Introduction:

Every so often when reading books of non-fiction written by great thinkers you come across one that you find yourself hoping is wrong about the multitude of depressing facts it presents. Line after line, this is the emotion that Meera Nanda’s latest book, “The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu”, evokes. Beginning with post-independence India, Nanda walks us forward in time, pausing at influential points in the story to build a bullet-proof case for her central assertion that- in her words- “Globalization has been good to the Gods in India”. While it is a fast and thoroughly engaging read with all references relegated to the back pages, the sheer quantity of facts is still overwhelming at times.

Since my position on Nanda’s work is familiar to most followers of this website, I will present this review in an unconventional format. I will first describe the structure and content of the book. Then I will present some popular criticisms. Read the full story

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After years of debating over the Internet (they rarely debate outside), believers and non-believers have finally reached a consensus on something about God: God is incredible.

The Learning Curve is a comic strip published by Siddharth Singh. The above work was originally published here.

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Thanks to Karen Armstrong, the author of The Case for God, we religious people FINALLY have a powerful strategy for combating reason. Contrary to its title, the book does not make a case for God at all. The story Ms. Armstrong lays out is, in actuality, the most succulent red herring that we can throw down to protect religion from critical thought. This is the basic idea: Atheism causes religious fundamentalism.

According to Ms. Armstrong, before science came on the scene people did not have any desire to know the ‘facts’ about reality. All pre-enlightenment Christians viewed the stuff in the Bible about Adam and Eve, the devil, the queers, the adulterers and the son of god, as metaphors for states of emotional well-being. They assigned no factual significance to all of this, until the atheists came along and forced some religious people to start understanding the scriptures as literal truth. Thus, atheists (and science itself) gave birth to religious fundamentalism!  The same goes for all the world’s religions. Thanks for your awesome revisionism, Ms. Armstrong. In my religious apologetics I have always wanted to employ Karl Rove’s strategy of going for your opponent’s strength while ignoring the facts. Read the full story

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I published an article ‘A Scientific View of the God Delusion and its Implications‘ online at Nirmukta in July 2009. The drafting of this article (started long ago) was spread over a few months, and I had completed the writing by June 2008. I had emailed it to a large number of my colleagues and friends, mostly scientists, inviting their reactions. I present here a summary of over one year of data collection regarding their responses. I list the responses in a decreasing order of frequency. Read the full story

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Life for us is pretty convenient nowadays. Much of this convenience could be attributed to technology that is involved in our lives to such a great extent today that we almost take it for granted. You wake up thanks to the alarm on your cell phone (even better is the snooze feature that lets you extend your sleep), travel in A/C fitted vehicles with LCD screens while listening to your favourite Floyd song on the move, run programs or generate “process related” reports (although most of it is crap!) on your laptop/ desktop at work. You can speak to your friend in Scotland while gyming, put him on hold and pick your girlfriend’s call thanks to your cell phone (which has other less important features like GPS, GPRS, MP3 playback and a whole range of 3G features) . You can download music, movies, chat, shop, pay bills, book tickets, bank/ trade online, have virtual avtaars, network with people with the help of internet. You can travel long distances in the comfort of flights or save your company some bucks (and for what!!) by using tele/ video conferencing facilities. The things I’ve mentioned above are pretty common and one would feel ‘handicapped’ in a sense if some of these facilities were not accessible to him. I’ve not even started with smashing protons, QED, Mars missions, telescopes peeking into the birth and death of stars thousands of light years away from Earth, AS50, ICBMs, F1 technology……this thing could be endless!! Read the full story

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(Note: This is the first part in the series on Complexity. Please read Part 2 and Part 3)

Humans wonder about the origin of life on the Earth. For most of us it is difficult to imagine how life can arise out of no-life, so we tend to think in terms of a Creator who created not only life, but also everything else. This is not a satisfactory answer for a rationalist. It so happens that a satisfactory answer can indeed be found within the ambit of the scientific method of posing and answering questions. The problem is that since most people have not been brought up in an atmosphere of free enquiry, certain scientific truths become hard to accept. This is particularly true about the irrelevance of the God concept. Another problem is that some scientific ideas are difficult to understand and explain, and may sometimes require a lifetime of training and practice. One solution to this problem is that scientists should do their best to reach out to the public at large, and explain science to them in a simple language. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Jayant Narlikar are some notable examples of eminent scientists who have been doing that. Read the full story

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Update: The title of Meera Nanda’s upcoming book will be “The God Market: How Globalization is making India more Hindu” and not “God and Globalization in India” as previously reported. The book will be published by Random House later this year. This post contains the full text of the introduction, except for the chapter outline and personal notes.

Introduction: God and Globalization in India

Meera Nanda

India had its own “why do they hate us?” moment after the city of Mumbai came under attack in late November 2008 by a bunch of gunmen with links to terrorist outfits based in Pakistan. Many in India answered the question much the same way George Bush famously explained the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States: Islamic terrorists hate us because we are good and they are evil; we are free and democratic and they hate freedom and democracy. Some took this rhetoric even further and argued that we are good, free and democratic because we are a Hindu nation, and the Islamists hate us because we are Hindus.

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