Cre-volutionism

I am not an atheist... I'm closer to agnostic but not one either... I don't consider myself very religious or a highly spiritual person. But there are times when people claim that there is no higher power - that we just evolved into what we are today that I feel something deep inside me protest. I'm not sure if it's the years of being brought up a Christian or something else... But I do want to believe that there is more meaning to life on earth. We didn't just happen because this was the right set of permutations and combinations that ensured the survival of the fittest. Don't get me wrong - I know Darwin was right... We did evolve, but I feel there is more to why we have become who we are, than just chance.

Before going into the matter of why I feel there might be more to our evolution than mere chance, let me get into what I feel about religion. I grew up in Goa, which is a small state in India where you're usually either a Hindu or a Roman Catholic. My village was Roman Catholic, and everyone was very involved in church activities. My grandmother had been a staunch catholic, but somehow my father had been influenced into converting to one of the newer Christian churches which the US has plenty of. We were brought up under one of these forms of Christianity, and followed the Sabbath and kept away from unclean food such as prawns and pork. There was a lot of stress on what the Bible claimed at the time. My friends from the village knew that I wasn't coming to church with them because I was from a different religion. But they assumed I was a "Protestant", which at the time seemed almost like the worst thing I could be called. I didn't want to be different from everyone else at the time... I wanted to be able to go to the local village church on sundays like everyone else, instead of sitting at home with my parents and reading the Bible on saturdays instead. I think my grand-parents, especially my grandmother must have kept hoping that we would come back to the right path again - which according to her must have been the Roman Catholic church.

Twenty years later, things changed quite a bit. We converted back to Roman catholicism. Having been through the experience of moving through a much stricter form of religious devotion that tries to follow the Bible word-for-word, to the more ritualistic and older one in the Roman Catholic church, I feel that as Christians, so many times, we lay too much stress on our differences and too little on what's common (which is such a large portion of our beliefs). While I think I am going to remain a Roman Catholic for the rest of my life, I know that I am never going to claim that we are the special ones who know more about God's true plan for us than anyone else. I think we can look back at history and see enough examples of times when we have been wrong about several of our beliefs. If we still believe that there was some chronological sense to how God created the world as described in Genesis, we're being as head-strong as the pope who imprisoned Galileo for saying that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around.

I personally feel that creationism through evolution played the role of forming life on earth as it seems to have a higher likelihood of explaining life as it is today. I tend toward the belief that a higher power ensured that our DNA (and that of plants and animals), were fine-tuned... Probably a larger-than-life genetic doctor (who I would prefer calling the Creator) did it, to result in the wonders that we are today. And perhaps in his time-line, millions of years are not a big deal...! We are not perfect - but we are a tad too good to have happened only by repeated sets of trials-and-errors. Probabilistically, there is always the chance that if the universe is large enough to have innumerable amount of planets with several of them having all the matter that leads to conducive situations for life to develop, we might have ended up with our set of life-forms here on Earth. But until we discover other planets with some other life-forms on them, or know the full-extent of the entire universe, we cannot prove or disprove anything about creationism. At the moment, I give in to the view that we have gone through millions of years of protein-folding to go from the hydro-carbons, water and other molecules that compose us, to these complex life-forms that we are now, who can contemplate and even partially comprehend our own formation.

Mankind has gone from hunter-gatherers hunting animals or foraging for food, to settle down and start farming, exploring new lands, moving out to occupy them, trading, adapting to new life-styles and being able to occupy this beautiful planet from the hot equatorial regions of Africa where we originated from, to the freezing poles. And we have managed to balloon in population from what must have been a few homo-sapien erectus' who evolved from apes running around on all fours, to become the nearly 6 billion modern human beings we are today. We are making progress in understanding life, the science of not only the earth but also the universe around us, producing beautiful art, tackling problems such as disease, increasing the yield of plants and even other animals, and beginning to reprogram the very same DNA which programmed us genetically to become who we are... We are consuming the resources on this earth faster than ever before - exhausting the natural resources that were formed over thousands or even millions of years and we are probably going to finish most of the non-renewable and most precious forms of energy within this century.

So what exactly is the purpose of our being here? Why are we here? Are we here just to be part of a set of protein molecules that ended up folding by sheer chance into an interesting set of beings that can suddenly do a lot more? How did so many complex systems develop in life-forms? Right from photo-synthesis, respiration, the complex circulatory systems, the amazing immune-systems that protect us, the all-important reproductive systems that ensure future generations of the evolutionary process... the neural-networks that form the brains that we have... our consciousness... our realization of who we are... and yet, it isn't clear to me as to what we are doing here if there isn't a bigger plan out there. I want to believe that there is a bigger plan for us. I want to believe that we are not going to be just a set of sequences of trials-and-errors that occupy a small time-line in the zillions of other things that go on in this gargantuan universe. I want to believe that I can break free from the shackles of the human body - this flesh and these bones after they are no more... that there is more to me than just my beating heart, firing synapses and all the other life-processes that science claims is life in me... That the real me (probably my soul) is more than just the hydrocarbons that form my physical self... And I think this is the hope that has given rise to almost all religions in the world...

