I say a little prayer for you

Readers of this blog know well that I am not a fanatical atheist who mocks the faithful and their religions.  I fully understand the phenomenal role that religion plays in helping humans make sense of our fleeting existence; after all, we are meaning-haunted creatures.

My problem is when the faithful bring their religion into public policy making.  Into various collective decisions.

COVID-19 is a recent, but yet another, context in which religion and faith interferes with public policy.  Recall the President yelling--does he ever speak calmly though!--that everything will reopen by Easter?  Imagine if that were to happen when we are in the thick of first wave of this awful pandemic!

Passover began Wednesday. Easter is Sunday. Ramadan begin a few days later on the 23rd.  It is an Abrahamic convergence of sorts when the cousins worship their own respective gods!

In their respective prayers, do the faithful wish the others good health during this pandemic?  Or, do they believe that their god will protect them, but the infidels be damned?

Decades ago, a born-again fundamentalist told me that my parents and I will go to hell despite the fact that we are good people because we don't believe in Jesus--HE is the only one who can save us, she sincerely said!

Sure, she and other faithful can believe whatever they want.  Those are personal issues.  But, what if those beliefs interfere with the common good?

In public policy, prayers are risky. Prayers to God can give people a false sense of reassurance that something has been done. In the context of COVID-19, this could mean actions to control the virus or protect those on the front lines of the pandemic—the health care workers, fire fighters, and store clerks, among others. In the worst case, prayers can take the place of effective action, such as social distancing and material aid, which can prevent people from becoming sick and dying.

Further, prayers are cheap. They don't cost a damn thing.  Helping people out in the real world during catastrophes is bloody expensive, for which material donations and taxes are necessary.

In two out of three studies, I found that Christians who prayed for hurricane victims donated less than Christians who did not pray for the victims. While it is unknown how prayers affect other forms of support during a pandemic, it is a real risk that they have similar effects, given that the same social and psychological mechanisms may be at play. In my research, I found that prayers may take the place of material help in the wake of a natural disaster because religious Christians regard the act of praying itself to be directly helpful—hurricane victims’ material need was perceived as lower, after they had first received prayers.

With prayers, one can maintain a safe distance between one's mouth and their wallet.  Not for this atheist though, who sincerely believes that god is irrelevant when doing the right thing. I have been donating left, right, and center, these past few weeks.  I don't care whether you pray--donate, locally!

And god said, "Let there be tRump"!

Back in the old country, the leader of the government boasts about leading a bachelor life in order to serve the country.  A day before the general elections, he went to meditate in a cave.  Or, so it was reported. I suppose questions shall not be asked on why his meditation had to be photographed and widely distributed.  This is the same leader who handpicked a "yogi" as the chief minister of the most populous state in the union.  Politics is nothing but doing god's work!

Back in the old days, when the Ayatollahs took over governing in Iran, we wondered and worried about such a convergence of politics and religion.  It was, ahem, unholy.  And these kinds of things never would happen in the beacon of democracy that the United States is, we believed.

Live long enough and you will see wishes and nightmares come true!

A number of Republicans, and especially the party's white evangelical members, believe that god chose tRump to be the President. His pussy-grabbing bravado is ok with god? His bigotry is ok with god? His lying is ok with god?  Heck, violation of every one of the holy Ten Commandments is ok with this god?

In fact, god has a clear plan, which the “Independent Network Charismatic,” or “INC Christianity” cheer, and "is significantly changing the religious landscape in America – and the nation’s politics."

A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.

It is all good, as long as you keep your girls away from him, I guess.

Remember this post on the Bethel ministry youth who bugged, er, "encouraged" us?  Apparently that group also is a part of the INC Christianity.

Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

Trickle-down Christianity.  Oh my!

While the Ukraine scandal, family separations at the border, and allegations of corruption have made some evangelical Christians question their support of Donald Trump, most of those steeped in INC Christianity will never abandon their president.
To them, as we found, to oppose Donald Trump is to oppose God who chose him specifically to bring America and the world back to God.

God's will hath no why.

Calling a Black POTUS married 25 yrs to 1 wife with 2 children, no mistresses, affairs or scandals, ‘the antichrist’ but a white POTUS married thrice, 5 kids by 3 women, mistresses, affairs & scandals, ‘God‘s anointed,’ proves your religion is white supremacy, not christianity.

