Repurcussions of Uncertainty

In a brief interview with the Economist magazine, Farzana Shaikh, the author of Making Sense of Pakistan, talks about the root causes of current problems in Pakistan. According to her, while the proximate cause of the current mess is the process of State Islamization, emphasized by Zia ul Haq in the 80’s, the ultimate cause [...]

The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion

(This is a follow-up to my earlier post – A Good Question: Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?)
Jerry Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, has sparked off a Big Debate about whether science and religion are incompatible. 
Sean Carroll, who writes a wonderful blog on the Discover magazine, joins [...]

Working with Available Light

In the introductory chapter of the book, The Hindus: An Alternate History, Doniger cites the Sufi parable of Mulla Nasrudin — the one in which after having lost his key inside his home during a night, Nasrudin was searching for it outside under a lamp post, because there was more light there than in his [...]

A Good Question

“Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?” asks Jerry Coyne in his essay Seeing and Believing. Simply put, the question is, is it psychologically contradictory to claim to believe in God and evolution (or science in general) at the same time?
True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does [...]

Religious Moderates

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German philosopher, had it right when he said ”Faith is not wanting to know what truth is”.
What is faith anyway? We can think of faith as a belief system. Believing a particular proposition means that we believe that it represents some true state of the world. “Indian food is spicy.”, “Entropy of [...]

Dasavatar and Evolution

Do you think that the ten avatars of the God Vishnu (as per the Hindu Puranas) loosely resemble the living creature’s journey from a primitive organism to a fully evolved spiritual human being?

Matsya: the fish, (first living creature in water)
Kurma: the tortoise, (making a transition from water to land)
Varaha: the boar, (living completely on land)
Narsimha: the [...]

Religion, Culture and Mr. Hitchens

Few words about Christopher Hitchen’s book God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything. And some thoughts on Hinduism in specific and religion in general.

Atheism and Agnosticism

There is a common misconception about the definition of atheism. Many perceive an atheist as someone who believes that God does not exist (i.e. there’s no God.) — which is not necessarily true.
Let’s consider the term theist first. A theist is someone who believes in God. If you think of this particular belief (there’s a [...]