Wasn’t Vivekanada a homosexual partner of his guru the guy who used to worship Kali (the blood thirsty Hindoo godess who appears in the nude in most of avatars.

It is really shameful that such people like Vivekanda are the Gurus of Hindoos and it is precisely because of this reason that India is so backward.

Hindooim is a cancer on this earth that needs to be eradicated soon.

Praise Yeshua who only saviour of mankind!

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The most wonderful thing about Jesus’s followers is that they are loving, caring people. Christianity, the ideology of Jesus’s followers, is a loving creed. Here’s Thomas Jefferson’s loving review of Christianity.

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is – in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree… Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt…The gospel history of Jesus consists of fabrications, superstitions and fanaticism… I consider the book of Revelation, the ravings of a maniac…. Due to Christianity, millions of innocent men, women and children have been burnt alive as witches.

Don’t you just feel the love oozing out of Christianity!

Neitzsche had said, “it is not their love for us but their lack of faith that prevents today’s Christians from burning us.”

Jesus’s followers would love you to death — literally — if they could get away with murder.

“Should the pope resign?” No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly – ideally – qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

A leering old villain. An evil corrupt organization. A profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution.

Wow! And wow again!!

“The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree . . . yeah, makes perfect sense.”

That hypocrisy. Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonised theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable “mystery”, or who see God in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God “suffering on the cross” in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Where was God in Noah’s flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for “sin”. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock, stock and barrel, as punishment for “sin”.

“Oh but that’s the Old Testament. No one believes those stories literally any more. The New Testament is all about love.” Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated, gentle Christian, you cannot be serious. Your entire religion is founded on an obsession with “sin”, with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the odious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus’s incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the “sins” of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the “sin” of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

Yes, I know you hate the word “scapegoat” (with good reason, because it is a barbaric idea) but what other word would you use? The only respect in which “scapegoat” falls short as a perfect epitome of Christian theology is that the Christian atonement is even more unpleasant. The goat of Jewish tradition was merely driven into the wilderness with its cargo of symbolic sin. Jesus was supposedly tortured and executed to atone for sins that, any rational person might protest, he had it in his power simply to forgive, without the agony. Among all the ideas ever to occur to a nasty human mind (Paul’s of course), the Christian “atonement” would win a prize for pointless futility as well as moral depravity.

Hats off to you, Mr Dawkins. May your tribe increase.

I hope you will take the time to listen to this video (there’s really nothing much to see), and if you would please help raise public consciousness about the topic. As Sam Harris says, “how we criticize, or fail to criticize, the religious beliefs of other human beings at this moment has an extraordinary significance for the maintenance of civilization. It could well be the most significant variable that is in our power to influence.” Please do take some time to listen to Harris.

India is likely to face some very major stress — centered most likely on resource scarcity such as water, food, or energy — in the not too distant future. When that happens, the split will be along religious lines. The government is etching even more deeply the religious divisions within society. It should keep us awake at night at the thought of the deaths of innocents by the millions that could easily be the result of the inevitable division caused by the cynically manipulative actions of the government. Then there’s another thought: didn’t these people themselves choose all these Congress governments which over the decades has been creating the conditions for the slaughter to come.

It’s all karma, neh?

Related Post: The Problem with Atheism. (Jan 2008)

“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is – in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree… Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt …The gospel history of Jesus consists of fabrications,superstitions and fanaticism… I consider the book of Revelation, the ravings of a maniac…. Due to Christianity, millions of innocent men, women and children have been burnt alive as witches.”

Postscript: Pankaj Narula has cast doubts in a comment below on the authenticity of the quote. It appears to be a composite quote. I will do a follow up on this post in a short while. I regret the error.

Bill Maher is not everyone’s cup of tea but I absolutely enjoy his shows. He pulls no punches when it comes to ridiculing monotheism. But then you may say it is an easy job considering that monotheistic religions are ridiculous. Here’s the opening paragraph of a Salon.com review of the movie:

What if there was a religion, asks comedian Bill Maher, in which an all-powerful god from outer space decided to send his unborn son on a suicide mission to planet Earth? So this space-god impregnates a human female in some mystical, not-quite-physical fashion, and she gives birth to a baby who is both a human being and a divine incarnation, simultaneously the space god’s spawn and the space god himself. (Oh, space god also has a third manifestation, one that’s totally invisible.) So space-god junior is born on Earth destined to be killed, even though he’s a space god and therefore immortal.

Read the rest of the space-god story in the New Testament (aka the Bible). Check out the Old Testament and the Quran (Koran) for the other versions of — to borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins — breathtaking inanity.

India, being the land of people who are more Catholic than the Pope and more Mullah than the Ayatollahs (remember, India banned “The Satanic Verses” and thus set in motion the reward for the murder of Salman Rushdie), there is no chance of “Religulous” being shown in theaters in India. The government would not allow it. Only books and paintings denigrating Indic religions are allowed by the “secular” government of India.

So I do my best to counter the “secularism” of the government of India by ridiculing monotheism.

A bit more from the Salon review below the fold.

Excerpts from the interview with Bill Maher:

You’ve been pretty consistent on TV and in your stand-up routines in criticizing Islam, in arguing that the religion and its followers really have a problem they don’t seem to be dealing with. You go after Islam again in this film, and you aren’t especially delicate about it.

