Allah Knows Best!

“Allah (God) knows best!” – so they say after every statement without thinking of the implications at all. Lets dissect this seemingly harmless statement and look at the implications for a moment:

As soon as you say that you personally believe something to justify your actions, the next person, the mullah, the fundamentalist and the fanatic are equally entitled to say the same, that they personally believe such and such to justify their actions (how ever barbaric that may be), and “Allah (God) knows best!”

This completely evades personal accountability and responsibility to the society, the next person and oneself. It also negates the necessity to provide reason in the real world for any particular action, be it good or bad.

I know, I can be a pain in the ass with my rationalism and logic, but I am compelled to point out the fallacy of the logic behind this seemingly harmless notion, precisely because it is not harmless. So next time you use the statement “Allah (God) knows best!” to justify your actions, take a moment to think about the implications.

A developer’s tale!

Some time ago an old colleague of mine sent me a picture he had taken of a diagram I drew on our whiteboard back in my old office.

Basically, the meeting was about discussing a project to build software for Nokia cell phones, so I started by describing what the situation is for us developers to my team by summarizing the whole issue in one small diagram illustrated below.

Everyone unanimously agreed with my perspective and then we moved on to the details of the project!

A developer's tale!

Heaven & Hell

So, obviously, most scientists and men of reason (if you’d excuse the sexist expression), such as Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, and myself will go to hell and most of the priests, mullahs and other literally illiterate and irrational people will go to heaven.

The inhabitants of heaven will enjoy their X number of virgins and the lack of contraception.

They will enjoy the god given infrastructure and the lack of knowledge to maintain it.

With eternity to consider, relatively soon, heaven will be over populated and plagued with the HIV pandemic. The infrastructure, not being able to keep up with growth, becomes inadequate; and soon pee, poo and what-not, all seamlessly flow with the flow of people in the most unhygienic and repulsive of conditions.

In the mean while, in hell, the scientists figure out how to harness this endless, free and absolutely renewable, source of energy!

Using it they synthesize every possible atom and chemical they need, build air-conditioning, infrastructure, and everything possible with science and technology!

People literally start having a HELL of a time with all the comfort and luxury technology, with an inexhaustible supply of energy, can provide, and leaves god wondering, “Where in hell did I go wrong!”

I am a fundamentalist atheist!

Some people say that I am just as fundamentalist as the religious fundamentalists. I refuse to acknowledge that for several reasons.

Religious fundamentalists KNOW with absolute certainty that there is a god (which ever one that is) and have their respective faiths tell them to fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors, stone people to death, condemn and outlaw consensual sex, and build schools for suicide bombers.

Whereas people of the “fundamentalist atheist faith” think that there is probably no god due to the lack of evidence, and therefore no reason to believe in the logical existence of god. At best they are compelled to argue with reason, get into heated debates, educate more children without the influence of religious dogmas, and vouch for secular societies.

There has never been an atheist school for suicide bombers and their most devastating weapon of mass destruction is a pen (in the metaphorical sense, in reality its a computer hooked up to the internet, logged into a WordPress account)!

Of course, at this point, you will give me the example of Stalin and Hitler, let me briefly explain what ideology motivated their actions.

1) Stalin: fanatical communist

2) Hitler: fanatical racist

In those cases or any other case, atheism was not the driving force.

I have already explained the difference between a faith based belief system (required by religion) and an evidence based belief system (required by science) that atheists have in my article “Reasons“, so I will not get into that here.

Following from the explanation in that article, a fundamentalist mindset can be defined as one that cannot be changed by providing evidence and reason. No atheist who is an atheist by choice can have this mindset.

In fact, one can argue that there is no such thing as a fundamentalist atheist!

If atheism could even remotely lead to fanaticism, Denmark would have been the most unpleasant place on the planet. Whereas in reality it is one of the safest, richest and happiest places to be!

If being a “fundamentalist atheist” (if there were such a thing) does give rise to societies like secular Denmark, nurture reason, progress science, and harbor tolerance, I’d choose to be a fundamentalist atheist “any god given day”.

I am a fundamentalist atheist!

My Apology

It was our first “Bengali” wedding anniversary today. Katy suggested we have some biriyani, in the only Indian restaurant around here, to celebrate our long, tedious and extremely eventful “Bengali” wedding!

So, off we were to meet Mamush (my mother-in-law, shashuri) and Krishek (my brother-in-law, shala) there.

As usual the chattering started and I was intently listening to the Polish gibberish thrown around me, catching a few phrases here and there; and of course the occasional translations were most welcome.

