Articles

Article of the Week: What Scares the New Atheists

Please ignore the title of the article, while you are reading this post. I will explain the reason at the end.

The article I have chosen for this week is one which critically examines atheism, or at least the version of it that gets practised by the most aggressive, vocal proponents of the idea. It doesn’t get into the usual debate of religion vs. atheism, or what religion/atheists can or cannot explain about our world. Rather it tries to see atheism for what it is – well intentioned, like most religions in their idea forms would be, but with its own set of flaws, inaccuracies and irrational reverence for its current ideologies.

The author starts by reminding us of the early 20th century atheists who denounced religion for all its irrationality, but upheld the racist ideas of their time, not merely in passing, but by elevating them to the exalted status of being scientific.

It is a warning to the “missionary” atheists of today “aiming to convert humankind to a particular version of unbelief.” The particular version of unbelief treats liberal values in the same scientific vein as its predecessor treated the theory of racial superiority.

The attack is not on the liberal values, but the author contends that there is no reliable connection between atheism, science and liberal values. Atheists’ ideologies have often been used by despotic regimes, claimed to be based in science. Can there be a “science of good and evil” as these atheists would like to believe? Can science validate  values such as human equality and personal autonomy? As it happens, these quintessential liberal values have their origin in religion.

Although the focus of the article is on explaining how the fear of religious resurgence is driving atheists to a panicky, extreme response, for me that is not the most important takeaway from it. I don’t, in fact, know if I agree or disagree with this. That’s why I asked you to ignore the title of the article for the time being. What is fascinating for me is putting atheism in its proper historical and current context, which can propel atheists to think about their “obvious” truths and motivations more critically. While they may be good, they aren’t necessarily “scientifically” obvious.

Read the complete article on The Guardian here.

Article of the Week: Human Behavior in the Face of Disaster and Loss

How do you expect a man to behave when his wife and children are trapped in the debris of his home after a devastating earthquake? What about people whose spouses, children and parents are  dead? Would they like it if camera people were out to capture the dead?

The experience in the field can be chilling. It is a short piece by Manu Joseph based on his experience of covering Bhuj earthquake in 2001. It came to my timeline as a reaction to another devastating earthquake that has hit the humankind in Nepal.

Warning: It can be deeply disturbing.
Request: Don’t judge people. Try to make sense of their plight and coping mechanisms.

Read the complete article on the journalist’s facebook page.

Article of the Week: You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile… by Luke Malone

If I have to summarize the article, it will say something like this:

Pedophilia is an illness before being an offence. If we could treat the illness, ideally before it results in offence, wouldn’t we create a safer society for our children?

Not all pedophiles, that is,

an individual who “over a period of at least six months” has “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” This person also has to have “acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” and be “at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children” involved.

abuse children. Not all those who abuse children are pedophiles; many of them are opportunity offenders.

What we have to realize that many pedophiles, that is people who are sexually attracted towards children, often against their better judgement, have nowhere to go. The taboo and legal disclosure requirements are so strong, that most therapists also either do not know how to or cannot handle treating pedophiles. Many pedophiles find themselves in a situation where if they seek help, they might be ostracized or punished even without having hurt anyone.

So, society comes into picture only after an offence has been committed, in the form of viewing child pornography or an actual abuse. And then we have strict laws to punish the offender. Problem? Deed is done. A child has been harmed. In most cases, there have been multiple victims because abuse has gone undetected for years.

We do really need a more proactive approach by helping pedophiles before they become offenders. They need a place to go, they need help in managing their condition!

The article has many stories, of pedophiles who are supporting each other so that they don’t hurt anyone.

An upfront warning – it is deeply disturbing. But let’s not be ostriches. The problem is real.

Read the complete article on Medium.

Article of the Week: Borderlands by Kai Friese

The beginning of the article is capable of challenging Tolstoy’s “All happy families are alike.”

ALL NATIONAL BORDERS ARE IMAGINARY. But some are more imaginary than others. And perhaps some nations are more imaginative too.

It is customary to spout platitudes about nations, their glorious histories, their heart-stirring national anthems, their national characteristics and their bitter-sweet relationships with neighbours. So much that we tend to forget that nations are often accidents of history and there is nothing natural about them. Nowhere is it more apparent than the border areas, where a casual ink stroke has separated families and societies and natural economy arbitrarily into two nations, where it is impossible for people to live by  national ideals (and isolations) that inlanders in their comfortable homes and stable lives rejoice in.

As if an arbitrary boundary wall is not enough, there is the absurdity of chit mahals on India-Bangladesh border.

There are some 200 chhit mahals in all,  approximately 106 pockets of Indian territory inside Bangladesh and another 92 the other way around. Some are “counterenclaves”: an island of Bangladesh surrounded by India, surrounded by Bangladesh (or vice versa), and one, called Dahala Khagrabari # 51, is an Indian counter-counterenclave or, in the jargon of border management, an “adversely held third order enclave.” India inside Bangladesh, inside India, inside Bangladesh.

