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Episode 5 of the Nirmukta Radio Podcast features two pre-recorded online conversations that I put together. The first one is between myself and a couple of activists in India- Prof. Narendra Nayak, the president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations and Rakshi Rath, a co-editor at Nirmukta. Professor Nayak talks about his tours and recent television appearances. We also discuss a couple of contentious topics that came up on the forums. The audio quality of this first conversation is pretty bad because of the technical limitations (on the India side of the conversation, me being in the US at present) that we were working with. We are terribly sorry about the quality of this first part of the podcast. The second conversation is between myself and Hemant Mehta, the author of I Sold My Soul On Ebay and creator and author of the Friendly Atheist blog. Hemant and I talk about his work with the Secular Student Alliance (he was the Chair of the Board of Directors at the time of the recording), an organization who’s mission, according to the website, is as follows :

The mission of the Secular Student Alliance is to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics.

This episode of Nirmukta Radio will be the last of this series. I’ve had a blast recording my conversations with the leaders of the Freethought movement, putting them into the podcast format and bringing them to the Freethought community in India. But it is time for the podcast to grow and represent what Nirmukta has grown into. Starting next month, September 2010, we will be posting a new series of Nirmukta Radio Podcasts, featuring an entire team of panelists and a new and exciting podcast format. We will discuss news and opinion on the issues that relate to science, skepticism, atheism etc.

Thank you for listening to the Nirmukta Radio Podcast. Nirmukta Radio is a production of Nirmukta.com. Music is Te Laudant by Cryptocrat.

Editor’s Note: The following messages is from Dr. Vijayam, Executive Director of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada.

We are  happy to inform you that  the 8th World Atheist Conference will be held at Periyar Educational Institutions at  Tiruchirapalli city (also known as TRICHY during the British time) in Tamilnad, India  on JANUARY 7, 8 and 9, 2011 (Friday, Saturday and Sunday).

The details will be informed to you soon.

We cordially invite you to the Conference.

Gora, (1902-1975) founder of Atheist Centre conceived the idea of the World Atheist Conference and held the first Conference in 1972.  In Post Gora period the the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh World Atheist conferences were held at AtheistCentre, Vijayawada in 1980, 1996, 2005, 2007 and 2009 respectively. The Third World Conference was held at Helsinki in 1983. Now Dr. Veeramani, Chancellor, Periyar Maniammai University, leader of the Draviadrar Kazhgam movement and the Rationalist Forum of Tamilnad, invited to hold the Eighth World Atheist Conference at Tiruchirapalli.

Tiruchirapalli city is overnight journey  from Chennai. It is 337 km from Chennai Egmore Station and a number of trains pass through Tiruchirapalli . All Trains from Chennai to Madurai and Kanyakumari pass through the city.

Tiruchirapalli has an international airport. Even if you land at Chennai, you can come to Triruchirapalli by Indian Airlines flight  or by train or  bus.

If you need any other information, please write to us. The theme of the Conference and the Registration details of theConference will be informed to you in the next mail.

Looking forward receive for a positive response from you.

With warm greetings

Yours humanly

Vijayam

Dr. Vijayam, Ph.D.,

Executive Director, Atheist Centre &

Editor, Atheist Monthly

Benz Circle, Vijayawada 520010, INDIA

www.atheistcentre.in

atheistcentre@yahoo.com

positiveatheist@gmail.com

Tiruchirapalli Railway Station

Bihar is one of the largest and most populous states in India. It also happens to be the most backward. However, the state has had a relatively glorious past. Bihar is well known for its intellectual achievements right from the time of Buddha. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi started his freedom struggle from Motihari in this state. One of the most well known movements of the post independent India against the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi was started by Jayaprakash Narayan who was a Bihari.

In spite of such a progressive history, Bihar has become a state riddled with superstitions and obscurantism. For the past five years we have been associated with running a campaign in Bihar to inculcate scientific temper among people. It all started when a Minister of State for Science and Technology of the Government of India and the Member of Parliament from Navada, Sanjay Paswan, honoured tantriks at a public ceremony. Read the full story

Nirmukta has recently crossed the 1000 member mark on facebook, and our team has decided that its time to celebrate by hosting an online event! This event will be held on Saturday, the third of July, at 7:00 PM, IST. All you will need to participate in the event is to go to http://tinychat.com/nirmukta at the scheduled time and sign in using twitter or facebook connect.

Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, will speak to us live on the influence of worldview naturalism. He is the the author of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and its Uses, and has written various papers and articles on the influence of the naturalistic worldview on our lives. You can read more about Tom’s work at http://naturalism.org and on his blog at http://centerfornaturalism.blogspot.com/.