At one point, Krishek, asked me if I had watched the new TorchWood episode. I couldn’t exactly remember which one that was, as highly predictable of me, so he started telling me bits of the story, and that he was disappointed that his favorite character had died in that episode. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember who in the world died!

Then it occurred to me that the side-kick did die of an alien virus infection and I blurted out, “Oh yeah, the gay guy died, oh that’s OK, he’s gay!” And of course, I made nothing of it, and forgot about it.

Dinner was great; the ride back home was a very nice debate that continued into my room with a few undesirable consequences, but that’s besides the point.

In the middle of our 3 way debate between Katy, Krishek and myself, Krishek mentioned that he was offended by what I had said earlier at dinner, “Oh yeah, the gay guy died, oh that’s OK, he’s gay!”. It took me a while to realize what the issue was, but slow as I am, I did.

This is when I thought of the feminist movement and what they had done for society. They have helped us raise our consciousness to the level that when ever, even for the romantic sake of using classic English, we address the human race as “mankind”, “man” or any other masculine form, we unconsciously apologize for it. That goes for man-woman and blond-brunette-redhead jokes as well.

I personally would never judge anyone for their sexual orientation or preference; be it hetero, homo or bi; monogamous or polygamous; playful or serious; with the exception of a few cases such as pedophilia, bestiality, rape and any degree of snuff.

Having said that, my lame gay joke was out of old adolescent ill gotten habits, and I apologize for it. Today my consciousness has been raised just like that of how society’s consciousness as a whole had been raised by the feminists.

Hopefully this article will help raise the consciousness of others, like me who are feminists, and are against any form of discrimination, to realize that at times even the best of us can unconsciously make blatant blunders and should be more careful the next time.

Sometimes all it takes is a nudge from someone who has had their consciousness raised already, like Krishek.

Open your mind!

Let us be heard!

What can we blame this on!

Neda Agha-Soltan

I am speechless…

Morals

Religion is not the source of our morals. In fact if religion were the basis of the moral structure of society, that society would be quite immoral indeed by today’s standards.

Like everything else in life, morality has evolved, and changed with time. The traits that we usually universally see as moral (honesty, fidelity, trustworthiness, compassion etc.) are literally embedded into our hardware through evolution. Unfortunately, I am not an expert in the science, philosophy and evolution of morality, so this article will instead concentrate on providing some examples of religious moral attitudes in contrast to today’s views.

The religion I am most familiar with is Islam, therefore my examples will have an Islamic context, but the idea or message this article is trying to communicate applies to most major religions in existence today.

I usually try to refrain from quoting the Koran (or any other religious book for that matter), or the Hadith, but feel compelled to, at least, quote some parts of the Koran to veer off some of the claims and accusations that I don’t know what I am talking about. Of course I am well aware that there will always be a few people, extremely ignorant, if not also downright deluded, that will honestly claim and believe that I have no idea of what I am talking about and therefore should shut the hell up. I usually do a good job either ignoring them or pointing out that I have adequate relevant knowledge to argue my perspective unlike most of them.

Moving on to a few examples:

In today’s world it is without a hint of doubt, sexism and slavery are considered immoral, where as in Islam it is not.

1) The entire Koran is talking mostly to the male audience. In most of the cases blatantly commanding what a man should do with his women, which begs the question of whether women are really considered people or just possessions.

2) In [4:34] of the Koran, it is clearly stated that, men are responsible for women, and that all righteous women must accept this arrangement. It further allows a man to beat his wife/wives as a last resort (to put it mildly) if they (the women) do not obey him.

3) According to the Koran [4:11], a man inherits twice that of a woman.

4) Men are preferred as witnesses, and in case men are not available, two women count for the equivalent of one male witness.

5) Slavery is allowed in Islam, so is using slaves for sex, but in a discriminatory manner. Men owning female slaves can use them for sex, but not the other way round.

An exhaustive list of the breaches in human rights (in terms of secular humanist thinking) that can be derived from just the Koran is too large for one article; volumes of books can be written on the topic. I have just barely attempted to scratch the surface in the hope that my article(s) will provoke some critical thinking by the reader.

Having said enough about Islam, Christianity is not really too far off.

Morality in general is twisted by religious faiths and inheriting moral values from religion will without a doubt give rise to truly immoral and appalling acts of cruelty and breach in human rights, as history and sadly even the present day situation with religious groups have shown us.

Why not derive our morals, and means of judgment from the golden rule, “Treat others the way you’d like yourself to be treated.”, instead of relying on age old books and fables that have long been, not only obsolete, but has contributed to human suffering in cataclysmic scales.

