Skip to main content

Frolicking Celebrations


Britain launched an atheist bus campaign recently, inter city buses would carry the message "There is probably no god, now stop worrying and enjoy your life". Donations were sought and the organizers were strangulated to the core with the unprecedented outpour of jubilation, money came pouring in, and the deluge leapt up the giant serpentine neck, opened its fangs of virgin evocation with venom of rationale dripping profusely from the loose corners.

It doesn't take much for a 10 yr old to figure out the absurdity in “branding” him, namely religious branding. For centuries, Religious parents presumptuously branded their offspring with their religion, and now “oh! The times are changing”, this generation is already marching into the vastness of “rational thinking”.

My first instinct was- well, to transpire political ends into reality, organizers have consciously condescended the morale of atheists, because the message if anything should read “there is almost certainly no god”. When asked, they replied that the word “probably” was pinned up to the self sufficient holistic aphorism to rip through the advertising counsel's improbable rules and they added that the word is also “catchy”. Atheists also wondered if the chief donator Mr. Dawkins was offering marginally inclined agnostics to rethink their premises, only this time more rationally. The word “probably” was for that niche of agnostics, not for the militant atheists.

Normal people (with no psychological delusions, often referred to as atheists by ‘the others’) have been celebrating the eventful year since the campaign's proposal, although some have not renounced their grudgingly impersonal stance of skepticism. “Atheists have no reason to advertise themselves on a grand and rampant scale like this one, we are doing just fine without the rest” is the resounding murmur. Some have confounded the ideological campaign with brief tirades, to sum up - Atheists unlike others are belief-less people, we either know or we don't know, and we certainly don't have to prove the non-existence of some idea that was never proved to exist in the first place.

Rats and mice don’t have religion, why humans? This question is uninspiring and boringly lack lustrous rhetorical misdirected myopic misstatement. Had we have been hunter gathers (just as all the other cousins of ours still are), we would not have had the current discussion, the transformation from hunter gatherers to farmers, then to sedentary life style of agricultural revolution (religion in an 'in-situ' state of design), then to industrial revolution (religion juxtaposed with patriotism and together were bonded beyond a recognizable face of distinction) produced apparently implosive equipment that has time and again proved its ability to break open and decimate the civilization from the inside.

Simply put, its the 'herd-instinct', this primitive instinct was then multiplied, loosely draped with cloaks of desire, desire seemingly innocuous threw open its multitudinous and polychromatic tentacles to engulf the primitive instinct, and unfortunately, humans were too busy to contemplate an endeavor of disentangling the tentacles, some were too afraid, for the monster that was asleep in the clutches of superfluity was 'oneself' and thus the quest to become the 'self' again was procrastinated.

Its a grave misjudgment and a horrendous disservice to simplify and reduce the 15 billion years of universal enigma into vapid generalizations such as "humans are superior to their cousins", it is analogous to figuratively put "a mosquito flapping its wings before the giant Antarctic iceberg hysterically laments that the iceberg did move a tad too less to what it expected".

'Our civilization has progressed' to say indubitably is a weak statement, we now know that we are products of evolution, our brain, our eyes were once too primitive in our single celled ancestors, we were once asexual, to deny all of this is to shut oneself 'inside out' denounce once conscience, once impulsive abilities.

As professor Dawkins put it, “one doesn’t need ‘religion’ so to do good to his fellow beings, good would do good, bad would do bad, regardless of the ‘religion’, besides, for good people to do bad things, it takes religion”

There has got to be a beginning to this universe ‘big bang’, the idea that a creator did create the universe is highly implausible, because then, one would have to ask ‘who created that creator?’, another creator…….this would launch one into an infinite regress of creators each one creating the successive one.

We now know that the universe is 15 b yrs old and scientists all over the world summoned at CERN are waiting impatiently to seek and to decipher in an empirically dignified manner, the ‘origins of universe’. Most of “the others" are skeptical, that the project CERN (launched last month) may not result in answering the higher questions, that it would fail miserably.

Take a brief pause, and now just reflect upon what all these endeavors mean to us. We have progressed into "the civilizations that can now fund such massive scientific projects", what can be more expressive than this, to display our ascendancy of our times, the time that we are living in. It’s happening right now, the levers of catapult are hanging right in front of you, you only have to raise your head, find the lever, launch it and be catapulted into the realms of rational, realms of dignified and irresistible knowledge.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where British Steel met the Nubile Cultural Beauty.

Noughties have been a delight. My life began; I might be tempted to say-just as any other city’s did. But the fact is that my life began when angry gentlemen threw spades at each other. In sixteenth century, my rulers at Golconda founded me. Musi, my artery ran through me fresh and clear embellishing me for years. When plague besieged me portentously, my rulers wove one of the most beautiful monuments in India-Charminar, adorned me with the crown. But before the incumbent rulers at Golconda could flourish in the shadows of the great crown and meadows of the fecund land, Nizams defeated them in a battle. What was to come next, I would not have contemplated at that time, but looking back, I realise that the Nizams watered those shrubs of culture that sporadically rose in the rule of my previous rulers. What was to be quoted by Dr. Ambedkar after my inclusion in the united India - as home to all the riches and culture, so good to take upon the capital city status for a united India - grew...

Oceanic lass

Last night, as I walked through the canopy of dry grass, a strange illusion came over me; the night was cold and the breeze penetrating, sort of trickling through the most sensual neurons of my body. The lady with a heap of clothes on her back went past me, with mincing steps, eyeing me for a fleeting second. I paused and so did the world around me, shut my senses off and apprehended the beauty of the moment; the lady walking heavily heaving and thrusting her right foot into the pile of mud before her, holding her sari by the folds with her naked palms, all the time indifferent to the beauty she possessed. She was not lascivious by the modernistic standards, but was effortlessly exuberant, intoxicating in the way she undid the heap off her back. Presently, she bent over and was reaching out for the folds of the heap, to unite. As she sat down, I noticed that something was bothering her. Her eyes, it was perhaps a straw of dust that found its object of beauty. From where I stood, I coul...

Chowmahalla Palace

It was the morning after my wedding. The dark peachy coloured blinds on my windows were still drawn; the maid with pigtails had retreated after laying down the morning’s breakfast on the thickly lacquered table. Stepping down from the cot, silk thread from my morning dishabille was stuck in the headrest’s broad eagle wings; it threatened to steal away my modesty. Gathering the folds around my knees, I restored propriety before slipping my feet into the glint slippers. The flower vase in the patio shone its tinselled mouthful of white roses that caught sun voluminously. In the garden that night, sitting alone, with the full moon perched in the pool water before me, I recalled the incident and the man who had turned me into a woman. The day before my wedding, a painter had been called. I met him in the courtyard; he was seated on a backless piano chair. Neatly perched on the easel was the drawing board, and from behind it, with tapered quills, greeted a man with sagebrush moustache. Th...