Author Archives: Editors

Does God Exist?

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    Editorial Note:

    This thread was initiated in email loop by Syed Imtiaz Bokhari after reading an article in daily New York Times.            Syed Nayyar Bokhari provided a video from Facebook providing reasons in favor of Existence of God.                                   For serious discussion, this thread has been established in TFUSA website.

    nSalik {Noor Salik}

    “Does God exist? – Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku Debate” on YouTube

    …

    On Oct 24, 2017 11:13 AM, “Nayyar Bokhari” <> wrote:

    On Friday, October 20, 2017 10:32 AM, Bokhari Imtiaz
    Hi members, I downloaded this article from today’s NYT.
     “Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries into Religion” philosopher Tim Crane is an atheist.
    James Ryerson reviewed this book and presented his comments in a very balanced and rational way. It is worth reading give us another perspective by an atheist philosopher on religion and its genesis.   
    Having surveyed religious traditions across the world and throughout history, he sees religion, at its core, as a set of “culturally prescribed practices” that aim to help people access “superhuman powers” in the hope of “realizing human goods” and avoiding bad things, typically “in conditions and situations they cannot control and with problems that they cannot solve.
    This seems to me is the crux of the religion, since ages people find solace in religion when confronted with problems in life to ward off calamities. To me it is a psychological remedy people looking for and it propel them to a comfort zones they created for them. It is still permeates all religions and people strongly belief in this cultural remedy, science has contrary view. Once they adhere to this philosophy their existential anxieties marginalized. 
    Worries about things like the meaning of life and the problem of evil are peripheral. “If religion could not promise the help of superhuman powers,” he concludes, “then religion would not exist.”
    With some my comments enjoy the article, expecting some feedback.
    Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries into Religion
    OCT. 20, 2017
    The philosopher Tim Crane is an atheist. Though educated in a Catholic environment, he has come to believe that nothing exists beyond the world of everyday experience and scientific explanation — nothing transcendent. Some people look around and think,this can’t be all there is. Crane is not one of those people. That he avows atheism, as opposed to agnosticism, does not strike him as presumptuous or arrogant. He has considered the relevant evidence and arguments as best he can and drawn the most reasonable-seeming conclusion. What more is a thinker supposed to do? He is convinced religious believers are wrong.
    But his qualm is not with them. As he explains in his lucid and thoughtful book THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion From an Atheist’s Point of View (Harvard University, $24.95), he is more troubled by some of his fellow atheists — specifically, those who campaign against religion as an irrational vestige of primitive thought outmoded by modern science. A notable feature of this campaign, Crane observes, has been its general failure to change the minds of religious people. Maybe those people are just foolish. Or maybe, as Crane is inclined to think, they do not recognize themselves or their beliefs in the picture of religion under attack. The atheists miss their target because they are aiming elsewhere. And because they fail to understand what religion is, they lack a suitably “realistic and feasible way to relate” to people of faith — which is to say, most people.
    In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers. Religion is an immense, sprawling and variegated affair. Any attempt to define it, however comprehensive, will omit some aspects and most attempts to define it, however crude, will capture something. The name of the game is what you see as central. Crane resists the notion, common to combative atheists, that the core of religion is an archaic cosmology (beliefs about things like the origin of the universe and supernatural agents) grafted onto a moral code. If you conceive of religion this way, as bad science plus arbitrary injunctions, of course you will think it should be replaced by good science and rational ethics.
    For Crane, the religious worldview is better understood as the combination of two attitudes. First: a sense of the transcendent, of an unseen moral order to the universe, often known as God. Second: an identification with a community that tries to “make sense of the world” by attempting to bring its members into alignment with this moral order through a tradition of narratives and rituals. Crane concedes there is a cosmology here; a belief in the transcendent is “a claim about the universe.” He also grants that religion, like science, is trying to explain things. But the kind of explanation and the kind of cosmology offered by religion, which does not “expect all aspects of the world to be intelligible,” are nothing like those of science, which strives to eliminate mystery.