No, you can’t be. You can’t pull your punches, and you wouldn’t be respected if you did. We show a little of the Theo van Gogh film ["Submission," which apparently led to the Dutch filmmaker's murder by an Islamic radical], which is pretty rough stuff. You see that woman with her face all beat up, saying, “This is what my husband does to me in the name of his religion.” And we talk to a number of Muslim people and you hear me saying that I think when they talk amongst each other they’re more honest about the predicament of their religion, but they won’t say it to a stranger. I’m sure some of this is going to ruffle feathers, but you know what? The Christians don’t love what we say about them either.

You’ve been called anti-Muslim from time to time. How careful are you, do you think, about raising criticisms that don’t cross the line into prejudice and stereotype?

I don’t think I’m involved with prejudice. Prejudice comes from the words “pre” and “judge,” and I don’t think I’m prejudging. I’m judging. I reserve the right to make judgments. We all have to make judgments.

At the shining bright core of our galaxy of ideas lie a bunch of super-massive ideas that are tightly bound to each other. The core’s gravitational attraction holds the galaxy together, draws in stuff and transmutes them into higher elements.

Exploring the metaphor a bit further is interesting. At the center of galaxies dwell huge black holes which destroy both matter and time. And like the great god Shiva — the Mahadeva as Nataraja, the king of dancers, dancing the Tandava, the cosmic dance of creative destruction — the galaxy core produces novelty and thus advances the evolution of the entire galaxy. Black holes, just like Shiva, destroy time. Curiously, the Sanskrit word for time is the same for black: “kala”. The universe evolves because ceaseless change is imposed upon it through the dance of creative destruction.

Evolution. It is hard to escape the gravitational pull of the idea of evolution. The idea goes back into antiquity. But it was only recently (in terms of historical time) in the mid-1800s that Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) pondered the biological variant of evolution and figured out the mechanism. It was natural selection. That is one of the superstar ideas that populate the core of our ideas galaxy. Everything that is known about biological evolution can be explained through natural selection.

Natural Selection

Darwin had patiently observed nature and cataloged a heap of facts during his voyage on the HMS Beagle which ended in 1837. Then another idea pushed him to an inspired guess on the mechanism which produced the diversity of species in the world. That idea came from a professor of political economy and Fellow of the Royal Society, Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834).

Malthus had considered the matter of how societies function and concluded that the struggle for food is critically important. The competition for food would result in winners and losers. Populations would increase till the standards fell to subsistence levels for the most fecund segment of society. The biological imperative to reproduce as profligately as possible lead inexorably to a situation where natural resource limits are reached and the weakest sorted out of the race. At the center of the drama of life was competition for resources.

Darwin had observed the natural world, pondered the evidence, and read Malthus. That’s what he needed to figure out natural selection. But then so had another contemporary of his: Alfred Russell Wallace (1823 – 1913). Like Darwin, he studied the natural world, pondered the puzzle of the diversity of species and he too had read An Essay on the Principle of Population (final revision published 1826), by Thomas Malthus, and arrived independently at natural selection. Darwin was about to be scooped by Wallace and rushed to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859.

Competition

The centrality of competition in the natural world is immediately understandable to anyone who has observed nature. Economists appreciate the power of competition and it is not surprising at all that natural scientists like Wallace and Darwin incorporated competition in their explanation of the biological world. (Darwin and Wallace were competitors!) They realized that there was no divine designer involved in the creation of variety in the natural world. There was no grand planner and consequently no grand plans.

The biological world evolves autonomously. There was only competition for resources and the universe was supremely indifferent to who were the winners and who the losers. Natural selection is the mechanism which all living systems rely on for their evolution.

The twin ideas of evolution through natural selection and competition are inseparable. I find it unsurprising that the central organizing principle of biology owes something to economics.

It should be noted that natural selection and competition are descriptive rather than normative features of the world. We are merely noting how things are, and no claim has been made so far on how they ought to be. The universe is neither moral or immoral; it is amoral. That eventually it gave rise to sentient beings that are capable of making moral judgments is itself a result of amoral processes.

In the rest of this essay I will argue that from a certain perspective, competition is good. That is clearly a normative statement and requires some support. My claim is that it is very significant that competition leads to outcomes that are on balance good and desirable.

Only Likes Compete

Let’s leave the biological world aside and for now focus only on the world of artifacts and manufactures. I am writing this on a laptop and using all sorts of hardware and software tools. I consulted the wikipedia, searched using google, used Firefox and Chrome. The tools keep improving. The Microsoft internet browser, Internet Explorer, was born retarded. Relentlessly, the competition has forced it to become much better. Why? Because in the struggle to survive, it has to compete. Absent competitors, Microsoft would have little incentive to invest resources in making IE better.

The iPod was pretty cool when it was first introduced. Yet the constant improvements that Apple made to it were not altruistically motivated. Today’s iPods are better than yesterday’s. Look around and note that improvement and competition go hand in hand. Note that where competition is prohibited, things don’t get better; they don’t have any reason to.

Let’s keep in mind that only likes compete. Only those entities that occupy the same ecological niche compete against each other. Predators compete with other predators; prey with other prey. Toyota does not compete with Pepsico or with Microsoft. Google competes with Microsoft, not with Delta Airlines. More generally, on one side of the market, producers compete with other producers, and on the other side of the market, consumers compete with other consumers. Producers and consumers don’t compete in the marketplace.

