Created Sunday 02 May 2021
I was fiddling around the web, searching "whether telling kids to not lie" is a productive or not. Because they don't understand why it is so and may show compulsive behaviors, after being unable to keep up.
Then I web-searched if seriousness or being serious is something we can do(I mean instantly), because I think it is vague and undefined, focused would be a better word.
Then, idk how, I searched if non-religious people are more honest, given they question(and should therefore, ideally, reciprocate honesty). I didn't have the word non-religious, so I searched the question w.r.t "atheists". The word used is irrelevant here.
This lead me to this article(which is awesome, I had only read till "Why are you against atheism?", inclusive), and then from it to Templeton. I was reading the site, but soon found myself irritable and angry. I paused, and thought what was going on with me? Was I being stupid, i.e. reacting before reading. Maybe I was triggered by the word 'spiritual', which I am perfectly fine with. Anyway, the article's idea was correct, and it reminded me of a video of Richard Feynman.
The video seemed neutral and honest. I started feeling good. Actually, the remaining portion of the article was more-or-less the same, but I read it afterwords.
I came back to the "article"(scientificamerican) and hit the word "New Atheist" friends. So I searched the term. As was reading the Wikipedia page(New Atheism), I found the so-called "4 horsemen" and the 5th(Ayaan Hirsi Ali). I started reading about Hirsi.
The article was OK(not stressful) initially. But it started turning miltitant(i.e. calling for forced conversion, assimiliation, war, coercion from specific countries on muslims). This troubled me deeply, because even if Islam was so problematic, all the "acts" recommeneded by Hirst would affect Muslim people, and would be a huge problem for people in the so called "non-muslim" locations. It was force, not learning. It would wreck their sense of security, life and families. Hirsi didn't show many signs of compassion, maybe she had retained the troubling(rightly so) events of her past, and was angry. I suspected this because many of her quoted dialogues seemed to be clear about requirement of violence.
I found about Mohammed Bouyeri, who very brutally killed Theo van Gogh. He had tried to decapitate the body. I thought: how can a religion has no risk-mitigation/radicalization-control mechanism, assuming it is "good". If such a mechanism is present(which is there - kill no one), why isn't it scaled and stated explicitly in Muslim communities, which would make violence obsolete.
Anyway, it became troubling for me to accept "loss" of lives for trying to prove/disprove the religion. It was simply unbearable to think about this. But I knew it would be painful/impossible to "prove" Islam wrong logically. But there needed to be a fix, I cannot accept people dying. Even one person.
I remained calm and read on. I found her allgeation of excluding "holocaust and its study" from middle easter countries. So I searched to see if this was correct - I couldn't find much(or wasn't interested, because the allegation seemed implausible).
Then I considered that the exlcusion of teaching it may be plausible, given the events and behaviors, as percieved by me in the muslim community. Mayble only my local community was hateful, could be.
I continued on Hirsi's wiki, and skipped to the Al-Qaeda hit list. From there I went to Anwar al-Awlaki's wiki, who turned out to be a US citizens terminated by a drone strike, by the US itself.
I read that "civil rights" groups had called the drone hit an extrajudicial killing. I was somewhat stunned, because I had thought of the same thing before, specifically that a "trial" never took place, which is unconstitutional even if the man is a terrorist. Another reason for me being stunned was that people were still holding on to the process of law, which I thought was very honest of them.
It was also deeply troubling that the people involved in the drone strike used personal attributes - tone of voice, persona, charm
I questioned: how many people would we have to lose to get rid of a religion. It's clear that one cannot harm a religion, but only people.
/Took a break - had breakfast/
I was still thinking, and I asked: why do people believe in the religion in the first place. One thing that worked for me(when I was younger) was that the Quran didn't have scientific contradictions, and many evidences(ayat) were found to be true in modern times times(like big bang theory and expanison of the universe). The preacher generally tries to make us believe that this is evidence for Quran's validity. To consolidate their idea, they(preacher) point out that Muhammad wasn't able to read/write and there were no tools(like internet) like we have today, so the "only plausible" explanation of such ayats is that it's not written by him, and is "divine".
Well, that did "seem" plausible.
But it was very troubling for me to accept, how such a thing can cause so much damage. Muslims say that this violence and terrorism was orchestrated(or an after effect of events) by the "West". That is not completely false. Even if this "hypothesis" of West being the criminal is assumed to be true, there do exist real problems within the mindset of the muslim community, which I've personally experienced. This mindset, certainly in India, is very unlikely to the be an after effect of West's "evils".