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) December 4, 2019

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

tRump is a RINO.  No, not that one.  But, this: He is religious in name only.

The "Two Corinthians" man is far from being a true Christian, as much as he is far from being a patriot when he makes out with the American flag.  Not for a moment does any sane person ever imagine tRump getting high on religion, like some of the uber-religious do.  In a marvelous autobiographical essay, the author writes: "I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all."  Maybe if tRump had tasted alcohol, his life--and ours--would have been different.  But then we also had a disastrous Republican President who had not only binged on alcohol but had even done cocaine, but found god after all that!

Anyway, the demagogue knows that bringing Jesus into political rhetoric is important in this country that was founded by fanatics who fled England: "the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”

And here I am, an atheist, who has never been anywhere near even pot, and I have no idea how the more potent drugs are.  Alcohol is rarer in my life than animal protein is.  I don't need religion or drugs to be ecstatic about life!

God and religion are not going to die anytime soon.  At a dinner a month ago at a meeting, an older man engaged me in a conversation about yoga and more.  The more included woo-woo talk. And then he made the mistake of asking me for my opinions.  I told him, in a matter of fact tone, that all our angst seems to be because we humans can't seem to figure out how to deal with two definitive aspects: We are here because our parents had sex, and we are going to die.  I suppose now he knows better to avoid me the next time he sees me ;)

With time, I have come to understand that life is what it is.  And life ends. Dogs die. Trees die. We humans also die.  Perhaps we are the only living beings who are fully aware that death awaits us, and I am thankful for that:  "we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life."

In my transition from a believer, I thought I had to beat up on religion, on faith.  I wanted to argue that there is no god.  But, I care not anymore.  Have not cared about those for a long while.  My atheism does not depend on beating up on god or religion.  Like the review essay notes, such a framework also "releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism."

Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

We are meaning-haunted creatures.  What a lovely phrasing!

Some day in the future, I hope, we will have a political system in which politicians do not have to fake their ways with religion and god.

We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one.

If only there were more real Vaishnav people!

It is the anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.  He was shot dead on January 30th in 1948. I am re-posting here a modified version of one my op-ed columns

****************************************

Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.

Albert Einstein summed it up best for all of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” 

In the contemporary United States, any talk in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out of a fear of being labeled a wimp.  The worst ones are those who successfully dodged the Vietnam War draft but now want to establish their manliness! This has been especially the case since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the “tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove their toughness.

Of course, violence is more than merely engaging in war. The political rhetoric, especially over the past four years since trump as a candidate and then as the president (gasp!) seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I, as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and rhetoric.

While words, unlike sticks and stones, do not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice--even among those who claim to be followers of Vishnu--is far from that interpretation of humanity.

When it comes to the terrible humanitarian crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the images of dead toddlers. Or, the images of mothers and children running after being tear-gassed at the border for seeking asylum.

The president's adviser on immigration, whose life is possible only because the US offered asylum to Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, boasts that “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”

The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but the radius of the arc seems to be getting longer.  Perhaps we shall overcome all our problems, but only over a much longer time than I would like. 

Consolation Prize

I have blogged in plenty--more than any reader ever wanted to read!--about death, religion, and god.  In blogging about these, I rarely ever make fun of religions, their gods, their narratives, and their followers.  Yes, the atheist that I am, sometimes I do joke about them.  But, for the most part, I don't.  For one simple and fundamental reason: Religions, gods, and the narratives help most people deal with the inevitable: Death.

If there were no death, then we humans would not have invented religions, gods, and the stories of how everything comes about.  We won't find any need to invent new religions/cults either.

But, there is death, and we humans know we are all going to die some time.  What happens to us after we die?  Where did grandma end up?  What about childhood friends? Heck, where did our favorite pet go upon death?

These are troubling questions.  And emotionally taxing questions.

Religions offer ways to deal with the ultimate existential angst:

Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion.

Of course, we are only talking about the sincere people, not like the fake ones who use religion and the fake religious for power.

When we are grieving, when we feel incapable of dealing with terrible developments, religions help:

Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.

Indeed.

God is irrelevant

One does not have to believe in a god to appreciate life.  This is paradise on earth.

