Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "science-vs-religion"

Science and Religion have no feud,
Both are expressions of naturalism.
The real feud has been between,
Intellectualism and fundamentalism.
Facts help us take the world forward,
Reason helps us treat primitiveness.
But facts and reason alone won't do,
Without warmth all matter is lifeless.
Of course there are flaws in religion,
In science too there's greed and bigotry.
If in religion we have extremist nuts,
We also have plenty of scientific bully.
Instead of picking on each other's mistake,
Let us be human across intellect and faith.

I know people who use God
as excuse for hate and war.
I know people who use God
as inspiration for love and peace.

I know people who use Science
as excuse to be cold and inhuman.
I know people who use Science
as means to be warm and responsible.

It’s neither God nor Science,
that causes coldness and war.
In the hands of a selfish ape,
Science and God are equally impotent.

But when it’s a responsible human
that wields either God or Science,
You can rest assured of one thing,
nothing can dent their humanness.

God is all in the mind,
What’s wrong with that!
Art is also all in the mind,
So, is art nothing but dirt!

Yes, plenty harm has been done,
In the name of God.
The same can be said,
About science and art.

Dividers will always divide,
Haters will always hate.
Apes will find one excuse or another,
To justify their authoritarian trait.

For example, 9/11 wasn’t religion’s fault,
Any more than Hiroshima was science’s fault.

No literature is infallible, but while errors in scientific literature are proudly mended by later scientists, errors in religious literature are rarely mended – they are interpreted, reinterpreted, and justified in a million ways, but never questioned, as very few persons of faith have got the brain and backbone to acknowledge errors, let alone correct them – this is not holiness, it’s blindness most primitive.

Reverence without revision isn’t sanctity, it’s stagnation – and stagnation might feel honorous, but it leads to devolution. Just because it’s habit doesn’t make it holy – admission of error is the beginning of enlightenment.

God of the gaps cannot
be God of the world,
and God of the world should not
be abused as god of the gaps.

As puny apes on an insignificant blue rock
in a tiny backwater of the galaxy, we know
nothing about the origin of the universe,
but I can tell you one thing for a fact of
earth biology, it has nothing to do with the
anthropomorphic god of all the scriptures.

If all it takes is a couple of burning bushes,
magic tricks and fairytales to quench your
quest for truth, you have neither the brain,
nor the backbone, or the heart to explore truth.

Fairytales provide nourishment for the mind,
but only as tales of fantasy, not of truth.
Myths are crucial part of the social fabric, but
they must never become the backbone of society.

Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought,
whether it’s separation between the mortal and divine,
or the separation between reason and theology,
or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry.

Every single aspect of human consciousness
touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and
desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness,

which is why I never felt at home with euroschools,
despite the fact that I too like everyone on the
planet grew up in a westwashed education system.

However, it took me over a hundred books and
2000 sonnets to wake up to the tangible realization,
that the entire eurocentric paradigm is separatist,
from its science to philosophy to theology to poetry.

In euro schools of thought we say:
keep the divine separate from the people,
keep science separate from philosophy.
In Naskarian we say:
integration is divine by reason of poetry.