    The atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested that the idea of God is a “hypothesis” about a supernatural agent, ventured as a possible account of perplexing natural phenomena. Crane disagrees. The god of actual religious people — the source of the unseen orders that imbues everything with significance — is both vaguer and more nuanced than that. Science takes “complex or confusing things” and tries to explain them in terms of “simpler or clearer things.” God is not simple or clear. Religion isn’t supposed to be a neat explanation of causal forces. It’s supposed to be a difficult explanation of the meaning of life. This explanation, Crane contends, is destined to be forever incomplete, always a struggle to fathom, not because it is missing some key facts, but because it involves “attempts to encounter” the transcendent.
    Crane himself thinks there is no transcendent reality, but he knows there can be no proof of this. Given the ineluctable enigma of existence, he believes religion can be a rational, “intelligible human reaction to the mystery of the world.”
    This picture of religion would no doubt strike the sociologist Christian Smith as “too cognitive, cerebral, intellectualist.” In his substantial, richly informed book RELIGION: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters (Princeton University, $35), Smith offers a social scientific theory that disputes the notion, advanced by titans of social thought like Clifford Geertz and Max Weber, that religion is a cultural meaning system. “Religion is not at heart a set of replies to existential questions,” Smith writes, “even if it often involves this.”
    For Smith, the paradigmatic expression of religion is something like praying to God to cure your wife’s cancer, or beseeching a cloud spirit to bring rain to your withering crops.Having surveyed religious traditions across the world and throughout history, he sees religion, at its core, as a set of “culturally prescribed practices” that aim to help people access “superhuman powers” in the hope of “realizing human goods” and avoiding bad things, typically “in conditions and situations they cannot control and with problems that they cannot solve.” Smith is quick to acknowledge that this is not all religion provides, nor the sole reason people practice religion. But he maintains it is the “central” reason. And unlike other things religion does, like providing an identity (which a profession can also do) or seeking existential meaning (which philosophy can also do), it is “unique to religion.”
    A methodological hazard of discussing religion at this level of abstraction is the need, as Crane says, “to generalize the views of billions of people.” Smith hopes to avoid this difficulty by focusing less on subjective religious belief and more on public religious practices, which are “more or less objective.” This has allowed him, he believes, to focus on what religion is.He distinguishes this from what religion can do, its “secondary outgrowths” (things like fostering identity, meaning, and community and so on). Though these derivative features are “often crucial” for the personal experience and institutional strength of religion, they do not constitute its “ultimate raison d’être.”
    Smith’s is a theoretical work, but he provides ample illustrations of his theory, including religious traditions that might at first seem like counterexamples, such as American Protestant evangelicalism, which stresses the importance of beliefs and attitudes over rituals and customs. In all cases, he finds formalized calls for heavenly assistance, often involving this-worldly concerns like financial security and family health, to be central. Worries about things like the meaning of life and the problem of evil are peripheral. “If religion could not promise the help of superhuman powers,” he concludes, “then religion would not exist.”
    At some point in the distant past, of course, religion did not exist. The story of its emergence in the universe, and the significance of this story for our understanding of the nature of religion, are the subject of THE NEW COSMIC STORY: Inside Our Awakening Universe (Yale University, $25), by the theologianJohn F. Haught. Like Crane and Smith, he takes a “generalized approach” to religion; focusing on what all such traditions have in common. Unlike Crane and Smith, he sees religion as something whose journey, like that of the rest of the universe described by modern science, is “unfinished,” and hence whose nature must be understood, in part, in terms of where it may be headed.
    Haught describes religion as the “anticipation of a rightness that is now mostly out of range.” This formulation resembles Crane’s, with its transcendent moral order both everywhere present and agonizingly beyond reach. But Haught, a man of faith, disagrees with Crane that religion’s truths will necessarily remain so remote. Ever since the Big Bang, we have seen the emergence of matter, then life, then conscious life — and then, most notably, in Haught’s estimation, the human consciousnessof “interior striving” that finds its zenith in our “spiritual adventures.”
    Who knows what advances in religion the next stage of the universe’s evolution will bring? Thanks to modern science, Haught argues, we know “the cosmic story is far from over” and can look “patiently and expectantly ahead for a possible meaning to it all.” Should such a cosmic gift come to pass, it would amount to a salvation of the physical world, not a deliverance from it — a kind of redemption perhaps even an atheist could live with.
    James Ryerson is a senior staff editor for The Times’s Op-Ed page

Is charity motivated by reasons that are far less noble ?