Well, almost a paradise.

I passed a homeless man who was lugging his belongings on an overfilled backpack, with his dog walking alongside.

What is my obligation to that homeless man?

An atheist I am, I worry a lot about such questions.

I could choose to help him.  Or, I could ignore his very existence.  I could try convincing myself that it is somebody else's problem.  Right?

One does not have to believe in a god in order to answer that question.  Bringing god into this is a distraction.  God is irrelevant to figuring out how to react to the sight of a homeless man in this paradise.

If the case of the homeless person is not convincing enough, consider the following:

•            It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.
•            It is wrong to enslave people.
•            It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.
•            Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required
to try to stop it.

Aren't all those true.  Well, a dick cheney or donald trump will favor torturing prisoners of war.  An assad has no qualms killing his own people.  But, an overwhelming majority of us--irrespective of what we think about god or any religion--will agree with those statements, right?

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists.  That seems to me to be a remarkable claim.  If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.?  There’d be nothing wrong with torture?  The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

So, then, what has god got to do with any of those situations?

Over the years, I have come to understand that it is a humongous waste of time to argue over whether or not god exists.  It does not matter one bit.  What matters is how we live our lives, which includes our relationships with fellow humans and with other life forms and non-living matter all around us.

Consider the flowing river.  Will it be ok for me to dump sewage or factory waste into that river?  Whether it is about slavery or about dumping sewage, the question of whether or not god exists, or whose god is the real god, is immaterial, right?

The awfulness is how, for instance, slavery and Christianity coexisted, with religious folks explicitly justifying slavery. Or, even now, how the religious right considers coal as a gift from god that should be shared with the world!

So, back to the homeless person.   He makes me feel uncomfortable.  Not because I worry about the safety of my life or my property, but because I do not know how to react.  Should I ignore him?  Shrug my shoulders and move on?  Should I engage with him and try to help?  Should I donate to the organizations that help the homeless?  If I do not donate, does it make me a bad person?  Do I want to be a good person?  What does it mean to be a good person?  Why have I not figured out the answer despite all these years?

God is irrelevant in trying to sort out these questions.

WWJD?

The answer to that question, my friend, is blowing in the polluted wind.

Jesus elected trump so that we can burn coal and protect the fetus!

Evangelicals know that trump is doing god's work.  Yes, that trump. Doing god's work.

A book is coming out soon on trump's faith.  Yes, that trump's faith.

david brody writes in a NY Times opinion piece about trump being a man of faith.  Yes, dammit, that same trump.

Donald Trump is on a spiritual voyage that has accelerated in recent years, thanks to evangelicals who have employed the biblical mandate of sharing and showing God’s love to him rather than shunning him.

God does not choose to work through people like me, but prefers scumbags like trump.  God's will hath no why, indeed!

brody writes about the “most evangelical-friendly United States president ever.”:

This president’s effect on our cultural norms has been shocking. His critics would call it appalling; evangelicals say it’s immensely satisfying: They’ve seen a culture deteriorate quickly in the past decade, and they’re looking for a bold culture warrior to fight for them. Showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor, He gave them Mr. Trump. Yet in God’s perfection, it’s a match made in heaven. Mr. Trump and evangelicals share a disdain for political correctness, a world seen through absolutes and a desire to see an America that embraces Judeo-Christian values again rather than rejecting them.

I had no idea that god hates political correctness.

trump's religious assistant for the environment, scott pruitt, talked to davod brody about doing god's work at the EPA:

Pruitt believes God commands us to take care of the environment and that also means to use what He has provided. "The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we've been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind."

Drill, baby, drill!  The good lord provided coal and oil for our benefit.

How did pruitt know what god wanted?

"I spent a couple years just earnestly praying, asking the question that I don't think we ask enough, 'God what do you want to do with me?'" Pruitt said. "Really getting into our prayer closet, seeking His heart, asking what He wants to do in our lives."

And what happened?

"It was actually Isaiah chapter one that I was reading through at that time that really spoke to my heart," he continued. "Specifically, in the latter part of chapter one where God says to Israel, 'I will restore your leaders as in the days of old, your judges as at the beginning.' And there was just a desire that welled up in me to say, 'I want to be like those leaders that we had at our founding, at the inception of our country.'"