Why not live and let live, and simply leave the next person, family, community, nation, continent (and may be eventually the next planet) alone and let them be!

Why not think a bit more carefully, in both depth and breadth, about religion and faith, and what their teachings really imply and how that affects the lives of everyone else who seem to be different, but are they really!

A short video from someone who shares my understanding, but explains it so much better!

Reasons

I like to think of myself as a man of reason. There may have been times in the past when I used to be less reasonable than I am now, but with time the only direction I can see myself head towards is being more reasonable!

Having said that, my beliefs (if you can call them beliefs, for lack of a better word, in the classic sense) are based on extensive research, study of available literature, knowledge that I have accumulated throughout my life and lastly my capacity to reason and connect relevant information available to me.

In this article I will attempt to clarify my position regarding the existence of god and then try to illustrate the difference between a faith based belief system (required by religion) and an evidence based belief system (required by science)

1) The existence of god

There are currently no means available to disprove the existence of any god, be it Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or other older Greek or Hindu gods such as Zeus or Durga. The inability to prove something exists does not automatically imply the converse case is true, which is that it exists. This is a false argument many non-thinking theists make.

Let me clarify this with a simple example:

I can claim that god/creator is a highly intelligent green yo-yo, spinning and floating freely just outside the known universe and it communicates with us through other green yo-yo-s, the language of which we haven’t been able to decipher yet.

There are no means by which you can falsify that claim, even though it does sound absolutely absurd. This inability to falsify my claim does not, by default, prove that this green yo-yo god/creator exists. In this light, when I think about it, the claims of the existence of the other gods that I’ve mentioned earlier sound equally absurd.

Therefore the likely hood of any of these gods to exist are equally implausible!

In the same way, there are no direct means to prove the existence of a god, but there are indirect ways to make educated guesses on the likely hood of such beings to exist and unfortunately for theists, the evidence is not in their favor.

I, therefore, have no reason to be bias towards one god or the other, if I believe in Allah, by reason I am compelled to equally believe in all the other gods, all of which are equally unlikely to exist.

And given what I know from my understanding of science, the probability of such a being or series of beings to exist is low enough to be considered, for all practical purposes, negligible.

From a scale of 0 to 10, assuming 0 is absolute disbelief in the concept of god, and 10 is absolute belief. I am 0.1, which basically means, I am open to the idea that god may exist, but I think it is highly unlikely and like to lead my life assuming that he/she/it does not exist and therefore I claim to be an atheist.

2) Claims of truth

Religion makes extra ordinary claims (such as miracles) without producing or implying any evidence and requires that a person following a particular faith believe in such claims with unquestioned belief in the absence of evidence and that questioning such claims is wrong and sinful.

Religion compels its believers to practice certain life styles and harbor certain attitudes, whether they be reasonable or not, including a predisposition to indoctrinate or presume that an individual, not agreeing or practicing such stereo types, is to be seen as inferior, evil and many such negative things.

Religion claims to be outside the scope of reason and scrutiny and presumes to be universally applicable, even though our understanding, knowledge and social attitudes have changed. A simple example would be, Islam and what it says about slavery. The perspective of Islam in regard to slavery may have been noble over a millennium ago, but our social awareness has raised to the extent that the Islamic view point of slavery is obsolete and needs a major overhaul, which of course no Muslim is willing to do or even admit.

Whereas, science claims extra ordinary facts with reason and evidence to believe such things, from evolution to black holes. No one is compelled to believe anything science claims without scrutiny. In fact, the very opposite, scrutiny is welcome! The only thing more foolish than belief without reason and evidence is disbelief in the presence of evidence and reason.

Science has taught us to question, scrutinize, make mistakes and correct them with time and when new evidence produces itself; a process which is self improving.

Therefore a belief (for lack of a better word) in what science tells us, is inherently different from religious beliefs. One is welcome to scrutinize, be skeptic, and produce counter evidence if available and debate on the validity of any scientific claim.

This is the process by which we abolished countless fatal diseases, doubled our life expectancy, produced technology to provide people with a seemingly endless supply of resources and comfort.

Whereas the history of religion is tanned with innumerable instances of oppositions to progress, sadly, even today.

3) Arrogant certainty

Religion is absolutely certain of its claims of facts and history even in the face of concrete counter evidence and reason. The believers are the chosen once who have god’s unquestioned favor as opposed to those who do not believe in that particular faith.

This form of thinking and attitude only portrays clearly its arrogance.