And there are valid reasons of “national” politics for why the situation has not been remedied and people are stuck with their disconnected nationalities (and hence lack benefits, papers, identities and rights!). Na khuda hi mila, na visaal-e-sanam* is what it reminds me of.

People are killed, raped and mutilated in the normal course of the day – visiting their families and carrying out trade that makes perfect sense for the area, but which national ideals have declared illegal.

Read the entire story of borderland dwellers on n+1 magazine.

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* I neither found God, nor achieved union with my love.

Article of the Week: Dr. Raghuram Rajan’s speech on Democracy, Inclusion, and Prosperity

The question that Dr. Raghuram Rajan, governer of RBI in his professor of political economy avatar, asks is

But how do countries ensure political freedom and economic prosperity? Why do the two seem to go together? And what more, if anything, does India have to do to ensure it has these necessary underpinnings for prosperity and continued political freedom?

Dr. Rajan starts by explaining Fukuyama’s three pillars of a liberal democratic state

  1. Strong Government: Strong government does not only mean one which has great military power or effective intelligence against enemies, but one that can provide effective and fair administration too. Dictatorships are usually weak governments. They can terrorize their citizens, but not provide good governance.
  2. Rule of Law: Government’s actions are constrained by rule of law, which might be enforced by religious, judicial or moral authority.
  3. Democratic Accountability: Government has to be popularly accepted.

Strong governments do not always move in the right direction.

Hitler provided Germany with extremely effective administration – the trains ran on time, as did the trains during our own Emergency in 1975-77. His was a strong government, but Hitler took Germany efficiently and determinedly on a path to ruin, overriding the rule of law and dispensing with elections.

Both rule of law and democratic accountability are needed to steer a strong government on the right path. (Why both? Read the explanation in the full text of the speech.)

Dr. Rajan then goes on to introduce a fourth pillar in his discussion – free enterprise.

Why are political freedoms in a country, of which representative democracy is a central component, and free enterprise mutually supportive?

It isn’t quite obvious that they should be. Democracy treats everyone equally. Free market system does not. Income and property decide an individual’s power in a free market system. But despite this difference there are certain circumstances in which they go hand and in hand.

(To) the extent that the rich are self-made, and have come out winners in a competitive, fair, and transparent market, society may be better off allowing them to own and manage their wealth, settling in return for a reasonable share of their produce as taxes. The more, however, that the rich are seen as idle or crooked – as having simply inherited or, worse, gained their wealth nefariously – the more the median voter should be willing to vote for tough regulations and punitive taxes on them.

The key, then, is level playing field. When there is a perception of fairness in competition, inequality does not breed resentment. Democracy and free market support each other by giving everyone the opportunity.

The level playing field, however, is easier hoped than achieved.

(In Western democracies) quality higher educational institutions are dominated by the children of the rich, not because they have unfairly bought their way in, but because they simply have been taught and supported better by expensive schools and private tutors. Because middle class parents do not have the ability to give their children similar capabilities, they do not see the system as fair.

This is something India needs to be careful about. Right now we are moving in the direction of providing level-playing field to more and more people by giving access to education. But it would not automatically remain so.

In the concluding part, Dr. Rajan makes an interesting point about India’s political situation. He is of the view that (despite many shortcomings), the checks and balances on the government is not in a bad shape. The rule of law and democratic accountability is functional here. But strong government is still wanted. This is a situation unique to India because in most parts of the world, strong governments have emerged first and checks and balances have followed.

Let me emphasize, we need “checks and balance”, but we should ensure a balance of checks. We cannot have escaped from the License Permit Raj only to end up in the Appellate Raj!

Read the complete speech on scroll.in.

Article of the Week: Cognitive Celebrity by Matthew Francis

Einstein was – like all of us – a bundle of contradictions, someone who behaved well sometimes and badly at others. As a world-famous scientist, he had a louder amplifier than an ordinary person, but if we expect a genius to be somehow fundamentally different from the rest of humanity, studying Einstein’s life and opinions will disappoint.

And as is always the case with scientific geniuses, Einstein’s theories would exist even if he had not. Special relativity, general relativity, and the photon model of light might not have been developed by the same individual, butsomeone would have sussed them out. Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz and others worked out much of relativity before 1905, just as Gottfried Leibniz independently worked out the calculus in parallel with Newton, and Alfred Russel Wallace developed natural selection in isolation from Charles Darwin. Historians of science once subscribed to a ‘Great Man’ theory, but we now know that transformative ideas emerge from the work of many talented individuals, instead of emerging ex nihilo from one brilliant mind.

Read the complete article: Cognitive Celebrity by Matthew Francis

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