I was speaking to a very religious friend of mine while walking back from church.
Me: “Hey, You need to see Christopher Hitchen’s talk at Google.”
“Who is he?”
“He is the author of the book ‘God is not great’”
“I don’t think he is worthy of my time.”
I was born a Christian in a land where Christians are in the minority. As it happens, folks are better at what they are when they are in the minority. Both my parents are devout Christians and work in a Christian organization. I have been exposed to the intricate details of how Christianity works as I have relatives across almost all major denominations from the Catholics to the Pentecostals.
It is .9:11 in the morning. I am supposed to be taking a look at collaborative knowledge engineering. Instead, I am sitting here with Microsoft Word open and writing a blog. Why? Because something caught my eye and caused a stack overflow in my brain. This thought has been simmering in my mind for a long time and I am so overwhelmed now that I cannot but put it down in words.
In the talk which Christopher Hitchens delivered at Google, he seems to make an assertion that somehow religion is the root cause of all violence in the world. Well, that is Mr. Christopher’s belief and I will save my arguments against it for later. What struck me while I watched the video was the fact that his statement echoes a similar argument that theists use - that somehow atheism is the root cause of all evil in the world (The sentiment is also echoed by Ben Stein’s movie ‘Expelled’).
I use a technique of argument for which I do not have a name (I have been told that it is a concept in Sociology). It is similar to the evaluation that I do for my principles: “If every member of the human species were to follow the action or an idea and there would be no harm in the propagation of the species, the thought or the action is good.”If I were to use this to argue with Mr. Hitchens, I would ask him whether violence would disappear from the planet if everybody in this world were to abandon religion. In a similar vein, I would also ask Mr. Stein whether violence and evil disappear from this world if everybody became Christians.
It also irritated me that no one at Hitchen’s talk even dared to challenge the propositions that he made. This leads me to believe that adoption of belief systems (theism or atheism) is determined by cultural and environmental influences. A believer in evolution would definitely feel out of place in a church or conservative school as much as a devout Christian would feel out of place and overwhelmed in a liberal institute of higher learning. Speaking about influences of environment, it is worthwhile mentioning that it is fashionable at my work place to strut around with a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” or “Fountain Head”.
I was surprised to find a section titled “Convert’s Corner” at Richard Dawkin’s website. I was quite amused since I thought it was only theists who took pride in parading converts. Well, I was wrong. Both sides seem to use similar tactics!
The point made above also reminds me of the clamour to find the religious views of a person when he becomes famous or does significant work. I dropped in at Ray Kurzweil’s Wikipedia page and found a section titled “Stance on Religion”. Why would anybody be interested in his stance on religion? And why would it matter anyway? Would the value of his work be diminished? Both atheists and theists engage in this absolutely disgusting practice.
All these factors have led me to believe that atheism is no different from theism - it is just another belief system. It uses the same tactics that any other belief system uses. And both recruit adherents by cultural, environmental and personal influence.
And what caused me to write this blog? There used to be a time when bad astronomer Phil Plait wrote excellent, well researched articles on space exploration and astronomy. But of late, his blog contain less of the two and more of fundamentalist atheism. Sigh! And it beats me on why SCIAM India needs to contain non science columns by Michael Shermer. And of late, I have been either sleeping or scribbling math on paper at church - the folks simply fail to answer the important questions or dig deeper.
Wake up folks! Open your eyes and see that your supposed ideological enemies engage in the same tactics as you do. Live with the fact that you will never wake up to a morning to find a world full of theists or atheists. There is a lot more that one can do than engage in this mindless and distasteful bickering!
I am now going back to my quest for Singularity.
PS: Trying hard to find out what my stance on religion is an exercise in futility. 
And I prefer it remains that way.