Go here for a Naturalism FAQ. Here is an excerpt:

Q. What is naturalism, anyway? And keep it straightforward!

A. Ok, naturalism is simply the understanding that there exists a single, natural, physical world or universe in which we are completely included. There are not two different worlds, the supernatural and natural. Since we are completely included in the natural world, there’s nothing supernatural about us. For instance, we don’t have immaterial souls that survive after death. We are fully physical, material creatures, and everything we are and do can be understood without supposing that we have souls, spirits, or any other sort of immaterial supernatural stuff inside us. Your thoughts, experiences, feelings, decisions, and behavior are all things your brain and body does. How they do all this is of course a very complicated story that’s still being discovered by science, but naturalism says there’s nothing non-physical involved. That the material world has produced creatures that are conscious, can reason, feel emotions, and ask questions is a pretty amazing fact. The “merely” physical isn’t so mere after all. Naturalism re-enchants the physical world.

During our conversation with Tom Clark we will explore some of the major implications of worldview naturalism on concepts such as god, religion, morality, justice, free-will, retribution, consciousness, etc. Since this will be a live streaming event, questions can be sent to us in real time through twitter and chat. Relevant questions from listeners will be selected and posed to Tom Clark throughout the entire duration of the event.

Date: Saturday, July 3rd, 2010, 7:00 PM, IST.

Venue: http://tinychat.com/nirmukta

Our twitter account: (for sending us your questions) http://twiter.com/nirmukta

RSVP on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=120028841375938&index=1

Scroll below image for login instructions and known issues with tinychat.

Designed by Bala Bhaskar

Read the full story

Yeah we realize the title is not very imaginative coming on the heels of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, but wait till you hear all our reasons for why we think you should participate in this particular celebration of free speech and expression.

Read the full story

Tamilnadu, formerly known as Madras State, is where the Self-Respect Movement was first started by E.V.Ramaswamy in the early years of the twentieth century. It was for the first time that the so-called ‘lower castes’ rebelled against the hegemony of the Brahmins, and started a movement that rejected all superstitions, religious rituals and the highest superstition of them all- god! In this state whichever party comes to power has to conform to the ideology of EVR Thanthai Periyar as he came to be known. So, in this state one can expect the ideology of the rationalist movement to be accepted without any significant opposition.   Read the full story

The team of activists at Nirmukta have two big announcements to make. These announcements carry certain important implications for the future of organized Freethought in India.

Before getting to the announcements, here is a statement explaining our use of the words ‘Freethought’ and ‘Nirmukta’. The word ‘Freethought’ is a fairly well-defined term to denote a point of view that rejects dogma, tradition and authority in favor of reason, logic and science. As a category it forms an umbrella term that incorporates social, political and philosophical modalities such as skepticism, rationalism, empiricism, naturalism, humanism, atheism, secularism and so forth. The word ‘Nirmukta’ is a Sanskrit word that means ‘Freed’ or ‘Liberated’. It is often used to describe a state of mind when one is liberated from the unenlightened ideas and repressive social conditions that bind us, keeping us from realizing the true splendor of reality. Nirmukta is freedom from dogma.

The Announcements:

I. The first announcement is about the newly formed Nirmukta Advisory Board.

As regular readers will know, the Nirmukta team has plans to register Nirmukta as a non-profit organization in the near future. There will soon be management and advisory roles to be filled on a permanent and official basis, but until then the Nirmukta Advisory Board is an unofficial solution to facilitate organization and planning. The board will coordinate the work through regular online meetings and frequent discussions on the forums.

At present the Nirmukta Advisory Board consists of:

1. Prof. Narendra Nayak - President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA)

2. Dr. Prabhakar Kamath - Founder of the Consumer Rights Movement in India

3. Shobhit Gupta - IT Professional living in Florida, coordinating the Media Network.

4. Rakshi Rath - PhD student in Psychology, filmed Prof Nayak on his recent tour.

5. Siddharth Singh - Social Networking Director and Associate Editor of Nirmukta.

6. Pankaj Kulkarni - Software Executive from Bangalore. Coordinator for Nirmukta Bangalore.

7. Babu Gogineni - International Director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)

8. Ajita Kamal - Founder, Editor and general coordinator of Nirmukta

II. The Nirmukta Advisory Board has approved the appointment of Dr. N. Bala as the National Coordinator of Nirmukta, on a temporary basis until the organization is registered. Dr. Bala is one of the coordinators of the Orkut group, Atheism in India, which has over 2000 members. He is also the creator of IndianHumanist.org and is an active participant in the Nirmuka Bangalore regional group. Dr. Bala will work in concert with the Nirmukta Advisory Board.