Producers Must Please

It is very important to understand this point. It is fatally wrong to imagine that producers compete with consumers. Socialist thinking is born dead because it does not understand that. Socialists imagine that the producers interests are opposed to the interests of the consumers. This is wrong. Producers and consumers appear to have divergent interests — producers want to sell as dearly as possible and consumers want to buy as cheaply as possible. To maximize the appeal of its products to consumers, however, a producer has to produce quality products and price them such that it wins against competing producers.

{I swear on everything I consider sacred and dear to me that I am not making this up. While I was writing that last paragraph, I received a spam message which begins thus:

See what I mean?}

Note this down. Producers don’t compete with consumers but rather producers compete for consumers. Producers compete with other producers for consumers. It is that competition that drives innovation and that is what evolution is in the artificial world of things. Competition in the world of things is fine and good. But what really matters is the competition in the world of ideas. Ideas trump things. The evolution of ideas through competitive pressures leads to innovation. That is what accounts for all human progress. I’ll come back to that shortly.

Societies that permit producers to compete develop good products. All monopolies are therefore harmful for society. It does not matter if the monopolist is a public firm or a private firm. If the producer does not face competition, it has no need to improve. Examples are legion. But just as an example for those who are familiar with India’s post-colonial history, consider the evils of Nehruvian socialism which restricted most competition in the private sector, and in many important cases created public sector monopolies. The result was widespread impoverishment of the economy and legendary levels of poverty. Material poverty in India is unquestionably the predictable outcome of not allowing competition.

Freedom from Control

Why the government did not allow competition is fairly easy to state. Monopolists collect super-normal profits (which economists call “rent.”) Rent-seeking by those who control the levers of government makes public sector ownership of important sectors of the economy very attractive. Furthermore, by handing out licenses to private sector firms, the government makes sure that it restricts competition in those sectors that would be the most valuable for extracting rents. The government of India thus directly controlled activities such as railways, power, steel, telecommunications, etc., directly and indirectly though license, quota, and permit requirements, controlled other aspects of the economy such as manufacturing, and services.

India is one of the least economically free countries in the world. You don’t need to go consult any well-researched academic report to conclude that: you merely have to walk around India with eyes open. The obvious poverty and economic backwardness could not be the result of economic freedom. Four out of five Indians subsist on less than $2 a day. That’s 800 million people — more than the combined population of the US and EU.

Want another telling piece of evidence that the Indian economy was (and indeed is still is) a slave economy and not a free one? Well, have you heard the prime ministers of India talking about impending or on-going “liberalization” of the economy? Surely, if the economy were not enslaved, there would be no reason for anyone to claim that they stand for freeing the economy. One would be very surprised if any Hong Kong politician were to proclaim that he would liberalize its economy because HK is already free.

Free people don’t need emancipation. Free economies don’t need liberalization.

India is apparently politically free (except for foreigners influencing India’s political fortunes), but India is not economically free. And until it becomes economically free, it will continue to remain what used to be called “underdeveloped” and which is now euphemistically called “developing.”

Ideas trump Things

So what exactly is the foundation on which a free economy rests? Free ideas. If you are free to think and free to express the results of your thinking, it leads to wealth. The preceding discussion about competition holds in the arena of thought. The heterogeneity of humans implies that different people will have different ideas. These will compete in the ideas space just as vigorously as products compete in the products space.

Gautama, the man who became the Buddha, said that all compound phenomena are impermanent and therefore all things must pass. I would add that all things are imperfect. Biological things evolve through natural selection and diversify and become “fitter.” All human-created things are imperfect but tend to become less imperfect as a result of evolution in the product space. Compare today’s cell phone with one of just a decade ago. Ideas — the product of human cognition and rationality — too are imperfect and tend to become less imperfect as the machinery of competition refines them.

The way to kill progress is to monopolize the production of ideas, or even worse to prohibit the creation of new ideas. The US is a shining example of a society which allows and encourages ideas. (There will always be aberrations from time to time, but I am speaking broadly.) The ideas compete and thus evolve. The better mouse trap is produced by a better idea about mouse traps. The browser continually gets better because somewhere someone is thinking up better ideas. Free people produce innovation because free people compete in the plane of ideas.

The Failed World

They call advanced industrialized countries the “first world.” There is another world which I call the “failed world.”

Contrast the American society (and more generally the Western European society) with its polar opposite: the Arab world. First fact: they are abysmally poor in general. Material poverty is endemic. There is a wealthy segment of the Arab world but that is not earned wealth. They did not produce it; due to a geographical accident, they found that they were sitting atop oil. But remember that the oil was fairly worthless till the non-Arab world developed the technology for using oil.

What prevents the Arab world from developing? It is their ideology. It is an ideology that is limited to what was known to a bunch of fairly ignorant people in the Arabian peninsula (even by the standards of 7th century CE world.) That ideology claims that it had been created perfect and therefore it cannot be ever improved upon. In fact, it prohibits at the pain of death any changes in it. All its ideas are frozen in time, and it arrests the development of any society that falls prey to the ideology. If one were to segregate and isolate the Arab world from the rest of the world, the Arab world will never see any innovation or progress. It is the constant infusion of goods (not ideas) imported from outside the Arab world that maintains it even at the low levels of existence. Without this “aid”, it would rapidly regress to the conditions that prevailed in 7th century Arabia.

