Conquering ignorance, intolerance, hate and cruelty

I had been given a bagful of books, mostly novels, by friends in Cape Town. Now I fell into languorous hours of reading as I reclined in the cockpit. The books were so biodegradably forgettable that I took a perverse pleasure in tearing out each page read and dropping it over the side until I held an empty cover and it, too, went overboard. Depending on our boat speed at the time, each mile was marked by two or three pages floating in our wake.

Among the new books that came aboard was the Koran, which a Muslim devotee in Durban had thrust at me “for spiritual guidance.” I read it through in a day and a night before it also went over the side somewhere in mid-ocean alongside the other fiction. If only all medieval zealots could so easily be cast out of the world. “There is no conqueror, but Allah,” it said. Perhaps, but could not Allah's disciples put more emphasis on conquering ignorance, intolerance, hate and cruelty, than stoning women and putting infidels to the sword?

http://atomvoyages.com/books/92-across-islands-and-oceans/218-20-emperors-and-astronomers.html

A triumph of faith over common sense

I hadn’t realised it until today but the Anglican Church here on St. Helena has a piece of the “true cross” on which Jesus was crucified.

Oh, really?

I found this quote from one of their priests:

“A few years ago Monsignor McPartland very kindly gave a tiny fragment of the True Cross to the Diocese of Saint Helena. It is kept in a relatively simple brass reliquary in Arabia, the Bishop’s Chapel at Bishopsholme. Each year on Good Friday it is taken to the Cathedral and it is taken to Saint Helena and the Cross on Saint Helena Day. Can we be sure these tiny fragments really are parts of the cross on which Jesus died? No, there is no way of proving it. But we can be sure that it is part of that relic in Santa Croce and dates back over a thousand years. More importantly we know it is part of that wood which millions of Christians over many hundreds of years have used in their devotions reminding them of Jesus’s death for us on the Cross.”

OK, let’s apply some cold hard logic to this.

Let’s assume that Jesus actually existed, even though there is no independent evidence to prove it (all the stories about him were written by his followers…)

Let’s also assume he upset somebody and got himself crucified. The Romans didn’t record doing so, but then as far as they were concerned he was a common criminal. They crucified loads of people in Palestine in the relevant period and Jesus would have been nobody special to them.

OK, so they nail him onto the cross and wait till he dies.  Then they take the cross down, remove the body and then use it again!  

St. Helena retrieving the True Cross

These things were not disposable. They were re-used until they fell apart.  So the cross on which Jesus was crucified was not newly made for him, and would have been reused and reused, maybe for as long as the Masada revolt in 70ad.  And then when it eventually fell to bits it would have been used for firewood.  It could not possibly have survived.

The idea that St. Helena could come along in 328ad (300 years later) and dig it up – intact! – is just beyond belief.

In the early 1990s my brother (and many others) were making money selling bits of concrete that were supposedly fragments of the Berlin Wall. He did once admit to me that, in all probability, if you joined all the bits of ‘genuine’ Berlin Wall back together you’d end up with a wall that would reach to the moon. I wonder how big the True Cross would be if you rejoined all the bits?

But then if you re-read Father Fred’s text more carefully, he neatly evades the question of whether this fragment that is locked in a safe box on St. Helena is actually part of Jesus’ cross.  He says “..we can be sure that it is part of that relic in Santa Croce and dates back over a thousand years..” 

So what they have is a bit of old wood.  That’s all.  

To believe otherwise is a triumph of faith over common sense.

Prayer and Indiana Jones

It has been pointed out that the character Indiana Jones, in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, is completely irrelevant to the development of the plot.  To put it more simply, if Indiana Jones had not been in the film the Nazis would still have discovered the Ark and opened it and died as a result and it would have ended up in the hands of the US government.  Indiana Jones contributes nothing at all to the basic plot development.

To me this sounds like prayer.  

I’ll explain …

You decide you want something to change - anything from an end to global hunger to getting your neighbour’s cat to stop crapping in your garden - whatever it is you want.  So you get down on your knees and pray for it.  And then one of two things happens.  Either God decides that your prayer aligns with his plans for the universe, in which case he does what you ask, or he decides it doesn’t and he doesn’t.