And these are the same people complaining that Iran is a theocracy!

Jeez!

Does the Dalai Lama tweet?

I have no idea which god is out there applauding trump in the Oval Office, nor do I have any idea about the god that his 63 million voters pray to.  These religious people I can never understand!

Other religious people have tried to talk sense to trump.  Like the Pope himself.  Remember this one?

When the President met the Pope at the Vatican, last week, it was as if they were members of different species, so far apart in values and style that the actual content of what separated them proved elusive. Francis slyly presented Trump with a gift, though, that—as of yesterday—defines their opposition as absolute. The gift was a copy of his encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’.” Trump politely promised to read it. Sure.

If you believe that trump read even one page of that book, hey you are one of the 63 million voters!

[The] dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another.

How awesome that the Pope reasons that our moral pollution is the cause of atmospheric pollution.

Another religious/spiritual leader has stepped in with his anti-trumpism.  The Dalai Lama writes "America First" is deeply flawed:

There are no national boundaries for climate protection or the global economy. No religious boundaries, either. The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.

I am sure trump immediately understands this.  His 63 million voters, many of whom include deeply religious Catholics--now denounce him.  Of course I am being cynical!

The Dalai Lama continues:

We must learn that humanity is one big family. We are all brothers and sisters: physically, mentally and emotionally. But we are still focusing far too much on our differences instead of our commonalities. After all, every one of us is born the same way and dies the same way.

I wonder if the pussy-grabber really knows that he too is going to die some day, like every one of us.  Maybe not.  Maybe he thinks that he will merely step into a golden plane and be off to much greener golf courses!

So, what does Tenzin Gyatso--aka, the Dalai Lama--suggest that we do?

The young generations have a great responsibility to ensure that the world becomes a more peaceful place for all. But this can become reality only if we educate, not just the brain, but also the heart. The educational systems of the future should place greater emphasis on strengthening human abilities, such as warm-heartedness, a sense of oneness, humanity and love.

Humanity.
Empathy.
Love.
Heart.
Peace.
Words that trump does not even seem to know.  And 63 million voters elected him!  Shame on them!

I encourage you ...

A young white man and two young white women walked towards us.  It was clear that they were not accidentally walking in our direction.  There was a purpose to their motion.

What did they want?

After we exchanged "how are you?" in various forms, they got down to business.

"We are here to encourage you."

I am not kidding.  You can check with the friend.  That was their intention.  To encourage us.

They were students at Redding, they said.  At the Bethel ministry.  One of them was from Washington state--from Tacoma.

We started gathering our stuff.  As they sensed that we were leaving, the young man asked, "do you have problems?  Like with your back?"

"Nope. We are good.  We are yoga people," I said as we walked away.

It turns out that the Bethel ministry is one heck of a strange place.  It is officially the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.  "Or, as students here like to call the place, Christian Hogwarts."

Surely that story is going to unfold well, right?

What is so special about this school?

The basic theological premise of the School of Supernatural Ministry is this: that the miracles of biblical times — the parted seas and burning bushes and water into wine — did not end in biblical times, and the miracle workers did not die out with Jesus’s earliest disciples. In the modern day, prophets and healers don’t just walk among us, they are us.

Aha, this is why the young man asked us about back pain.  He believes that he can heal!

The Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry is at the forefront of a burgeoning — and decidedly youthful — evangelical Christian revival. Some have called its movement the fastest-growing religious group in America — a loose network of churches, led by so-called apostles, who see supernatural gifts like prophecy and faith healing as the key to global conversion. While other religious movements struggle to retain members and draw in young people, Bethel attracts millennials in droves.

All this healing and magic approach reminds me of a famous fake in India!

America has all kinds of cults that make me wonder why this country is called an "advanced" country!  These nutcases in Redding are not the first nor will be the last.

For school assignments, students hang out in parking lots and grocery store aisles, asking strangers who use wheelchairs or crutches if they can pray for them to heal.

Surely that story is going to unfold well, right?

There is almost always a correlation between such religious nutcases and the local economic geography, right?