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(We give to charity because it eases our conscience, raises our social status and care less about whether it does any good or not, George Bernard Shaw noted in 1896. Socrates opined that people behave ethically when they think they are being watched. Every day new charity organizations sprung up to help third world countries like Pakistan despite the fact that it may have marginal or even adverse effect on their objectives. It does not change the detrimental governmental  policies and it may even encourage neglect or hands off approach by governments which does a lot more harm than what these organization can achieve. A worth reading article by Jacob Burak. F. Sheikh).

Excerpts from article below;

Studies show that, in general, people who feel good, do good – and likewise, people who do good, feel better. The rich are no exception. Giving to charity activates parts of the brain related to reward and pleasure. Yes, the rich do have some distinctive reasons for giving to charity, such as the desire not to ‘morally corrupt’ their heirs. But like others, they also give to strengthen their identity – and probably, to relieve their guilt. As Shaw said, with typical epigrammatic acuity: ‘One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than turning a prayer wheel.’

The first person to attribute the act of charity to improving one’s public image was the 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, who claimed that people make moral and ethical decisions based on how an impartial observer would judge them. This idea harks back to a dialogue about justice in Plato’s Republic, in which Glaucon tells Socrates that people behave ethically only when they think others are watching.

Fast-forward to 2009, when Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University in North Carolina, co-conducted a studyevaluating the motive of outward appearances in giving to charity. The research found that appearances are so important that they even trump financial incentives. In the experiment, participants were divided into two groups, where each group was asked to type a combination of letters on a keyboard. They were told that if they typed the combination correctly, some money would be donated in their name to the Red Cross, although never more than a few dollars.

In the ‘private’ group, members were exposed only to their own ‘giving’ scores, whereas in the ‘public’ group, each member was asked to publicly announce his or her donation to the others. In the end, members of the public group got the letter combination right twice as often as members of the private group. At a later stage of the experiment, researchers decided to test whether people would forgo a financial reward to look altruistic in the eyes of others. In the public group, adding a personal financial incentive had only a small effect on its success rate, whereas it increased the private group’s success rate by 35 per cent.

Let’s remember, too, that the problems philanthropists want to solve are frequently the result of government decisions, resource allocation and the status of human and property rights. If philanthropists were to commit to deeper and more meaningful action – if they joined governments or other institutions – they could affect public welfare in a more enduring way. Instead philanthropists are often slow to get involved in public policy, and prefer to make donations that counteract the government’s shortcomings. This reveals where their priorities really lie.

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Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 Novel & Omar El Akkad’s Novel About Next American Civil War of 2074

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(Brief Thought by F. Sheikh before the short introduction to Sinclair’s 1935 Novel. 

Azeem Farooki has shared short introduction of a 1935 novel “ It Can Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis and eerily main character of the novel, who is running for President, is a photocopy of Donald Trump.

Few months ago Dr. Shoeb Amin wrote a Book review of “ American Nations” by Colin Woodard. This book basically narrates that North America is inhabited by 11 nations with distinct character and culture that goes beyond State’s boundaries and that character has not changed over centuries despite the influx of new immigrants. This led to conflicts and civil war.We have not fully resolved these conflicts. These conflicts are coming to forefront with full energy. The Author of the book suggests that if disintegration can happen in Russia, it can happen here also. Current situation in Catalonia Spain, which has its own distinct culture, also tells us how unthinkable can become a reality.

This brings us to a novel by Omar El Akkad “American War” written in 2017 but the events take place in the future 2074 when polarized America has sunk into second Civil War. The novel is written through the eyes of six-year-old, Sarat Chestnut who lives in Louisiana when Southern States, (Alabama. Georgia and Mississippi) declare independence. The oil has been banned due to extreme global warming. The Middle East has gotten its act together and has formed new united country “ The Bouazizi Union” which is helping Southern States to gain independence. Sarat Chestnut grows up and becomes a suicidal bomber for the cause of Southern independent State. All this scenario looks preposterous now, but if you have read “ American Nations” by Colin Woodard, it is worth reading riveting novel“ American War” by Omar El Akkad, who was born in Cairo, Egypt, and worked as a journalist for The Globe and The Mail. He covered war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo bay and Arab Spring. He received National Newspaper award in 2006. He lives now in Portland, Oregon.)  

Sinclair Lewis’s – 1935 novel 
 It’s an election year, in a time of economic uncertainty. Running for president is a ranting populist type who has a bestselling book that is part biography, and part shameless boasting. He promises to “make America a proud, rich land again,” rails against blacks, Jews, and Mexicans, and makes it a point of criticizing the press, whose editors he accuses of “plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions.”