Please could someone tell me what difference you praying made? 

If there was a problem, surely an omniscient God didn’t need you to point it out to him before he could fix it?  And he only does what he wanted to do anyway (try praying for something that God wouldn’t want – like an end to all religions – and see what happens) so why did you need to pray?

From this we see that prayer is as irrelevant as Indiana Jones.  And also a lot less fun to watch.

If I'm missing something please let me know ...

You can't criticise religion in India - by law!

An Indian man who made his name exposing the "miraculous" feats of holy men as tricks has fled the country after being accused of blasphemy. Now in self-imposed exile in Finland, he fears jail - or even assassination - if he returns.

When a Hindu fakir declared on live television that he could kill anybody with tantric chanting, Sanal Edamaruku simply had to take him up on the challenge.

As both were guests in the studio, the fakir was put to the test immediately.

The channel cancelled all subsequent programming and he began chanting on the spot. But as the hours passed a note of desperation crept into his raspy mantras. For his part, Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, showed no sign of discomfort, let alone death. He merely chortled his way through this unconventional (and unsuccessful) attempt on his life.

He has spent his life as a prominent member of India's small band of miracle-busters, men who dedicate their life to traversing the country demystifying certain beliefs.

It's a nation often associated with profound spirituality, but rationalists see their country as a breeding ground for superstition.

In the 1990s Edamaruku visited hundreds of villages replicating the apparently fabulous feats some self-proclaimed holy men became renowned for - the materialisations of watches or "holy" ash - exposing them as mere sleight of hand.

As a campaigner determined to drill home his point, sometimes with an air of goading bemusement, he has attracted critics.

He readily admits he took advantage of the explosion in Indian television channels which discovered an audience fascinated with tales of the extraordinary.

"I was campaigning in villages for so long before the television came," he says. "But some people do not like me to be going on television and reaching out to millions of people."

But in 2012, four years after his televised encounter with the fakir, a steady drip of water from the toe of a statue of Christ genuinely did, he believes, put his life in danger.

Immediately hailed as a miracle, hundreds of Catholic devotees and other curious residents flocked to the shrine in a nondescript Mumbai suburb to watch the hypnotic drip. Some even drank the droplets.

Edamaruku was challenged to investigate and so he went to the site with an engineer friend and traced the source of the drip backwards. Moisture on the wall the statue was mounted on seemed to come from an overflowing drain, which was in turn fed by a pipe that issued from a nearby toilet.

The "miracle" was simply bad plumbing, he said.

It was then that the situation turned ugly.

He presented his case in a febrile live television debate with representatives of Catholic lobby groups, while outside the studio a threatening crowd bearing sticks had gathered. He claims they were hired thugs.

For some Catholics the veracity of the miracle is no longer the point. Edamaruku, they say, insulted the Catholic church, by alleging the church manufactured the miracle to make money, by claiming the church was anti-science and even casting doubt over the miracle that ensured Mother Theresa's sainthood.

In the following weeks, three police stations in Mumbai took up blasphemy cases filed against him by Catholic groups under the notorious Section 295a of India's colonial-era penal code.

Section 295a was enacted in 1927 to curb hate speech in a restless colony bristling with religious and communal tensions. It makes "deliberate and malicious" speech insulting to religion punishable with up to three years in prison and a fine. However, some say it is frequently abused to suppress free speech.

"Under this law a policeman can simply arrest me even though there has been no investigation... they can just arrest me without a warrant and keep me in prison for a long time… That risk I do not want to take," says Edamaruku.

He applied for anticipatory bail, which would prevent police taking him into custody before any investigation - but this was rejected. At the same time, he says, he was getting threatening phone calls from policemen proclaiming their intention to arrest him and telling him that unless he apologised the complaint would never be withdrawn.

Threatening comments were posted on an online forum, he says, and contacts in Mumbai told him they had heard talk of somebody being hired to beat him in jail. Catholic groups say they aren't behind any threats Mr Edamaruku may have received.

He decided to leave early for a European lecture tour. Finland was the first country to give him a visa and he had friends on the Finnish humanist scene willing to help.