[Redding] has a high unemployment rate and a crime rate that’s almost twice the rest of California’s. Homelessness keeps climbing. So does drug use: marijuana, grown in the idyllic countryside surrounding the city, but meth too, and increasingly devastatingly, heroin, which is “exploding” across the county. Shasta County hospitals see three times the number of overdoses than the rest of the state averages.
Now residents swap stories of people found shooting up in the streets, cars broken into with cinderblocks in fits of desperation, and stores robbed, repeatedly, in broad daylight. In a Facebook group called “Redding Crime 2.0,” more than 27,000 members track down one another’s stolen cars, complain about homeless encampments, and post photos of shady characters caught dealing drugs in parking lots.

The only, ahem, bright spot here is this Bethel ponzi!

Bethel has devoted itself to fixing the struggling city of Redding, which is one of California’s poorest. It donates money to the police department. It buys out public buildings. It nurtures local businesses. It sends armies of students to clean the city’s trash- and syringe-strewn riverbanks. To the church’s leaders, Redding and Bethel are inextricable, and the city’s rebirth is one of the church’s most urgent missions.

Surely this story is going to unfold well, right?  Maybe this is the beginning of yet another Waco. Or Rajneeshpuram. Or Jonestown. ...

Gob bless America!

Why does god hate Calcutta, er, Kolkata?

We humans have always been interested in understanding the cause-effect relationship.  If we don't know why something happens, then we bullshit our ways through.  When the moon in the sky was slowly disappearing as if somebody was chowing it down, and then when it re-appeared in the sky after a while, I imagine that a few curious people in the old country asked the wise old man who had seen it all for an explanation.  He convinced them that it was the celestial serpent that was swallowing the moon, and that the gods came to the rescue and slit the serpent open. He then told them that if they wanted the moon to keep coming back, they had to pray to the gods.  If they didn't know the language to communicate with the gods, well, he would gladly serve as their interpreter.

I pick on the religion in which I was raised because, well, that's the honored tradition--to make fun of your own people.  Every faith has its own bizarre stories about their own gods.  

Meanwhile, there were other kinds of curious people in that same old country.  They did not listen to the old man's bullshit and, instead, noticed that there were patterns that emerged when they studied the phenomenon.  And not only the moon, but even the sun was darkened out in the day.  How could that be?

The systematic thinking, based on reason and evidence, led scientists like Aryabhata to understand the cosmos without serpents and gods.  I suppose Aryabhata made sure that people would not be so mystified by "zero"; else, the number may have become a god as well ;)

Understanding cause and effect has also helped us create things that never existed before.  It is not through faith that we create electricity, for instance.  A whole lot of cumulative knowledge-building in physics and engineering has resulted in the easy life of today where we press a switch and the lights come on.  Heck, I merely walk into a restroom on campus and the lights magically turn on!  As Arthur Clarke stated in his third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The same way, when accidents happen, we try to understand the cause.  Something that I learnt a long time ago back at the Park Club in the old country.  When a plane goes down, we try to understand what caused it.  Right?

So, when a bridge collapses in India, you do not expect that to be attributed to god.  This atheist won't even bother reminding the faithful that "god" is a product of faith.  But, to grandstand for whatever reason that a god broke the bridge like how a kid snaps a twig is remarkably stupid.  Asinine.  But, hey, it is all ok if the emperor says so!  India's prime minister boldly and loudly proclaimed his verdict: "Flyover collapse is God’s message".  God certainly chooses some strange people as her messenger!

Apparently god decided that killing 26 people was the only way that she could send the message.  Maybe she does not know about texting, tweeting, or even updating her Facebook status and getting the message across without harming lives.  I tell ya, god is one hell of a terrorist!

Of course, India's prime minister is not the first leader to read the divine tea leaves.  In this country, sleazeballs who pose as political leaders trip over each other with "god bless America" as if god is on their side and not with, say, Tanzania.  And when disasters strike, there are sleazeballs who pose as religious leaders who proclaim that those are god's way of punishing us for whatever is the religious leader's favorite sin to target.

Such is life in these "modern" times!  I, for one, have always loved Calcutta ;)

Why do Republican candidates always say Allahu Akbar?

Last week, after the show ended at the Iowa political theatre, I watched, thanks to my favorite television channel, Marco Rubio's "victory" speech after he came third.  Towards the end of that speech, Rubio said:

I thank my lord and savior Jesus Christ, I thank God for allowing me the opportunity to come this far with each of you

I find "God bless America" and "In god we trust" difficult to handle, and Rubio went far above and beyond those.

