“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.”

-Steven Weinberg

“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are.”

-Eckhart Tolle

1. Introduction

The impulse to see human life as central to the existence of the universe is manifested in the mystical traditions of practically all cultures. It is so fundamental to the way pre-scientific people viewed reality that it may be, to a certain extent, ingrained in the way our psyche has evolved, like the need for meaning and the idea of a supernatural God. As science and reason dismantle the idea of the centrality of human life in the functioning of the objective universe, the emotional impulse has been to resort to finer and finer misinterpretations of the science involved. Mystical thinkers use these misrepresentations of science to paint over the gaps in our scientific understanding of the universe, belittling, in the process, science and its greatest heroes.

In their recent article in The Huffington Post, biologist Robert Lanza and mystic Deepak Chopra put forward their idea that the universe is itself a product of our consciousness, and not the other way around as scientists have been telling us. In essence, these authors are re-inventing idealism, an ancient philosophical concept that fell out of favour with the advent of the scientific revolution. According to the idealists, the mind creates all of reality. Many ancient Eastern and Western philosophical schools subscribe to this idealistic notion of the nature of reality. In the modern context, idealism has been supplemented with a brand of quantum mysticism and relabeled as biocentrism. According to Chopra and Lanza, this idea makes Darwin’s theory of the biological evolution and diversification of life insignificant. Both these men, although they come from different backgrounds, have independently expressed these ideas before with some popular success. In the article under discussion their different styles converge to present a uniquely mystical and bizarre worldview, which we wish to debunk here. Read the full story

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A new compilation of essays by atheists from around the world, titled “50 Voices Of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists“, is to be released soon. The book contains essays by two of our contributors, Sumitra Padmanabhan and Prabir Ghosh, and is edited by Australian writer and bioethicist Russell Blackford, and Udo Schuklenk, philosopher and bioethicist at Queen’s University in Canada.

Excerpts from the promotion email sent to Sumitra Padmanabhan by Russell Blackford:

“Hi, folks - this is to alert you that 50 VOICES OF DISBELIEF: WHY WE ARE ATHEISTS will soon be appearing in bookshops. The official publication dates are 9 October in the UK (and Australia) and 9 November in the US….. The back cover carries excellent endorsements from Johann Hari, Ariane Sherine, and Jerry Coyne…….

The book is also available for pre-order on Amazon and Amazon UK, and, for whatever it’s worth, has been holding down pretty decent rankings so far especially for a book from an academic publisher that hasn’t even been released yet. The book’s Amazon page is here.” Read the full story

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A Rational Response To Shashi Tharoor.

Shashi Tharoor, one of the diplomats in contention last year for the position of U.N. Secretary General, recently wrote a series of articles in the Times of India and The Huffington Post, criticizing the Hindu extremists in India who violently protested the conversion of poor and disenfranchised Hindus to Christianity. These three articles (1,2,3) by Tharoor echoed the standard liberal-Hindu positions on religious tolerance - popular ideals among Indian intellectuals.  Here is my response to Shashi Tharoor.

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A couple of days ago I had sent out an email to the subscribers and contributors at Nirmukta, notifying all of you of the posted article containing my interview with James Randi.

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Hello. This section of Nirmukta will record the content development and behind-the-scenes action at the web site. Not that the articles themselves are not entertaining in their own right, but we thought that a running commentary could be justified given the context. Objective statements about some of the quaint beliefs talked about at Nirmukta can barely skim the oceans of amusing observations possible. This blog page will, however, plunge right in.

Now that I’ve justified the necessity for this blog, lets get to business. As a rule, older languages are usually more ambiguous in their interpretation than recently evolved ones. This being true for Sanskrit, Nirmukta can be twisted to mean many different things. The meaning we use here is “freed”. “Liberated”. It is meant more as a state of being than as a verb. Freed of irrational belief in the supernatural AND the subnatural. What, then, am I? A Nirmuktan? Wonder if I can divine the answer to that.

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