Almost all of them regardless of where they arose from, have so much in common... There is a constant search for a higher sense of purpose. There is usually hope for life after death... There is an inculcation of right and wrong things. Surprisingly and almost always - without any necessary direct-connection between these religions, most of the rights and wrongs of all these religions are strikingly similar, if not the same. All of them profess for/against the same basic things... Honesty, peace, harmony, integrity, love for all human beings and other virtues are encouraged, while violence, bad habits and so on are denounced. Some might say that God's were used by religious people or others with authority to be able to control the populace and wield their power on them. We might also say this is part of evolution - successful civilizations imbibed successful principles into their religions which led to these becoming the dominant ones in most of the principal religions of the world today like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Jainism, Sikhism and so on. But I would still argue that it is surprising that there is so much in common!

And yet, somehow religion has also been the primary cause of so much violence, intolerance, hatred and so on. For a moment, if we are to only forget which religion we belong to... and assume there actually is a higher power - a universal God or even many Gods for those who feel one couldn't have done it by himself/herself... What if he/she/they didn't care about which religion we really follow to get to him/her/them - just that we live by the right principles... Wouldn't this world be a much better place to live in? If evolution led to today's religions, why don't they evolve to root out the evils that corrupt them with issues that shouldn't be handled by religion in the first place...!

I think we've been blessed with the freedom of thought - we can let our imagination soar to wherever we want it to. And whether or not we're religious, agnostic or atheists - all of us are part of an on-going evolutionary process. Evolution usually favors the best outcomes and so as time goes on, with increasing knowledge - just like we must've become self-aware all of a sudden one day in the distant past, we might discover the truth behind our true purpose... the truth behind how we really became who we are... if there really was more to us than just evolution... and until then, I feel we should allow ourselves to be free to decide what we want to believe... Because the basis and beauty of evolution is in diversity.

I think this world would not be as beautiful as it is, if we were all just clones of one perfectly evolved human being. May the wonder of life continue... and may we keep finding solutions to our problems in the innovative human spirit that has kept us going for thousands of years so that this experiment of life flourishes.

Life is a wonder - let us enjoy our differences! They help us evolve better - and if we do have a creator I am sure he must be smiling at how we are shaping up so far.

Defiance...

Last night I watched Defiance which is a movie recounting the story of the Bielski brothers, who were among the Jews who faced the Nazi onslaught during the World War II. Tuvia, the oldest of the four comes to find his brothers in the woods after their parents were killed by Nazi sympathesizers. Asael Bielski, the youngest, breaks down and you wonder if he is going to make it through the ordeal that awaits them. Tuvia and the others begin to forage for and try to gather food and supplies from people in the nearby village who were willing to help them. While on one of these trips, Tuvia overhears that the local police chief was involved in killing his parents - after which he returned the favor at the chief's house. The chief had proudly claimed that he had caught 15 Jews the previous day and that the Germans were paying 500 rubles for each one. Koscik, an old Belorussian, was obviously taking a huge risk hiding and helping Jews like Tuvia, something his wife didn't seem to approve of.

From Defiance

This got me thinking - what would I do if I was in Koscik's place? What if there was a group of human beings, being persecuted... for no sane reason except that they belong to a certain race/caste/creed... Helping them results in death or something just as bad. Turning them over to the authorities would yield a large reward. At times like this, when everything goes against your conscience, how does one preserve it? How do you know where to draw the line between your instincts for survival and preventing yourself from falling into a state where you knowingly allow your fellow human being's to come to harm? Were the Kosciks or the Schindlers of the time expecting to be rewarded by the Jews or be written about in the history books? I doubt it! They would have no way of knowing if the Nazi juggernaut in all its might would ever be crushed. The Jews were just too weak, and were already depleted. These good samaritan's were helping them because they realized it was the right thing to do, and they were going to do no matter what. I think that is what differentiates the heroes from the regular person - they're ready to go against the flow, no matter how bad the odds are - because they believe they're doing the right thing!

Zus Bielski looks to be the toughest of the Bielski brothers - he is big built and looks just about as defiant as anyone can ever be. And, he wants revenge - especially on the day he meets a group of Jews fleeing into the forest, who were from the same village as his wife and child, and they tell him that he will never see his loved ones again. In a rage he gathers a group of armed friends and ambushes a few soldiers, kills them, grabs their arms but when a larger group of soldiers show up driving down the same road - he loses Azael who is chased by several Germans into the woods in the opposite direction.