India and its neighbors

Closer to home (speaking from an Indian perspective), there is a natural experiment that occurred in the Indian subcontinent. India used to extend to the east and west of present day India. Many centuries ago it even included Afghanistan, then a place of great learning and prosperity. Islam defeated the land centuries ago and now it is a place known better for relentless war and crushing poverty. Afghanistan is so poor that India sends it aid. Just a few years ago, the people of Afghanistan even destroyed the remnants of their illustrious past — the Bamiyan Buddhas — because Islam decreed it.

In more contemporary times, India’s borders shrank further with the creation of Pakistan (and Bangladesh.) The population of all three countries are similar in many respects and naturally so because they occupied the same geographical niche for millennia. Yet the fortunes of Pakistan and India have diverged significantly in the last half century. For all practical purposes, it is a failed state about to implode. That it lasted so long is thanks to the geopolitical strategic games of the post-cold war era. Now that Pakistan has outlived its use for the US, the US is discarding it with all the finesse of handling a used condom. What distinguishes India from Pakistan and Bangladesh is that they are Islamic states and therefore rigidly wedded to an ideology that does not permit ideas to flourish.

Market versus Command-and-control

What distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful economies of the world is that the former are market-driven and the latter are command-and-control. By market driven is meant that there is competition among buyers and competition among sellers. This competition among producers and consumers is not limited to just the product space but extends more importantly to the ideas space. Exhibit A: the former Soviet Union and other communist states. They controlled what was to be produced by whom and in which quantities and when. More damagingly, they controlled who was to think what. Result: economic collapse.

Communism is an ideology that prohibits free enterprise. It wants a monopolistic control of the entire economy, not just bits and piece of it here and there. And it wants the monopolistic control to be in the hands of a select few. The same with monotheism. There is only One True God ™ and there is a book which has every truth eternally recorded in it, and the founder of the religion has absolute control over it for eternity, and no novelty is allowed. There is only one Lord and everyone has to submit to it — both in the here and in the hereafter. Submit now so that you can get your rewards in the hereafter. Pay now, travel later. Good to be in control of such a great scheme.

Monotheism

Monotheism in the ideas space is the equivalent of monopoly in the economic space. They are supremely harmful.

The market system, in contrast, has no central controlling authority. It is most significantly a marketplace of ideas. Sure many of the goods bought and sold are things, not ideas. But look under the hood, and you will see that the engine is an idea. All things are born first as ideas.

The market, like the dominant Indian faith, has millions of gods. There is no one authoritarian, vengeful, cruel god that you have to obey or else you get eternal punishment handed down from it. The non-monotheistic gods are like a competitive marketplace of ideas.

How did the Americans succeed in creating a market economy when traditionally they are followers of a monotheistic faith? They did that because the founders of the country were smart and built a wall of separation between the state and the church. It is the United States of America, not United Christian States of America. Some in the US are busy trying to bring down that wall but I am pretty confident that it cannot be done.

How about Western Europe? They don’t have a wall. True they don’t have the wall but they just ignore religion. They don’t need the wall because they are too smart.

The End

So where does all this lead to? Economic freedom is critically important for economic growth, which in turn is the basic for development. As long as a monopolistic control is in place — whether the State or monotheistic faith — there will be no marketplace for ideas. Lacking a marketplace for ideas, there will be no competition. No competition would mean no evolution and no innovation. No innovation means that progress will be impossible. But populations would continue to grow and bump against natural resource constraints and end up in a Malthusian trap.

Note that a marketplace where ideas compete is itself an idea, and it is a fertile idea. Monotheism is also an idea but it is a dead idea. It marks the end of all ideas because it prohibits a marketplace for ideas to compete in. It imposes a monopolistic control over human minds which is more pernicious than its control over the human body.

At the core of human civilization are a set of ideas so powerful as to thrill the prepared mind and give meaning and purpose to life. The idea of enlightenment and freedom expounded in the Indic philosophies like Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism are the philosophical equivalent of the Western ideas of free markets and economic freedom. The two are natural allies and complement each other, just as monopolies and monotheism are natural allies and have similar outcomes in their respective fields.

Free markets and economic freedom is humanity’s destiny. Liberation from monopolies is as assured as the liberation from the prison of monotheistic mental prisons. It may take some time, however.

Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshiping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die–on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.

That’s quote is from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

It is the arrogance of the believers that lead to unimaginable horrors. The followers of monotheistic religions have to have that arrogance to believe that they are the sole possessors of truth and that their god is the only one worth worshiping.

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco writes:

They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.

It was that faith unencumbered by doubt that moved monotheist armies to slaughter “the heathen” in foreign lands. Convert or die, was their battle cry as they put to the sword those who didn’t subscribe to a specific monotheistic belief system.

The Religion of Peace still goes around slaughtering non-believers. But times have changed for the other religion of peace and now it sends out a kinder, gentler set of invaders. Their armies seldom march these days. Their arrogance is undiminished, however. These days they come to your land and tell you that you are living in an area of darkness and that they bring you salvation if only you would see the light. One such worthy, the papa from Italy, showed up one Diwali in India and told Indians that they should prepare to be saved.

Meanwhile his most famous handmaiden had been busy for years preparing for the coming salvation of India. The spectacle of the Indian government giving her a state funeral is truly disgusting. She was merciless in her insistence that no painkillers be administered to those who were dying under her care because suffering saved their souls.

She claimed that she was doing it for their own good. It was C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) who pointed out that

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It is depressing to contemplate the misery that those faithful inflict on people who have never meant them any harm. It is enough to lead one to despair.