Which is when I got to thinking, what Rubio says so publicly is no different from saying "Allahu Akbar" when all that phrase means is "god is great."  If at all, Allahu Akbar is a lot more succinct than the lengthy manner in which Rubio phrased it.

The winner of the Iowa circus, Ted Cruz, opened his speech with, "Let me first of all say, to God be the glory."  There, isn't that also nothing but his version of "Allahu Akbar"?

Why is it ok for the GOP presidential contenders to walk around saying god is great, but then they want to hassle Muslims who want to come here as refugees fleeing dictators and chaos, and the Muslims who are here, only because they say "god is great" but in Arabic?

Can't we all agree to keep god out of the public square and refer to whatever gods in private spaces?  I am with Susan Jacoby when she writes about being Sick and Tired of ‘God Bless America':

our political campaigns are still conducted as if all potential voters were among the faithful. The presumption is that candidates have everything to gain and nothing to lose by continuing their obsequious attitude toward orthodox religion and ignoring the growing population of those who make up a more secular America.

How significant is the secular population?

Americans who say religion is not important in their lives and who do not belong to a religious group, according to the Pew Research Center, have risen in numbers from an estimated 21 million in 2008 to more than 36 million now.

Which means

At 22.8 percent, according to Pew, the unchurched make up a larger group than Catholics, any single Protestant denomination and small minorities of Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

The god (or the son of god) references by politicians means that "“religious freedom is in danger of becoming code for accepting public money while imposing faith-based values on others."

Jacoby ends with this:

Just once in my life, I would like the chance to vote for a presidential candidate who ends his or her appeals with Thomas Paine’s observation that “the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason.”

We can dream, right?

We are but pawns in this cosmos

It was after the move to Madras (Chennai now) that we first got a television set at home.  In the Neyveli phase of my life, there was no television.  The Indian government was slowly launching its state-run Doordharshan in one big city after another, and being in India's fourth largest city meant that we had been promoted to the age of the telly.  A small black and white set, from a company that was owned by India's tennis-playing family.

It was a pain to watch movies on that small screen, and even worse it was to read any text like the subtitles.  But, thanks to that small screen and the state-run television broadcasting, I watched quite a few "art" movies--films that were not the regular, commercial, kind, with the heroes and the heroines running around trees and uttering melodramatic dialogues.  My all-time favorite was Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Elipathayam (The rat trap.)  A close second were Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane and Satyajit Ray's Shatranj ke Khilari (The chess players).  

Shatranj ke Khilari is set in the days before India's First War of Independence, which was referred to as the Sepoy Mutiny in the grand British interpretation of history that we learnt in school.  With the backdrop of the British ready to gobble up Awadh--which was Oudh in the British history that was told to us--two nawabs are preoccupied with nothing but playing chess, even as the world around them changes rapidly.  

Chess, which my mother taught us to play when we were kids, was born in the Subcontinent, and then spread via Persia to the Middle East and to Europe.  Shatranj itself is a Persian word.  Thus, two Muslim Nawabs playing chess forgetting everything around them, in a land of Muslim rulers, was, well, nothing out of the ordinary.  "Of course", you thought while sitting back in the chair as you watched the movie.

Which is why it is tragically hilarious to read the news item that Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti "has declared the playing of chess “forbidden,” calling it a waste of time and money that creates hatred between players."  Will be laughable if not for the seriousness with which the Mufti's words are taken by some. 

In a fatwa, or religious decree, issued in response to a question from a caller to a Saudi television show, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al-Sheikh said that the game was “the work of Satan,” like alcohol and gambling, despite its long history in the Middle East.

A fatwa against chess?  Doesn't the Mufti have better things to worry about?  He is not the first religious leader to rule against chess; examples include:

An Italian sage of the 11th century, Saint Peter Damian, scolded the bishop of Florence for his weakness for the game. Chess was initially outlawed by Iranian Revolution which prevailed in 1979; however in 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini said it was permissible as long as it is not combined with gambling. However a contemporary Shia leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq, has emphatically forbidden all forms of chess, whether played online or with physical pieces, and regardless of whether betting is involved.