Whereas science is humble enough to say that a theory is only a theory, which by no means imply that it is wrong! It only implies that a theory is claimed to be true because there is unquestionable mathematical or evidential proof of its truth, but non-the-less it can be disproved if at any given time in the future counter evidence is found.

A few examples probably most people can relate to:

1) The theory of gravity, the truth of which allows us to launch satellites into space (modern communication depends on it)

2) The theory of conservation of matter and energy, the truth of which allows us to produce nuclear energy (a large chunk of our source of power)

3) The theory of electricity and magnetism, the truth of which allows us to build exceedingly complex machines (the very computer you are using to read this article)

But they are only theories!

A few examples that are less familiar to people:

1) The theory of relativity, the truth of which allows us to accurately know where we are (modern GPS systems)

2) The theory of evolution, the truth of which allows us to understand the diversity of life on earth, and produce 3 to 5 times more food per unit area of land (without it our food production would be less than half of what it is now, which can have dire consequences)

3) The theory of quantum mechanics, the truth of which allows us to produce synthetic chemicals such as plastics and antibiotics and many other things we take for granted and others that are not at all so obvious.

But they are only theories!

This is science, humble and admitting to the idea that there is a possibility that the theories are incorrect, but more likely simply not fully complete just yet.

Science is even humble enough to admit that there is a possibility that god exists, even though unlikely!

Based on everything I have attempted to explain, I can be convinced with enough reason, logic and evidence that god exists, but until then my stance on the matter will remain as I have described earlier.

On the contrary, a person of religious faith is not open minded enough to think in any other way.

<Link> to a video of an excellent lecture on the topic!

Hijaab

In Islam, the hijaab is compulsory for women and supporters of this “righteous” concept usually provide the following reasons (this is not an exhaustive list):

1) Allah’s Messenger said, “Allah is modest and covering. He loves modesty and privacy.” [Abu Daawood, An-Nasaa'i Al-Bayhaqi, Ahmad], therefore a woman must practice the concept of hijaab to show how modest she is.

2) It offers protection to women.

3) It indicates that a woman is decent, respectable and highlights her good qualities; and not practicing the hijaab indicates that a woman is indecent, not respectable and is evil.

In my humble opinion:

1) If Allah is/was modest, he (note that according to Islam, Allah must be addressed in the masculine form) wouldn’t want the phrase “Allah-hu-akbar” (Allah/God is great) recited every time at the drop of a hat and screamed out at the top of people’s voices at least 5 times a day.

2) The protection offered by the hijaab to women only reflects the unpleasant and unacceptable nature of the society that actually requires women to practice such a thing; namely male dominance, male insecurity, and the lack of respect for women as human beings who are well capable, both intellectually and physically, of holding their own ends.

3) According to this point the conclusion is that almost every woman that we know, including our mothers, sisters, friends and most of the female population on the planet are indecent, does not deserve any respect and are evil.

Finally, to clarify the concept itself:

1) The hijaab is not just about wearing a certain kind of garment, it dictates a woman’s life style. It imposes that a woman cannot interact with any man other than her husband (or close relative), and that a woman must remain indoors at all times; and only due to extreme necessity she is allowed to make exceptions to these rules, in which case she must wear the veil.

2) The hijaab also applies to men, but to a much milder context, the description, reasoning and criticism of which is beyond the scope of this article. Here I am only trying to elaborate on what obligations are imposed on women by the hijaab and why I disagree with the concept.

3) “It is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and his messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their decision” [al-Ahzaab 33:36]; which basically means that a believer of Islam must listen to and obey what ever is told by both Allah and his messenger, so the hijaab is compulsory.

These aspects automatically imply:

1) A woman cannot participate in almost any performing art or sports and technically not even pursue a career since it may not be an “extreme necessity”, and definitely never for an audience of both men and women, and if they do they are indecent, not respectable and evil.

2) A woman’s physical health is compromised and disregarded because, for example, the chances of getting a heat stroke in hot countries like mine for the millions of women working would increase dramatically, say in the case of Bangladesh, the garments industry employs a large chunk of the female work force, which is a big part of the economy.

3) A non Muslim or Muslim woman not practicing the hijaab, in spite of being successful and a great person, is indecent, not respectable and evil, for example an accomplished female doctor even though she may be saving lives every day of her life.

4) A woman is viewed as an object or possession, which must be hidden away in spite of her comfort, health and rights to opportunities that should be available to all.

For now this is as much as I will elaborate on and come to the obvious conclusion that, the concept of the hijaab is one that could only be created and supported by an extremely insecure male chauvinist.

And if Allah/God does exist, he/she/it cannot be as small minded as this.

Amen (pun intended)