But humans are not all equally evil. So I will conclude this one with the words of Lao-Tzu, the legendary wise man (words which Russell quoted as an epigraph on his work Proposed Roads to Freedom.)

Production without possession,
action without self-assertion,
development without domination.

What else would one expect from the followers of Christi-insanity? Their scriptures teach them hatred and intolerance of all non-monotheists. Let me just cue up Pat Condell (who perhaps coined the term “christi-insanity”) and let him rant on my behalf on the insanity of the monotheists and their murderous ways. Here’s “The Tyranny of Scriptures.”

I wonder when humanity will become free of the curse of murderous madness of monotheism.

In a world running out of cheap energy and clean water and farmable land and harvestable oceans, the stakes are too high to accord any respect to intellectual and moral laziness in any realm of knowledge.

Sure, we all believe in a wafer of some kind to make sense and meaning of the world, and I’m incredibly fortunate that my bulwark against the darkness is science.

I thank you for writing this post, because it’s impossible not to be part of this conversation (although many mistakenly imagine they are “above” it), as it is the invisible undercurrent of every conversation and touches every public and private decision.

This is the principle conflict of our time, and we better figure out that this is the real enemy (not teenage terrorists in pajamas in a desert 12,000 miles away) before the lights start going out.

The recent New Yorker cartoon lampooning the right-wing’s portrayal of the Obama’s as secret revolutionaries and closet Muslims — should be shocking in its accurate portrayal of the right-wing as utterly un-American in its values, let alone un-human. But this isn’t what the current conversation on the cartoon is remotely about.

Even in its simple-minded mythology of broad-brush homilies, America was built by revolutionaries seeking religious freedom who had no respect for nationalist impulses, standing armies, aristocratic exceptionalism, corporatist thugs, or a specific flavor of god. For a while we were those ingenious Yanks.

I’m beyond tired of the inroads made by right-wing and religious fanatics who can’t perform basic human functions, like write a song, solve a quadratic equation, tend a garden, love a partner, steward even their own small portion of the world without utterly savaging it, and raise children to do the same.

I have revolution in my blood and I think you should, too. I’m not going to give the world to thugs in uniforms (police state or church) with wafers and magically-written texts who’ve spent the last decades (I’m thinking of Jimmy Carter’s 1979 speech) ensuring that the basic science we needed to be doing to get to energy independence, with efficient solar cells and fuel algaes and fusion, would be here now. [Edit: The last sentence is garbled but the idea comes across that had the science been done, by now the US would have had energy independence.]

It’s not merely that these people are not on our side. They’re committed to a path that destroys the enlightened parts of the world and impoverishes what’s left. They send women home. They kill gays. They burn libraries. They close schools. They believe god should be in government, shellfish are an abomination, and anybody who disagrees should be stoned.

Jung wrote a great deal about the religious function. It’s time you scientists started to understand, as the economists are finally beginning to understand, that we are not a rational species, and absent considerable assistance, we make lousy decisions.

PZ Meyers gets this, and is willing to step outside the ivory tower of soft-toned elitist disagreement and go toe-to-toe, on an almost daily basis, with these ignorant creeps in the language they understand. Somebody has to fight the slime mold in the basement or it takes over.

Both of your voices are needed, but please do not add your voice to those who hit him from the rear.

So here’s some news of the weird that fits the bill. It comes from the University of Central Florida. (You have to take what you get — even if that is half-way around the world in some godforsaken state.)

‘Body Of Christ’ Snatched From Church, Held Hostage By UCF Student, reads the headlines.

Many people don’t know it but some Christians, especially the Catholics, have a cannibalistic ritual. They eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood. You can’t make this sort of sh**t up. It’s called transubstantiation. They believe that the bread and wine literally turn into flesh and blood. Pretending that that is true is bad enough but then they proceed to eat it. Doing anything else other than consuming it and passing it though the human digestive system is considered the gravest of sins. Go figure.

So here’s the short summary of the events. A UCF student takes the cracker (the body of Christ) and instead of eating it, saves it to show to a friend. Church officials try to take it back from him. He goes home and preserves it in a ziplock bag. The faithful start a campaign against the student and threaten him with violence. PZ Myers at Pharyngula posts a commentary saying it’s a frackin’ goddamn cracker.

PZ wrote:

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It’s like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

And now PZ is getting death threats from Catholics and some are merely writing to his school’s president asking that PZ be fired (PZ is s a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota.)

As a comment on Pharyngula puts it

1. Poor kid takes home uneaten eucharist to show his friend.
2. Church and catholics go batshit crazy.
3. PZ thinks this is ridiculous and says so, also says he may do some things to a cracker.
4. Church and catholics go batshit crazy.

Monotheists are stupidly insane. They riot over teddy bears named Mohammed and over someone not eating a cracker in church. But in between all their murdering and plundering, they do provide some comic relief from time to time.

Update: ‘Body Of Christ” Returned To Church After Student Receives Email Threats. Nice bit of intimidation there. Right out of the book they call the Holy Bible.

That last point is worth underlining. I am for or against ideologies, not people. I judge the people for how they behave, not what they fundamentally believe in. To lend support for my assessment of a certain ideology, I will have to point to specific actions by individuals or groups that acted in accord with the dictates of that ideology. I am given that opportunity by the actions of the followers of the ideology and is not something that I invent on a whim. If the facts I choose to highlight are in dispute, I’d like to be corrected. Otherwise I would like to hear an argument why the ideology cannot be judged, first, objectively without reference to actions; and second, by noting the consequences of the ideology as evidenced by the actions of those motivated by it.

