Crammed in van 15 kids collapse
Imphal, May 23: In what could be termed as corrobo-ration of serious concern fre- quently highlighted by the pa-rents regarding their young kids transported in an un-friendly manner by school van operators and other transpor-ters, no less than 15 students.....
Mute/deaf student shines bright
IMPHAL, May 23: Pukhram-bam Juliana Chanu, who is virtually mute and has very low hearing capacity outshone a large number of her peers when she scored the highest mark (88 out of 100) in Philosophy apart from securing letter marks in four subjects in the.....
Obscurity clouds HSE '13 results
IMPHAL, May 23: Results of the class XII exam conducted by the Council of Higher Se-condary Education Manipur (COHSEM) have confused many people even as some others have started questioning if there were certain lapses or follies in the result. As per .....
Cabinet okays
IMPHAL, May 23: The State Cabinet has today given its approval for the recognition of three tribal dialects. Government Spokesperson, M Okendro said the three tribal dialects recognised by the State Government are Poumai, Liangmai and Gangte. Beside.....
DTO issues 3057 licences in a day
IMPHAL, May 23: One former District Transport Officer (DTO) of Ukhrul issued 3057 driving licences in a single day and the revenue thus collected never reached the Government’s coffer. One G Athui, then Inspector (Mechanical) was given the charge of .....
Educational facilities in Saitu inaugurated
IMPHAL, May 23: Along with inaugurating an Eklavya model residential school at Gamnom Saparmeina, Deputy Chief Minister Gaikhangam today dedicated two hostel buildings for scheduled tribe boys and girls students at the same area. Eklavya model resident.....
Ukhrul ADC
IMPHAL, May 23: The Ukhrul Autonomous District Council (ADC) has resolved to remove LN Kashung, CEO of Ukhrul ADC from his post for alleged ‘misconduct’ and ‘unbecoming act of a Govt servant’ under Section 32 (2) of the Manipur (Hill Areas) ADC Ac.....
HIV girl secures four letter marks in HSE
IMPHAL, May 23: It is a big morale booster and a source of inspiration to all children living with HIV that a girl living with HIV and undergoing ART secured letter marks in four subjects in the Higher Secondary Examination 2013 conducted by the Council o.....
Director inspects Govt model schools
IMPHAL, May 23: An official team of Directorate of Education (S) led by its Director H Deleep today inspected Wangkhei High School, Keishamthong High School and Lamding High School in connection with the introduction of Mentoring System at a few selected .....
Unidentified man locks Nambol school
IMPHAL, May 23: The Development Protection United Voluntary Organisation has urged the concerned to make a clarification on locking of Nambol Leirel High School by a person who identified himself as an RPF activist yesterday. In a press conference held.....
VA urges authority
IMPHAL, May 23: The Samulamlan Village Authority has urged the authority concerned to complete the installation of Mobile BTS at Samulamlan within June this year. A statement issued by the chief/chairman of Samulamlan VA, K Paohminglen said the VA woul.....
TSA admitted in ATSUM
IMPHAL, May 23: Thadou Students Association-General Headquarters (TSA-GHQ) has formally become the unit of All Tribal Students Union, Manipur (ATSUM). Three of the TSA-GHQ 'officials' have also been inducted to the ATSUM fold today where an oath-takin.....
Kabow Leikai eviction Fasting prayer on May 26 followed by rally, meeting
IMPHAL, May 23: In the backdrop of the alleged forced eviction of Kabow Leikai, a fasting prayer would be organised on Sunday (May 26) in respective Church which would be followed by a peace rally and public meeting on May 27. This was decided during .....
BSF detects IED in Tbl
IMPHAL, May 23: Troops of 116th Bn BSF today detected an IED weighing around 10 Kgs at Wangjing Heituppokpi, Thoubal district. The bomb detected by BSF troops posted at Wangjing was retrieved by a bomb disposal squad of Manipur Police and they set of.....
PMS for SCs
IMPHAL, May 23: The 2nd phase lists of selected SC students of the State for the award of Post Matric Scholarship for the year 2012-13 were notified on the notice board of the Directorate of MOBC & SC located at Old Gauhati HC Complex and on the website w.....
