thought experiment.

Imagine two worlds where nobody has introduced the notion of a Soul.
In one world(A) people are immortal. In the other(B) they die.

World B sounds like ours. When a person dies what is it that tells us that they are dead? Is it inactivity? If so then how is it different from paralysis? Is it brain function? Whatever the case may be it leads us to ask another question of ourselves. What is the difference between a dead person and a living person? I believe it is this question which gives rise to the notion of Soul. That unquantified thing which is added/removed upon death is what we call soul. It may/maynot exist. This is what we use to explain death.

In world A however nobody ever dies. Hence we may say that no terminal illnesses take place. Thus in world A the concept of death does not occur. Hence if the concept of death does not occur it implies that the concept of soul has no existance as it is not needed to explain anything.

In order to completely explain death one must first answer the question of describing life. When do complex chemical reactions begin to be called life?

All religions have gods or beliefs which may be explained using the interactions of that community with it's environment. For example there may be agod of the desert in the desert but not in the jungle.Since all religion of the world have some or the other concept of a soul they must all have derived it from a situation prevailent everywhere, namely death. All religions prepare us for some form of afterlife. Thus all of them condition us mentally to keep on living. They take the example of the Soul. In my opinion the soul itself is an explanation needed to explain death.

Willpower

I was watching a cutscene from bioshock. He said "Imagine the will it took to build this place". That caught my eye. Will.

What is so special about that one thing. He did not say money or time. He said will. I began to dig deeper into this word and found that a lot of people who did amazing things came up against odds that were overwhelming. Tense situations either strengthen or break the will of a person. To quote from the monk who sold his ferarri "getting up in the morning takes will"

Hence I began my experiments with will.
I have not eaten anything since last night. That would make it 18 hours. For a guy like me who has three meals a day this is verry difficult.

The night was ok since I was sleeping most of the time. I usually have a breakfast of parathas. Pretty heavy. Hence by noon I was a little squeamish.
I had my first stomach growl at about lunch time. Since then lions have been roaring in my stomach regularly.

I try to dring water and settle them but it does not work. Ill eat dinner tonight at about 9pm. That will make it 24 hours of hunger. For the first time in my life I will have tested my will. The interruptions in attention when your stomach growls is very stark. It makes you stop whatever you are doing ang pay attention to it. Ill try to make this a habit. Delay the first growl to about 6pm. That ways I can go two days without food on my next test.

Lets see how long i last. Adios.

Lost in death

 

Are we as lost as this stream of water? 

No body remembers if the plants were watered but only if the rock was worn.

Life, lost in death.
In death, lost to life.

 

Our life lost in escaping death. Trying to live longer and betray this truth.
We tend to live as if there were nothing that could kill us.Our plans span years and even lifetimes while in a single breath, death can put us to sleep.

All we ever try to do is to live long  lives. With comfort and little pain. After death it is only action that lives on. The deeds of our life are what live on after we are put into the earth. If that is all that counts then it is not surprising that we do not account for a lot. Maybe I should start living every day as it comes.

Life, lost in death.
In death, lost to life.