Now on to other substantive matters.

By the time one has outgrown one’s childhood, most people without cognitive impairment figure out that one cannot eat one’s cake and have it too. We intuitively realize that there are trade offs in our universe: you either eat the cake and not have it, or you have your cake only if you resist eating it. Being unable to appreciate that basic principle is indicative of a mental defect. In very small children, it is cute to observe how they misapprehend the world but in adults that same behavior is pitiable.

Not everything that needs our attention can be attended to because we are finite creatures with finite resources. We have to prioritize things and then depending on our assessment of the urgency and importance of the things that need done, we sequence our actions. Not everything is equally urgent, or equally important. Some things are important but not urgent. The house burning down is urgent; getting daily exercise is important. Leaving the house to burn down because you have to get your routine jogging done is stupid.

The ability to make distinctions and see differences is absolutely critical. Perceiving the universe as one indistinguishable whole with no boundaries or distinctions is a wonderful mystical Zen experience perhaps but in our daily living we need to distinguish the benign from the malignant, the useful from the useless, the healthy from the diseased. We do that as a matter of course as it is ingrained in our genes: like all other living things, we are the descendants of a very long line of ancestors each of whom was successful in making that distinction long enough to mate and procreate.

We humans differ from other living things in one significant way: we live in a world of ideas, not just a world of things. Ideas can also be broadly characterized as benign, malignant or neutral. The same can be done for an ideology which is essentially a collection of ideas. The theory of evolution — like all scientific theories — is also an ideology, just like capitalism, or communism, or any other ism. Ideologies, like things, can be grouped and their characteristics examined. Any specific religion is an ideology. A group of related religions can also be examined as an ideology. Judging the goodness (however defined) of any ideology is no different from judging the goodness of things.

I have made the case that ideas matter elsewhere before and I am sure to do more of that later. But for now I will focus on religious ideologies only.

All religious ideologies are not created equal. They differ naturally because they were created by different people under different geographical and historical circumstances. Religious ideologies are contingent and don’t have any absolute existence, unlike say the ideology of the theory of gravitation. If you did the right inferences from observation, you would arrive at the same theory of gravity as someone who lived in a different land at a different time.

The major monotheistic ideologies were born in the Middle East and they share the same lineage. Their family resemblance is unmistakable. Judaism came first; the Christians acknowledge the Jewish bible and added their own two bits; then Islam came along and plagiarized bits from the preceding two and added its own twisted bits to it. Every age and every place that has been touched by the monotheistic ideology has suffered profoundly from its malignant influence. It has killed, raped, burnt, pillaged, and destroyed whatever it can. Not content with merely killing non-monotheists, it has encouraged its followers to turn their rage against one another. Sibling rivalry, perhaps. But the history books are full of rivers of blood shed by mutual hostility between Protestants, Catholics, Shias, Sunnis, and all of them at some point or the other against the Jews. Though Christianity and Islam are descended from Judaism, the Jews are held in special contempt by the followers of the other two. A Darwinist may explain that by saying that they all occupy the same ecological niche and hence the bitter rivalry.

But they are not equally vicious. The Jewish god is a monomaniacal savage but he does not command Jews to go out and kill the others. His world is restricted to the Jews and how he controls them. The Christian god is a much meaner god. He created a hell for non-believers and instructed his followers to go out and either convert or kill those who don’t follow him. A few hundred years later, the Islamic god upped the ante and instructed its followers to basically kill everyone who refuses to submit to him until the entire world is enslaved to him.

The sequence of origination ensures that the ideology which came later had the opportunity to revile the earlier one(s). Islam labels Jews and Christians monkeys and pigs; Christianity condemns Jews for having the blood of their savior on their hands. There is a progression of increasing violence in the three monotheistic ideologies.

One reasonable explanation for the savagery of Christianity and Islam is that they were invented by savages. They lived in a brutal and brutalizing environment. They lived in a dog eat dog world where worldly pleasures were few and far between. Their god is a reflection of that mentality that brutalizes humans and humanity. A brutalized male dominated warring society living in harsh conditions could not conceive of a god that was loving. The fantasies of a paradise which can only be described as an impotent man’s wet dream figures prominently in Islam.

How anyone can believe in a god of the monotheists is a fascinating subject. That god is literally unbelievable. This is widely recognized by the monotheists themselves — those who believe in the Islamic god vehemently reject the Jewish and Christian god, the Islamic god is unpalatable to the Jews and the Muslims, and the Christian god is idiotic in the opinion of the Jews and the Muslims. Each comprehends the utter stupidity of the other two, and non-monotheists arrive at the logical position — the logical union of the three views — that monotheism is utter stupidity.

What distinguished monotheism from other religious ideologies is that it is supremacist, exclusivist, and triumphalist. That attitude finds it most extreme expression in Islam — it claims it is perfection in every sense, no other ideology can be permitted to exist, and it will ultimately conquer every human for eternity. The non-monotheist religions are cautious and hesitant. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism all claim to be correct but also make allowances that there are multiple ways and that different people will see the world differently. They are willing to accommodate other points of views, and other ways of living. But to the ideology of Islam, there is only one way and if you refuse to willingly submit to the dictates of Islam, you have to be subjugated and if need be, annihilated.