Anniversary observed
IMPHAL, May 23: The Indian Dental Association (IDA), Manipur State Branch has celebrated the 24th anniversary function of the association on May 20 at Classic Hotel, Imphal. The programme was presided by Dr T Nabachandra Singh, president of the IDA (MS.....
Free diabetes camp
IMPHAL, May 23: A one-day diabetes free health camp was held today at Lecture Hall-2 of Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences, Porompat. As chief guest of the event, North East Elderly Women chief editor RK Nayansana Devi noting that diabetes.....
Senapati prepares for Exchange programme
KANGGUI, May 22: Everything is set in order for the one day Cultural and Musical Exchange programme jointly organised by Senapati District Students Association and Kuki Students' Organization, Sadar Hills in association with Student Mobilization Initiati.....
JAC demands exemplary punishment against rapists
IMPHAL, May 23: JAC against the rape of a student of TG Hr Sec School on Oct 20, 2012 has urged the concerned authority to conduct the trial against the rapists fairly. A statement issued by the JAC today reminded that the number of crimes rises due to.....
Raphei Katamnao Long hails ADC
Ukhrul, May 23: The Northern Students’ Union (Raphei Katamnao Long), Ukhrul District has appreciated the ADC, Ukhrul for timely implementation of developmental projects in various departments particularly in the field of Education in the Northern area o.....
Diaspora Speak
By : Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh
My last tango with god
On Thursday, October 4 2012, The Daily Telegraph (London) published an original handwritten letter by Albert Einstein expressing his views on God and religion, which was sold later on eBay on October 18 for $3,000,100 to an anonymous bidder. It is called “God letter”.
He wrote it in German on Jan 3 1954 - a year before his death, to the Jewish philosopher Erik Gutkind. He wrote: “The word God for me is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this.”
The historical document is particularly important because it dispels the myth that Einstein was religious and that he believed in God. His famous quote, “God does not play dice with the Universe,” suggested to some that he harboured religious views.
For me, the path to understanding that God does not exist has been very long and protracted. Eventually in my 30s, I had an epiphany as shafts of light of reason and scientific advances sliced in towards me from many sources. For me, if God does not exist it is not even necessary to invent him.
As a young boy in my new world full of hope, I used to pray to God sometimes, when I needed something or when I was frightened of my father, who was a very strict disciplinarian. Unmet expectations led to disappointments that filled my chest.
God always seemed to wander away from me. I remember in the real dark nights of the soul it was always three o’clock in the morning when I was alone. There was never a God by my side.
In the panicking reasoning of my childhood I did not lose faith in God, though in my sin-free childhood innocence I saw no reason why God would not answer any of my prayers in a positive way, like an enormous outreaching melon tendril.
I used to go and look at the drawings on the inner walls of Cheirap and Panchai (open) law courts at Uripok, near Khwairamband bazaar. There were sketches, such as a man holding a bottle of alcohol being burned in hell-fire, an infidel woman being tossed into a cauldron of boiling hot oil by scary-looking hell fellows. They were from scarily dull to truly frightening. I used to believe them.
As I grew up, in my mid-teens the idea of God gradually stopped making sense to me. Ideas have no primary reality and religious ideas tend to be some form of idealism.
In my maturity and at a Rubicon of my life in the UK, I prayed to God with sincere, sensible and affectionate pouring out of my heart. God again failed to measure up to his righteousness. I felt my prayers did not go further than the ceiling in those cold winds of time.
I then made up my mind that God is a failed hypothesis or a delusion. But as supposition in general is insufficient as a full theory of truth I decided I would do some study later in life to see that this supposition implies truth.
The time came when I semi-retired. I put my heart and soul into everything to know him and his existence as I had a passion to know the truth. I researched for 5 years. I read the Gita, the Bible, the Koran, Buddhism and any book on God I could get hold of in my search for an answer.
I found Thomas Aquinas’s theological argument in his Summa Theologica that the existence of God is self-evident, rather meaningless. Self-evident to whom? To God himself or to ourselves? It is only self-evident to us because our parents and society implanted in us that God exists. It is not self-evident to Buddhists.
