R K Sudan's Blog (10)

This is a creeper – a plant belonging to the gourd family. As the name suggests, it creeps along gripping at supports like grass or branches of another tree / shrub. The head grows spreading its tentacles that grow rapidly and grip another body for movement. Curiously the head always stays upright and clear of the ground. The thread like tentacle having fine bristles all over it is so sensitive that it behaves like a conscious entity.  It seems like consciously floating its pointed end in…

Continue

The Invention of God: The Natural Origins of Mythology and Religion by Bill Lauritzen

In this book Bill Lauritzen postulates a brand new theory of Invention of Gods by the Homo sapiens. His theory is that primitive people might hav…

Continue

The common viewpoint and generally accepted definition of consciousness is “awareness of the self or I”. This concept of “I” makes most of the confusion related to consciousness. Honestly, I haven’t so far been able to understand, accept or deny, or define this phenomenon which even science has just started studying and philosophers have always found difficult to handle.…

Continue

Why We Believe in God(s) by J Anderson Thomson

A Review.

At the first glimpse one wonders why this 140 something page small format book was brought out in a book form when all this could well have been…

Continue

Recently I came across this interesting research article by Benjamin Libet in Journal of Consciousness Studies (http://www.imprint-academic.com/jcs) captioned "Do we have a Free Will?” Libet, with the help of experiments, shows that our intention to act starts some time before we actually become aware of it. That points towards the fact that humans may not have a…

Continue

The 8.9 Richter earthquake of 11 march 2011 afternoon and subsequent tsunami which devastated most of Japan has raised before the world a moral and scientific poser on the issue of safety of nuclear plants. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant has since become a cause for concern because of fears of a nuclear meltdown and leakage of radiations from the reactor owing to a failure of the designed cooling system. The fission reactor (Mark 1…

Continue

Atheists don't have any particular belief system or an ideology of sorts. Recently discussing this with a friend I faced queries like why then was this suffix 'ism' in atheism, or what atheists believed in if there was no belief system in atheism? “That means you don’t believe in anything” was his reaction and then said in a lighter vein, “Nihilist perhaps”.

 

Atheism…

Continue

It is a normal practice for a theist to attribute everything to god from creation of the universe to its day to day running and finally destruction. His attitude towards science is that it should prove that there was no such thing as god. That shows a crisis of confidence in the theist mind.

Science believes in inquiry and experimentation in order to validate something.…

Continue

In today's market driven environment anything that has takers, sells. For any business endeavour or collective public initiative to succeed you either have to have ready takers or need to create them. Theists can sell concepts easily because of an existing universe of takers of their products but for atheists there exist none. And to find takers you need to go searching for the needy. Then find contributors who will support your efforts. Once that is done watch out for the competition lurking… Continue

Dr Binayak Sen

 

First, he is handed down life imprisonment under some 125 year old and obsolete sedition law and now his bail pleas stands rejected by the Chattisgarh  High Court. That is the funny case of Dr Binayak Sen's. The prosecution alleges that the searchers couldn't find a stethoscope from his place and he professes to be a medical doctor! How funny?

 

If a case is built on such findings then Mr Ramjethmalini's assertion that it was “a case of no…

Continue