Hence, I tried to think about the whole "belief" and "scientific validity again", and if it can be shown to be irrational.
Problem statement - the preachers statements.
- Quran is not logically contradictory.
- No ayats are incompatible with science, even with modern times.
- Therefore, the best and only "explanation/choice" is to accept it as being correct.
Solution: "Think" about the statements, and accept them. Process in the brain
1 accepted. OK. 2 accepted. OK. 3 accepted. So, what to do "now", in our life. Should we use the Quran for making decisions in life(or even in society, which is a controversial idea). There's no need to ignore science/logic. according to the Quran. It's just that everything needs to be "checked" with the Quran.
This makes us dependent, mentally. And I find this idea of "checking" with authority tiring and cumbersome.
So, can't we ignore the Quran? s "very high likelyhood" of being true and make our own decisions, based on science alone. A simple solution would be to snap out of the question and be independent, but I wanted to prove a stronger clain: being independent was the only option, logically.
/I took a small break./
We have lost so many people to extremism, which is not only very sad but demotivating. i.e. was/is it necessary for people to have to die to question the preachers' rhetoric. Couldn't we have done it when the preaching started, and averted these deaths.
Generally, this question has no definite answer. But it is very prolematic to accept the deaths as a "learning opportunity". It seemed very pessimistic.
I was stuck, but "there had to be a way", I cannot accept murder of people...
I realized that I was stuck by the preacher's preaching, which is are simply a chain of thoughts. I questioned: how can a chain of thoughts impair our ability to think. I know thinking is the most important thing, but how can we get stuck, without any clue.
So I reframed the problem. Assume that the preachers preaching(the three statements, as mentioned before) is a program called X.
Assume my brain is capable of running programs. Now do a dry-run of how I "consider" the preaching, i.e. try to run X in my brain.
And because I'm "considering", it's like running X in a VM, in my brain.
So, inside the VM, this happens when X is run:
- No logical-contradictions. Accepted. OK
- No scientific-contradictions. Accepted. OK.
- Accept X as running nicely - ? Wait, what, we are stuck again!!
The VM crashes/freezes, maybe a Nervous Breakdown, Overstimulation. We cannot let X running, because we'll never know about its nature(good or harmful), even if new "scientifically uncontradictory" contradictory ayats shown to be true.
Running it on another VM, or a nested VM gives the same result(madness this is). We get stuck. So there's only one option to escape the crash: believe(run on host) X, and shut the VM. System resources are relieved, because X does eat up the host's resources, memory, energy etc.
But wait: we had to evaluate X, and accepting seems to be the only option. This means that X can never be honestly evaluated.
Simply said: the preaching is unfalsifiable. I didn't think of this directly because the hype by non-religious people sounds like a baseless allegation against religion.
But, what if we do believe X?
- If someone accepts X after running it for a long time, and even if some scientific contradiction does arise. They cannot challenge X, because science is dynamic. So one has "100% confidence in X" all the time, irrespective of past/future events. And they can label all contradictions as falsehoods/to_be_established. They have lost control.
But X can still be used for imagination/understanding - art, fiction, songs. We love em😃️. But they are clearly labelled as such. Religion is falsely labeled as reality.
So every time one gets such a unlabeled virus program(X), they should be ready to terminate it, if it gets stuck. The source of X must label the program as unfalsifiable/falsifiable. One cannot trust it. And this holds irrespective of whether one believes X or not.
But the extremists are hell-bent on running X, even for other people. This causes all the trouble.
/* is it really unfalsifiable - only Islam*/ /* what about other miracle - claimed or will come*/ TODO: complete this ayat See also: Example of a distraction
They don't need to re-educated in logic or thinking. If the extremist were intellectual and truthful, they will have trained. All the mythology stuff was good for the brain. They calculated/imagined stuff, learning to think in the process. They should be ready to work in any setting. They only need to realize that it was fictional.
If they were bigots, well I don't know of any solutions then. Maybe being around people might help, increasing empathy. Why I'm proving this - to lessen their heartache, and to make them confident of their faculties, to show them it was false, they were right. They were running irrational rules. But rules are rules, and it they make the brain grow. Browser History Browser history(continued)
Note:
- I hadn't read The Selfish Gene or God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, so 'virus' is something I have come to independently, in a computer based system. See ./pasted_image002.png