There is never any evidence of the existence of God that I can see. What is evident is his non-existence, such as the recent histories of natural disasters such as the havoc caused by Hurricane Sandy in New York, the Japanese earthquake, the Asian Tsunami and the earthquake in Kashmir (2005) which wiped out three generations of people, 74,000 died and 2.5 million were left homeless in Pakistan, while 1,400 people died in India.
There are so many arguments for God’s existence from the fertile minds of people who did nothing but think all day and night, forming all kinds of ideas that are not provable. Philosophers try to build knowledge on more than an inference or analogy. Descartes said “I think, therefore I exist” without providing any details about the nature of “I” that has been proven to exist.
On the other hand, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes said: “Men created gods in their own image. If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves”.
Finally, I left God on the shelf. I began to suspect the reality was something outside of religion. I clawed my way out of the kingdom of God where pigs flew upside down and cows parachuted.
This article is not so much about an argument as to whether God exists, but why I ended my association with God. In all the religious traditions the existence of everything is owed to God. The premise is hard to reconcile with common sense or modern science. Why should I owe him anything without knowing what he has actually done for me?
During my research I came across two books written by believers who became disenchanted with God. My perception of God echoes their thoughts that God is a figment of the imagination that people latch on to simply because it gives them some hope.
Karen Armstrong (68), an Irish Catholic nun who left the Roman Catholic Order after seven years and wrote in her book, A History of God: “The idea of God which has been fostered for centuries in the Christian West appears disastrously inadequate and the age of reason seems to have triumphed over centuries of superstition and bigotry.”
My thought also hovers indecisively over the “Act of God” as described by an Australian Ex-Catholic nun, Van Raay (65) in her autobiography, God’s Call Girl. She became disillusioned with her order as a paragon of Christians virtues. She left her convent as a virgin at 31 to become a prostitute for 20 years. She felt she was highly motivated to do the best for her clients by doing the will of God.
Throughout history, a number of people have tried to prove the existence of God with such arguments as the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Design. As I have argued in my book, My Search for God, I consider each of these arguments to be full of flaws. Belief in God is an inspirational faith while rationality is a belief based on reason or evidence. The two are incompatible.
The rationality of why humanity could not do without God is because they do not know what would happen to them in the afterlife. But this does not stop people from thieving, killing and committing adultery.
The iconoclastic rationality of God often preached by metaphysical poets like John Milton in his “Paradise Lost” had huge followers. But Milton, who regarded the Holy Scriptures as “truly the word of God” became blind during the course of his life. His wife left him after 3 years of marriage.
Over the centuries a few non-theological philosophers exercised their brains as to what would happen if they approached things differently – a world without God.
An English biologist Thomas Huxley in 1869 coined the word ‘Agnosticism’. His view was that the truth values of certain claims about the existence or non-existence of a deity or other metaphysical claims are unknown (as far as we can see) and unknowable.
Before him there were early thinkers in India such as Samara Belatthaputta in the 5th century BCE, and the Nasadiya Sukta concerning the ‘Origin of the universe’ in the Rig Veda.
By the early part of the 20th century many freethinkers, having drawn inspiration from a perception of divine asymmetry, began to challenge the idea of an unchanging universe. Some like Francis Bacon, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein began to seek justification in an ever-changing universe.
In the last half of the 20th century modern science began to indicate the gap between intuitive thinking and rational thought. Many sceptics of God as the creator of human beings emerged.
In the ‘40s Bertrand Russell, a hard core English atheist and in modernity, Stephen Hawkins and Richard Dawkins are showing the way without a God in the universe.
I do not believe anymore that there is a supreme being with all the attributes of a human being who created life on earth. I believe that all life came through an evolutionary process.
I now feel I am a better person for having looked for but not found God. So I say my last goodbye to God if he exists at all.