Looking Ahead

The Nirmukta Advisory Board is working on two broad areas of interest.

1. Media Network - We are putting together a team of websites, journalists and writers, programmers, designers, artists, filmmakers and PR people to help form a network of media resources with the agenda of promoting Freethought in India. We have already held two meetings, and a report on the progress of the media network will soon follow.

2. Regional groups - The online organizational work at Nirmukta will run parallel with on-ground activism, beginning with the establishment of regional groups across the country. Although there are many rationalist groups in India, we feel that there is a need for a nation-wide network of groups that connect young and progressive Indian Freethinkers. Our Bangalore group is the most active one at the moment, although we are seeing interest from Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai.

Dr. Bala will begin acting in his capacity as coordinator, contacting individuals and groups across the country. His appointment helps bring the vast atheist community on the Orkut Atheism in India group together with the members of the Nirmukta facebook group, the Carvaka group on facebook, the Indian Atheists fan page on Facebook and the Indian Atheists group on Atheist Nexus, all of which have been under Nirmukta management since their inception.

Our plan is to build a large online coalition for Freethought in India. Join us, the movement needs you!

Email Us:

General Inquiries contact, Ajita or Siddharth: info@nirmukta.com, siddharth@nirmukta.com, ajita@nirmukta.com

Coordinating with Nirmukta contact, Dr. Bala : drnbala@nirmukta.com

Media Network related questions contact, Shobhit : shobhit@nirmukta.com

Video/Youtube related inquiries contact, Bala: videos@nirmukta.com

Note: This announcement has also been posted on the forums here. Please join us on the forums and become part of the Indian Freethought community.

Nirmukta Forums (nirmukta.net) Wallpaper, by Bala. (Click on Image)

In countries like India where goddess worship is prevalent, the argument is often made that such superstition actually helps the cause of women’s rights. To feed the flames, more than a few Western feminists (such as Kathleen Erndl, Sarah Caldwell) have suggested that women in India should embrace these superstitious notions and derive strength from the myths, in order to the counter real prejudice that they face everyday. I disagree with this notion on two levels. Firstly, I don’t think that it is, in practice, possible to separate ‘good’ superstitious beliefs from the ones that are responsible for increasing suffering in society, since these are inter-dependent irrational sets of beliefs that defy logic. Secondly, these superstitious beliefs about goddesses and fairies prevent us from gaining a better understanding of the problem and finding stable long-term solutions based on reason. Furthermore, other feminists like Cynthia Humes have shown that there is a difference between the view of women as goddesses and the experiences of the majority of ordinary women in these cultures. Studying the reasons for this difference is, in my opinion, key to understanding gender inequality in such cultures.

I submit that the goals of the Freethought movement are aligned with those of the women’s rights movements in these countries, and that therefore there is a practical reason for Freethought groups to actively promote the feminist cause. Read the full story

Here are some news items.

1. Nirmukta Forums- The Only One Of Its Kind In India: Nirmukta.net, our very own online discussion forum for the Nirmukta Freethought Community, was launched successfully last Monday, the 5^th of April, 2010. Membership hasn’t sky-rocketed yet, but it is increasing steadily. These are the only privately hosted forums that deal exclusively with issues concerning the freethought community in India, as far as we know. Given the size of the country and the number of IT professionals that it produces, the potential for activism and community-building at these forums is all the more important. Read the full story

12 March 2010:

Right after the Annual Conference held in Kolkata, our Bankura branch has jumped into action. A tribal girl, Putul Tudu aged 12, was to be given away in marriage against her will. This is not only illegal in India, but unethical and inhumane as well. On the 9^th of March this year our secretary from Bankura, Biplab Das, and another member, Tarun Rakshit, visited the remote Housibad village amidst the jungles of Taldangra and managed to stop the wedding.

Famous Bankura Art

Biplab Das informed the police and had the girl rescued. It is not common among tribals to marry so young. Also, tribal youths normally choose their own partners with each other’s consent. This was an exceptional case, probably urged by extreme poverty.

Within two days Biplab Das and his friends got the girl admitted to the local Taldangra Girls’ School and also managed to get her hostel accommodation. The hostel, Kasturba Gandhi, offers residence to local girl students at a nominal cost.

This incident will act as a precedent and deter other such stray incidents in the poor tribal zone. The village panchyat will also be able to take similar steps whenever necessary. Congratulations to Biplab and his assistants Tarun and Prasanto!

Sumitra Padmanabhan
General Secretary, Humanist’s Association of India