The followers of ideologies are humans. Human action is motivated by a wide range of impulses and incentives, not just ideologies — religious or otherwise. It is not too difficult to determine what the prime motivation may have been for a certain action. The kamikaze bombers of the second world war may have been Buddhists but the Buddhist ideology was not the prime motivator for their suicide missions. It was not an adherence to the principles of Buddhism but rather their allegiance to the Emperor and the nation that moved them. Stalin and Mao murdered scores of millions for a political ideology and not for their being atheists. They were bad people doing what came naturally to them as followers of a certain ideology.

Steven Weinberg has said: “Without religions, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But it takes religion to get good people to do bad things.” I would generalize that observation: Without ideological motivations, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But to get good people to do bad things requires bad ideologies.

So why am I writing about religious insanity in a blog which is about economic growth and development? How is religion relevant? Let me elaborate on why I think religion matters and why more importantly the ideology of Islam matters to India’s development.

As I have said before, all ideologies are not created equal. Some are benign and can be safely ignored. The Pastafarians will not sic their Flying Spaghetti Monster god on me if I call them ridiculous for their ridiculous beliefs. Well never mind the FSM as it was meant to parody monotheism. How about if I call Buddhists a bunch of retarded egg-heads and call the Buddha a dried shit stick? Not a problem. At worst someone may challenge me to a dharma duel which I could easily win by smiling stupidly as I make some seemingly profound statement like “what is the sound of one hand clapping” or “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

These days you can mock all ideologies — religious or secular — except one: Islam. Scribble something on a piece of paper and regardless of where you are and whether or not you have broken any local laws, Islam can and will take offense if it so pleases. That is usually followed by some of the faithful flying into a murderous rage (which is different from murdering people by flying planes into buildings) and setting out to kill you.

I object to an ideology that responds to criticism with violence and murder. Yes, the ideology has the response encoded within it. It is not the invention of the followers. By not allowing criticism, it forces a stop to human progress because it will not allow any idea — religious or secular — to survive if it is not consistent with Islam. This is why most countries where Islamic ideology is dominant do not figure in any area of science, technology, arts, and entertainment. Pretty much everything we know about the universe was discovered after the 7th century and therefore all that Islam could possibly know (and knows) was (and is) bounded by what was known by essentially ignorant people in the desert in the 7th century. So if Islam is allowed to dominate India today — today when it has finally emerged after a thousand years of servitude — it will be a disaster. What sort of disaster? Well, look at Pakistan and Bangladesh — those parts of the Indian subcontinent where Islam has triumphed.

Ideologies matter. Observe the differing performance of the differing ideological groups from the Indian subcontinent in Western nations. That is a natural experiment the results of which clearly demonstrate that Islamic ideology hinders the development of people because it prohibits precisely those freedoms that are most critical in human development and growth.

The ideology of Islam matters to today’s India and it has done so for around a thousand years. Will Durant, an American historian summed it up this way. ““The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in History. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown barbarians invading from without and multiplying within.”

The partitioning of India was based on that ideology of Islam. The Muslims of colonial India voted that they cannot co-exist with non-Muslims because their ideology did not permit that. The creation of Pakistan (and subsequently of Bangladesh) was the direct and unavoidable result of Islamic ideology. Thereafter, the constant state of war that exists between the three fragments can be reasonably traced back to the Islamic ideology of dividing all humanity into the land of Islam and the land of the kuffars. The millions of lives lost over the centuries continue to be added to every year — sometimes in bloody wars and more regularly in a war of thousand cuts of random acts of terrorism. Resources that could have been used in alleviating the misery of its poverty-stricken population, India is forced to use instead to buy weapons from the advanced industrialized nations to deter Pakistan from declaring and fighting one more of the Thousand Year jihads.

Being in a constant state of war with Pakistan is without doubt one of the reasons that India is miserably poor. I should hasten to add that it is not the only reason. Even without the existence of Pakistan, I am sure that some people would have figured out other ways of keeping India poor. And indeed they did. I have, for the same reason that it keeps India poor, opposed socialism and communism. But the Islamic specter haunting India is making the job that much harder. As the on-going conflict with Pakistan is religiously motivated — just like the partition of India was — I find it hard to evade the conclusion that India would have been much better off if it did not have to contend with Islam.

So now for the objections that prompted this essay. I agree that stupid people vandalizing property because of some offense they have taken is a matter of concern. But that is bad people doing bad things. None of the Indic ideologies (Jain, Buddhism, Hinduism) lend the least support to violence against people merely because of what they believe in or profess. I would worry about it but I would not lose my sleep over it. It is neither urgent nor important in the overall scheme of things. I could rant and rave about it but there are more pressing things that matter to me.

Which brings me to the point that I had made earlier in my response to Alpana in the previous post.

Alpana, it is a division of labor. You deal with what you consider to be the most pressing issues and I will do likewise. Our assessment will be different since we have different viewpoints. Besides, given that all tasks are not equally urgent or equally important, we have to prioritize and pick out battles. Complaining that I don’t balance out every instance of Islamic intolerance and terrorism I report on this blog with an instance of Bajrang Dal or Shiv Sena intolerance and mayhem is stupid at best. They are orders of magnitude different in their frequency and impact. And besides, like I have mentioned before, I am writing about a particular religious ideology and then illustrating the consequences of that ideology when it produces the natural result. Please feel free to do the same using your choice of religious ideology — I suggest Jainism as they are rarely taken to task and it has never been called a religion of peace. I am sure that you will have lots to write about Jain terrorism.