Tuvia, who prefers diplomacy to armed conflict does not approve of Zus' strategies. The brothers argue over who should lead their ever-growing group of followers (men, women and children in need of protection, food and shelter), who have been taken under Tuvia and Zus's wing. Zus would prefer leading a smaller band of able men to extract revenge on nearby anti-semitic villagers and Nazi officers, while Tuvia feels they should only use force defensively and try their best to stay alive until the war was over. After one quarrel Zus leaves to join a Russian armed contingent that was fighting the Germans from the same forest.

From Defiance

The movie goes on to portray how this large group of Jews manages to organize itself - they have a Rabi among them, begin sewing, training even the women how to use guns and so on. There are groups of men who are tasked to find food for the others, while the weaker ones stay in camp and either help build shelters or cook food and so on. Azael, who had managed to escape his pursuers is growing to be a leader in his own right. Despite being smaller in size, he shows resolve and the ability to encourage and rally people with inspiring speeches. Tuvia's peaceful methods don't always help him maintain his leadership though. With food going scarce, one of the men in his food-gathering groups starts challenging Tuvia's leadership. He claims that the more able men who do the work of getting finding food for the rest should be given a larger share of the food rations. Tuvia had mandated that everyone should get the same amount. By this time Tuvia had caught pneumonia and was quite weak. One day things come to a head - Arkady, the leader of the food-gathering band of men proclaims that Tuvia isn't the commander anymore. Tuvia ends up taking out his pistol and shooting the man. Nobody questions Tuvia's leadership again... But did Arkady deserve it? Is leadership worth another's life?

The movie is beautiful. It is certainly one of the best I have watched lately. Unlike Avatar, which was the last one I enjoyed, this movie didn't for once make me wonder at the cinematic beauty of the movie-making process. I was caught up too deep in the intricacies of the story itself - there was so much depth to each character, so much to learn about life under difficult circumstances, about leadership, about heroism, about faith. Toward the end, the Rabi confesses to Tuvia that he had almost lost his own faith at one point, and that Tuvia was the one who gave it back to him. He thanked God for having sent Tuvia to lead his people out of the wilderness like the Jews believed their leader Moses had during their exodus from Egypt millenia before.

One of the touching moments in the movie for me, was when the rabi leads them into prayer and ends it by asking God to grant them one final blessing - to take back the gift of their holiness. Why was it that the Jews were persecuted so much? What made the chosen people from the Old testament, the very same ones who have been subjected to the worst torments anyone could ever go through. How can anyone justify treating others so inhumanely especially through generalization? How did power corrupt someone like Hitler who was brilliant enough to become the supreme commander of Germany and over-run almost all of the great civilized Europe so quickly, to lose his conscience completely? And how do lesser (known) people like Koscik, Tuvia, Azael and Zus, manage to keep theirs despite all the adversities they live in? Where does this moral compass come from and what makes it flounder in some, despite them having everything they want and need, and hold steady in others who do not?

Life is full of mysteries...!

A return to the ways of writing...

It's been over 4 years since my one and only blogger blog. In fact it has been so long that I've decided to start fresh, especially since the theme here is going to be different. This blog is going to be like a sand-box that enables me to document random thoughts both imaginary as well as those rooted in reality... Experiences that have meant much to me, as well as descriptions of memories, dreams and a lot more, that come from either side of this jelly-like organ that resides inside the bony cranium that protects it.

The inspiration for returning to blogging comes from other bloggers I've been following/reading lately - my sister for one, whose blog I recently ran into. Many other friends have also influenced me with their interesting blogs. Right now I am wondering when my next blog is going to appear here... Life keeps us busy, and it becomes increasingly difficult for us to make time for seemingly simple and mundane things like tapping away at the keyboard to produce something that nobody else but ourselves might be interested in. It is so easy to put this activity aside for a date in the future which might never arrive...

Yet another realization I just arrived at, is that I am taking awfully long to write this first blog, because I am assuming that it is going to be read by someone else... and that is making me want to do better than just rattle away like I usually do. Well, I'll just shrug off the desire to spend time to polish my writing through the realization that it is very unlikely that this particular blog has the smallest chance of interesting anyone else. So if you're here with the expectation of reading prose that is poetic or which tantalizes your literary taste-buds, I must admit you are going to be highly disappointed. But if you want to know what I really feel, what I write here should give wings to those little voices in my head and liberate them to make appearances that etch them on the Internet's digital canvas, from where they can fly off to any corner of this beautiful world in the form of zeroes and ones.

So heres to keeping up with writing.