The writer is based in the UK
Email: imsingh@onetel.com
Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk
praying for you
“I now feel I am a better person for having looked for but not found God. So I say my last goodbye to God if he exists at all.” Dear Dr. IMSingh, God is not to be found but to experience in spirit and in truth. I am praying for you that one day the Lord who created the universe & you would make you feel His presence. May the Lord give you peace, joy & happiness!
Jinine Laishramcha
Yes, the character of Gods in holy books is all man made. The reality of infinity of time, space and energy is however evident something of we may call God or alike.
Joshua Kom
If you believe in evolution, why not some of the monkeys in the zoo do not turn into human being?? everything have a creator or maker or designer, will it not be rediculous to say taj mahal just came out of the air.
science and religion
I agree with ur article Mr. Irengbam mohendro singh. All this spritual thing makes human a point of reference for weakness and strongness! Apparently i came to know that god is just a imaginary in which people earns or gains something to help themselves when they become weak and trouble. I have been also told that god is just a infidible as it was created by human only when something unexplainable came up. Because of religious we are all different. I'm also athiest but sometimes i need god to prove myself strong to every bad things. It is just a illusion. Gita, bible and any other book of god are just a creation of human being. How could we believe that god exist when egyptain like mummy civilization extinct before christ was born. What about mammoth? It extinct before 10000bc! Its nothing but an evolution.
NAMELESS WARRIOR...@DR.Mohendra
First all i want to say to our revered Dr. Mohendra that u give up exactly like every one one thinking & argumentive mind wud have in the quest of infallible & supreme brahman, i wont justify but i will simply only my opinion & i will best to explain my experience in breif words. The reason u faied in ur quest for god is that u try to find the supreme being through the books & scripture by ignorring that god is an individual experience & it can acheived only through an empirical experience but not through a second hand borrowed kbowledge & m sure that is the only essense of god & that is buty of his benediction. Whenever a realised soul descend to this world he always come in his own unique style & unique path, that is the reason why even though every religion preach about the same supreme god & truth but thier way of approach, philosophy & beleif system are always never parallel to each other in one way or other. About Descartes he himself justify 'I think so iam' but he fail to recognised who was that very 'I' & Berttrad Russell & Marxist athieism was nothing but was a very similar belief system like that of thiestic believe to god & in opposite to that the athiest deny the existance of god then wat is the different between them both are trying to justify which cant b justify through any evident or any valid knowlegde. To me God is more real to me then to deny him after observing all this awe , complexity & wonderful cosmic unity of this universe. Through philosophy or argument we wont never reach to God ,through philosophy & syllogism we wont never succeed to witness the infinite being, dont u see the foolishness of all this argument about god or reality we hardly able to see six meter feet distance through our naked then how come we wud be able to narrow down the infinite, omniscient, omnipotent & omnipresent being of this whole universe. Bcoz of all this useless never ending theological argument & philosophical argument about god compell Budhha himself to drops God from his main domain religion & instead chose to be silent about god & even though he knew it coz he himself experience the god face to face. The very presence of Budha, such a butiful soul with such a inner tranquility & peaceful inner being presence was the very justification of god or supreme truth existance more thst wat else we need more to justify God but he was all well aware about our so called intellectual knowledgible peoles & the limitaton of our feeble mind & also he was pretty aware that they would repeat the same old story of argument over an arguement on & on for infinite regression so Budhha drops whole topic about god from his religion instead he emphasise to the path of meditation & a way to drops the mind & ego bcoz the very point when we lost our ego of being 'I' & dissolve into the infinite totality of god then only we experienced the god or emerged our self out of his grace has himself or supreme reality & the very recognition of it is the supreme reality "Aham Bramhasmi Or Im that". PS: Western philosphy was always a path of argument & reasoning from the Aristotle onward & all the w.philosophy is the legacy of his quest only so through them u wont never experience god, instead start reading discourse of OSHO , Gurdjief & Nanak etc. but begin only from d Osho m sure u will lost all ur argument & giving my words to u Sir, u wont never regret to be part of the Great soul of east. But sir, plz dont tak me wrong it only my humble request to u bcoz i undetstand that feeling of thirst for the supreme reality & i had experience the very same dark nights of the soul & i came to realised it was only preparing my path as a seeker. Let it be....
