Showing posts with label dawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dawkins. Show all posts

18 August, 2011

The God Delusion

How lucky we are to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing
more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter!


-Excerpts from the book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins


I have already attributed Richard Dawkins to have facilitated my transition to become the ardent and absolute atheist that I am now, in previous posts. And like in his documentaries, he is cleverer and super accurate with his arguments in The God Delusion.Impeccably convincing!

Turning towards the book itself, it is a quick and joyous read in the literary sense. But, this book symbolizes an apprehension of serious scale and it ain't just the literature one needs to ponder about. What actually dawned upon me while reading the book was the intent of the book itself. Pushing science and rationality amidst the infinite bandwidth white noise of religion, Gods, and the related blah blah!

Religion is ubiquitous, and it certainly is perilous, whatever small subjective positives one might have experienced. This ancient dogma has to be stigmatized for, eradicating it would take a long long struggle against many maniacs.

Nevertheless, increasing the consciousness of people pertaining to the futilities encapsulated in religion as a whole will slowly evolve to eliminate this weird but natural seeming, artificial digression of us humans.

While Science is what has given us answers, drawing us out from the shrouded clouds of ignorance, into light and still leading, Religion is that strong regressive force holding back majority of the Homo sapiens , bound to the shackles of faith, blind faith and dumb blind faith!

The God Delusion is a must read for everyone: Of course it will be offensive to the strong theists. But, for anyone who's just swaying away from the absolutism attached to religion, it will certainly help and enable them start drifting farther away from religion and closer to rationality - All for the good.

I might personally want to see religion eliminated from the face of the earth; But, it is even more complexly interleaved than even Dawkins himself projects.

Let's hope there's light, sometime soon, if not spontaneously!

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
Albert Einstein

07 December, 2010

Dawkins dawns Darwin upon me

Of the few important people who have had substantial influence on me, Professor Richard Dawkins is the latest addendum. He comes late, but will certainly have (had?) a profound impact on my frame of thought. I am the most and wholly conformed to him than any other intellect I revere. And I have reached that state of conformity after checking up all the arguments he presents in a convincing manner, as encouraged by him.

I am yet to read him ( will soon start to), but have watched almost all of his talks and certainly all of his documentaries. While watching him talk in the convincing attempts of elucidating obvious facts about life and nature, which are easily ignored under the blanket of religion and other correlated fallibilities; And also while tackling the absurdity spilled by ignorance; I can recognize a portion of my own longing and aspirations in him. Prof.Dawkins has already inspired me to take up the cause which he has worked his entire life: To stand up for the truth, substantiated by reasoning and evidence.

Personally, I have gradually grown to be an ardent atheist in the last few years. The obvious conflicts of reasons like the supernatural, destiny, after life and miracles were long conquered by my own attempts of understanding, facilitated by Science all along. But, the usual conflict any atheist would have to face: Hurting the 'feelings' of the believers in quest to cognizance, was keeping me from taking a strong public stand.

Prof. Dawkins has guided me through this process of equipping myself to take a strong stand, even if I supposedly hurt the feelings of others. These 'feelings' weren't to be there at the first place; People who realize it and shed the carapace of irrationality would not feel hurt.But, the adamant and reluctant ones who fail to understand and comprehend the grand truth professed by Science ought to be brought out of the delusion, and if it takes to hurt their unreasonable feelings ,then better we shatter those.

Facts, sometimes are obvious with all the evidence scattered all around us. We still fail to recognize them and stay blind. This sort of voluntary blindness, would transform to become the foundation for a deepening state of ignorance. This is a peril which would not only affect the individual, but will go on to hamper the entire society.
Tackling such atrocities from the root would require the activated ones, or the atheists to spread their religion of truth and reason; And as Prof.Dawkins calls it, we need to endorse Militant Atheism, by which he implies that we go out and speak up, take a stand and counter the religious fanaticism with loud truths, facts and reasoning of Science.

Clarification: I was a Darwinian even before Prof.Dawkins happened to me. The post title seemed better put the way it is.

PS: Some of the best things ever said, and here's all of my favorite by Prof.Dawkins

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”


"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."


“Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity”


"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."


"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."


More on http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org/

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