He arrived in Helsinki on a summer afternoon two years ago, the endless hours of sunlight saturating both day and night. He thought he would only stay for a couple of weeks until the furore he left behind in India had died down.

But the furore has not died down - the Catholic Secular Forum (CSF), one of the groups that made the initial complaint, still insists it will press for prosecution should he ever return.

Two years on, he is angry, bitter and defiant. Living in a small flat on the eastern edge of Helsinki, he has forced himself to adjust to an alien landscape. After the crowded hustle of Delhi, more than 3,000 miles away, he can now walk mile upon lonely mile without seeing a single person.

His closest friend here - the founder of the Finnish humanist society Pekka Elo - died late last year.

"I miss a lot of people… That I cannot meet them is something that saddens me," he says.

Since he left India, his daughter has had a child, and his mother has died.

He conducts board meetings of the Indian Rationalist Association by Skype and every morning colleagues update him on the latest tales of the supernatural and fraudulent holy men. He plots their downfall. This routine is crucial to him.

Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai tried to broker a solution by calling upon Edamaruku to apologise and on Catholic groups to drop their case in return.

But Edamaruku staunchly refuses to compromise on what he sees as his freedom of expression.

"I don't regret anything I said," he says. "I feel that I have full right to express my views... I am open for discussion and correction but I am not willing to accept anybody's bullying, change my views or submit to their pressure to apologise."

Some legal analysts think he could risk returning. The courts recognise that Section 295a is regularly misused, they point out. Writers, activists and others have been arrested and imprisoned even before charge - but most were released on bail.

But Edamaruku fears for his safety, pointing to the fate of his friend, anti-black-magic campaigner Narendra Dabholkar.

"Narendra Dabholkar… suggested that if I come to Mumbai he and his friends would be able to protect me. I was considering his proposal," Edamaruku recalls, referring to a conversation last summer.

But four days later he was murdered, a crime which many believe was linked to his campaign against magic.

So Edamaruku spends his time trudging the arresting, bleak forests of Helsinki, sometimes remembering his unconventional childhood in Kerala.

His father, born a Christian, grew up to become a rebel who was excommunicated. His mother gave birth to him in the pouring rain having fled her in-laws' Christian home because they pressured her to convert. But the family always managed to reconcile its differences. The bishops and Hindu priests among his relatives could be found sitting around one dinner table laughing at their own beliefs.

He insists he has no regrets.

"I would do it again. Because any miracle which has enormous clout at one moment, is simply gone once explained. It's like a bubble. You prick it and it is finished."

The statue still stands in that sleepy suburb of Mumbai, but it no longer drips.

India's 'blasphemy' law

India's colonial era Penal Code prohibits hate speech - section 295a says:

"Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of [citizens of India]... shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to [three years], or with fine, or with both."

Key cases include:

1957: Ramji Lal Modi published a cartoon and article deemed offensive to Muslims - he was fined and imprisoned for 12 months

1996: Artist MF Husain faced a prolonged legal campaign over his images of Hindu figures - higher courts dismissed most cases but as more were registered he took Qatari citizenship

2008: IT worker Lakshmana Kailash spent 50 days in jail after being arrested on suspicion of posting offensive images online - police had mistakenly identified him and he was released

2013: Writer Yogesh Master was arrested over his book about the Hindu god Ganesh and got bail a day later

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Full story, including more pictures at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26815298

Somewhat oversimplified ...

but amusing anyway.

I may be wrong (and I'm sure I will be corrected if I am) but I think miracles ended when investigative journalism began (i.e. around the end of the 19th Century).

POST THOUGHTS: The more I think about it the more sure I become that investigative journalism was the end of miracles. Today, weeping/bleeding statues get investigated - and found to be fraudulent. Not that this stops people worshiping them, but then faith is all about not caring what's really true...

Where did I come from?

Salvation for dummies

Actually the picture makes a serious point.  Religion tells us that if we don't worship God we will go to hell - a place presumably created by God (well he created everything else ...) specifically to punish those that don't worship him.

And they say we have free will?

Religion does not encourage thinking for oneself.  Blind obedience - that's what religion demands.  Just like human dictators ...