I know that I have a bias which reflects my personal history and upbringing. For instance, I am a non-Muslim and therefore my view of Islam is that of an outsider — an outsider whom Islam considers to be a little less than filth. As I was born to Hindu parents, I am a Hindu. As a Hindu I am quite familiar with the faults of Hindu society and I am critical of any bits of the ideology that is irrational and stupid. Fortunately, Hinduism is flexible enough that you can pick and choose the bits that appeal to you and reject the rest with nary a thought. For instance, I like the ideas behind the idols — the symbolic representation of the gods — even though I am not a theist.

Not only am I biased but I know that I am biased. I am not an impartial observer. I am partial towards rationality and reason. I don’t think tales of people rising from the dead and people flying off on their horses to the moon make any sense at all. Only those who don’t really understand what the world is clearly understood to be can entertain such idiotic notions. I think that anyone who seriously believes that the books that the monotheists follow were dictated by god — an omniscient eternal omnipotent being — is dumber than a doornail. Heck, those books are so full of nonsense and factual errors, that even a reasonably educated person living a thousand years before they were written would have known better. For instance, that the earth was a sphere was known since antiquity. Yet the authors of those books were clueless — they did not even have what is fairly common information. The so-called omniscient being apparent only knew what was known to ignorant desert nomads.

I have spent the last two hours writing this because I have had it up to here with the pseudo-secularists blaming the victims for the harm that is ideologically motivated and is unacceptable in a civilized society. I realize that it will not make me popular with that crowd because what I wrote will stick in their craw since they cannot factually refute any of the statements I made above. Their position is generally a fine mixture of illogic and ignorance — the antithesis of what I stand for. (It’s my blog. I can write this with only a hint of humor.)

So Ms Alpana, yes, India can break up in a civil war. It is quite possible. But to understand the likely cause, I would refer you to the previous break which was in the making for centuries but happened around 60 years ago. Examine the causes and it may give you a clue about the next one.

It’s all karma, neh?

On a related note, the Guardian.co.uk reported that (as of Feb 17th), “180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet” from the Wiki page on Muhammad have been made. I assume that these were followers of Islam who made that demand. Islam forbids the depiction of Muhammad because it could lead to idolatry — that is worshiping of Muhammad — and Islam calls for the death of all idolaters.

Yes, the followers of Islam if they so choose should not depict Mohammed or any other living creature. But demanding that non-Muslims follow the dictates of Islam is patently idiotic, and ridicule and derision should be heaped on attempts at controlling others.

Here’s a clue to those clueless retards that want to control others. You are not required by law — human or physical — to go check out any material that is not consistent with your ridiculous belief system. If you don’t like to read something or watch something because it offends you, then don’t do it. Just read or watch or listen to what you don’t find offensive. Don’t like a novel? Don’t read it. Write your own which suits your taste and follows your religion’s dictates.

Let me remind you. I find your belief system offensive and inhuman. (Don’t thank me. I am merely returning the compliment. Check out what your “holy” books say about my belief system.) But I would not presume to tell you not to practice it in the privacy of your own home. I don’t call for the ban of your “holy” writings that the majority of humanity finds offensive. Yes, however millions of Pastafarians exist, there are more non-Pastafarians. And that goes for the followers of every other religion — including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Let me also remind you that the world is a pretty big place. It is much much bigger than could be conceived by the writers of the “holy” books who lived and died their whole miserable lives in a desert in the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago. They thought that what they could see from the top of their camels is all that the universe was. Nope, the world is much bigger. Other people have other ways of living and thinking. Believing that the entire world was just a huge freakin’ desert where everyone must do everything exactly the same way is retarded and unimaginative.

It is stupid and dangerous insanity to want to dictate to others how they should live under your religion’s prohibitions. Let me give you an example. To most Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists, killing cows and eating them is offensive and against their religion. Would you support a worldwide ban on the slaughter of cattle? If not, why not? What makes your ban any more reasonable than the ban on something that most Indians find offensive?

Grow up. It is way past the 7th century and we are no longer in the Arab peninsula, Toto.

The Wikipedia team told the wackos who want to control what is published on the web to shove it but did it very politely.

Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.

So long as they are relevant to the article and do not violate any of Wikipedia’s existing policies, nor the law of the US state of Florida where Wikipedia’s servers are hosted, no content or images will be removed because people find them objectionable or offensive.

See, there is a place outside of the desert and it is called Florida and there is a time called the 21st century that is not the 7th century. Sweetie, if you are offended by something that you have no reason to be able to control, then it is your problem, isn’t it? Can’t you get it into your pointy little head that YOU are the one who is taking offense — others have better things to do than go around offending you.

Live and let live, my preciouses.

This ends my little rant. But wait, there is more. Here’s Christopher Hitchens on YouTube. It is part of a debate on free speech in Canada in November 2006.

Hitchens (the author of “God is not great: How religion poisons everything”) is great. An Englishman who became an American citizen a few months ago. What is with these Englishmen? You have Hitchens, and Dawkins, and Pat Condell. Condell’s rants on religion are amazingly lucid and hard-hitting. Here are two for your watching pleasure. As Condell says, “Peace.”

NOTE NOTE

Follow up to this post is here.

That’s Bertrand Russell holding forth on the idiocy of revealed religions. I am quoting him here because I feel it is time I paid more attention to what is going on with the mad monotheists (I know, redundant) are doing to wreck the world.