No, this is not a description of 2016, and the candidate is not [http://www..thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/cheats/2016/11/09/ap-donald-trump-wins-presidency.html]Donald Trump—although you can be excused for thinking so. This is, instead, a character named Berzelius Windrip in Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, a cautionary tale about how fascism comes to America. Although published over 80 years ago, Lewis’s novel seems especially relevant in the age of Trump. So relevant, in fact, that it recently became Amazon’s number one bestseller in the Classic American Literature category.

“The thing most resonant about the novel is it identified the conditions that were operative in 1935, and operative in the summer of 2016,” says Susan Medak, managing director of the Berkeley Repertory Theater, which staged a theatrical version of Lewis’s book in September. “What we wanted to share with the audience was there were high stakes in the election,” she adds. “[Trump’s] message of real hatred and bigotry spoke to this particular time again. The issue of gender is even in the original novel. The issues of freedom of the press were powerful. It took little effort to draw those parallels.”

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From Satanic Verses To Charlie Hebdo By Kenan Malik

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(A worth reading analysis and historic perspective by Kenan Malik on how Muslims in the West have reached a stage where their very existence is looked upon with suspicion. Kenan Malik is an author, speaker and broadcaster based in London. F. Sheikh) 

On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It was a brutally shocking act that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for almost a decade.

26 years later, on 7 January 2015, came an even more viscerally shocking act, when two gunmen forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sprayed the room with machine gun fire, killing 12, and injuring another 11.

What I want to look at today is what each of these events represented, and how we made the journey from the one to the other.

When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, Salman Rushdie was perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. The novel was not, it’s worth reminding ourselves, a novel solely, or even primarily about Islam. It was, Rushdie observed in an interview, about ‘migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death’, as well as an attempt ‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that until the fatwa most Muslims had ignored the book. The campaign against The Satanic Verses was largely confined to India, Pakistan and Britain. With the singular exception of Saudi Arabia, whose authorities bankrolled the initial efforts to ban the novel, there was little anti-Rushdie fervour in the Arab world or in Turkey, or among Muslim communities in France or Germany. When at the end of 1988 the Saudi government tried to persuade Muslim countries to ban the novel, few responded except those with large Indian subcontinental populations, such as South Africa and Malaysia. Even Iran was relaxed about Rushdie’s irreverence. It was available in Iranian bookshops and even reviewed in Iranian newspapers.

It was the fatwa that transformed the Rushdie affair into a global conflict with historic repercussions. It was through the Rushdie affair that many of the issues that now dominate political debate – multiculturalism, free speech, radical Islam, terrorism – first came to the surface. It was also through the Rushdie affair that our thinking about these issues began to change.

To understand these changes, and how they led to a world in which the Charlie Hebdo killings became possible, I want to look at three issues of the post-issues of the Rushdie world that are particularly pertinent to this discussion.

The first is the changing character of Islam and of Muslim identity. Until the late 1980s the idea of a Muslim community barely existed in the West, while Muslim identity meant something different to what it does today.

Take Britain. The first generation of Muslims in the 1950s and 60s, largely from South Asia, were religious, but wore their faith lightly. Many men drank alcohol. Few women wore a hijab, let alone a burqa or niqab. Most visited the mosque only occasionally. Their faith expressed for them a relationship with God, not a sacrosanct public identity.

The second generation of Britons with a Muslim background – my generation – was primarily secular. Religious organizations were barely visible. The organizations that bound together Asian communities (and we thought of ourselves as ‘Asian’ or ‘black’, not ‘Muslim’) were primarily secular, often political.

It is only with the generation that has come of age since the late 1980s that the question of cultural differences has come to be seen as important. It was only now that the idea of a distinctly Muslim community emerged, as did a specific Muslim identity. Much the same process can be sketched out in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands.

The reasons for this shift are complex. Partly they lie in a tangled set of social and political changes, including the collapse of the left and of radical social movements. Partly they lie in international developments, from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, that helped foster a heightened sense of Muslim identity. Partly they lie in the growing influence of Saudi Arabia on Islamic institutions in the West and its aggressive promotion of Wahhabism. Partly they lie in the rise of the politics of identity, an issue I shall address shortly.

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posted by f.sheikh