Seriously!  Why?

Then, as now, religious professionals were wary of a game that transcended religious and cultural categories, and stimulated the brain rather than the soul.

But, why?  Because it is "gloriously rebellious," writes this commentator:

[Chess] obsessives, especially the professional players who devote their lives to the game and strive to understand its “truth”, are engaged in a glorious act of rebellion. The “real” world is dull, unjust, unchangeable, so instead they live in an illusory world, like Alice when she goes behind the looking glass and finds “a great huge game of chess that’s being played – all over the world”. Perhaps this is what the mufti really fears: chess players are natural rebels who have rejected the workaday world and all its totems. They want to topple kings – and maybe muftis too.

Of course, one needn't play chess to topple kings--the white supremacists from the northern island played that toppling game really well in the Subcontinent!

Why does science fail in the popularity contest?

A few years ago, when visiting with the parents, my mother complained that science was one day reporting that coffee was bad and then changing it another day.  I told her that science is a work in progress and that as we know more we might have to revise what we previously knew.  She seemed disappointed and unconvinced.

What disappointed my mother is precisely what always excites me about science.  A refreshing feeling that we don't know and we are trying our best to find out.  What we know now is incredibly more than what people knew only a few generations ago.  And there is a good chance that quote a bit of what we now know will be overthrown in a couple of generations.  It is awesome.

But, we humans like a clear story, a story that does not keep changing.  We like narratives that provide us with a sense of certainty.  Religions offer that comforting feeling of certainty.  "Where did we humans come from?  God created us" is a simpler narrative with a remarkable sense of certainty.  To answer that question with "we evolved from apes, and in fact we could even be separate category of apes.  We are still searching for the missing links in the evolution. But then these are recent stories.  We have no idea where this universe came from" are not the answers that provide any certainty at all.

Writing about this incremental progress that science offers, David Barash, who is "an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Psychology and Biology at the University of Washington" notes:

The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable. Scientific knowledge changes with great speed and frequency – as it should – yet public opinion drags with reluctance to be modified once established. And the rapid ebb and flow of scientific ‘wisdom’ has left many people feeling jerked around, confused, and increasingly resistant to science itself.

Exactly.  That's what my mother's question/comment was all about.

Perhaps we mourn the loss of certainty, of the sort that most religions offer to their followers. Perhaps it’s more a search for authority, of the sort once provided by our parents. Or a universal yearning for any reliable port – even if conceptual rather than maritime – in the storms of life’s unknowns. Whatever the underlying cause, people have difficulty accepting the unstable, shifting, impermanent reality of how the world is put together. And this difficulty, in turn, renders us uncomfortable with precisely the only stability and certainty that science offers: that paradigms come and go.

Paradigms come, and paradigms go.  That is how science works.

The loss of paradigms might be painful, but it is testimony to the vibrancy of science, and to the regular, unstoppable enhancement of human understanding as we approach an increasingly accurate grasp of how our world works.

I often mention in my classes about the increasingly accurate understanding, which is why I am confident that a couple of generations from now, humans will have that much better an understanding of this universe than we now have--unfortunately, I won't be around at that time! ;)

Denied the comforting blanket of illusory permanence and absolute truth, we have the opportunity and obligation to do something extraordinary: to see the world as it is, and to understand and appreciate that our images will keep changing, not because they are fundamentally flawed, but because we keep providing ourselves with better lenses. Our reality hasn’t become unstable; it’s just that our understanding of reality is of necessity a work in progress.

A work in progress, unlike the well-defined and unchanging holy word of god that the faithful believe in.

Science is a process, which, unlike ideology, is distinguished by intellectual flexibility, by a graceful, grateful (albeit sometimes grudging) acceptance of the need to change our minds, as our understanding of the world evolves. Most people aren’t revolutionaries, scientific or otherwise. But anyone aspiring to be well-informed needs to understand not only the most important scientific findings, but also their provisional nature, and the need to avoid hardening of the categories: to know when it is time to lose an existing paradigm and replace it with a new one. What is more, they need to see this transition as progress rather than a sign of weakness, which is more difficult than one might think. 

I suppose we have quite a bit of work ahead of us then.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Miracles on a pale blue dot

Over the years, after reading some of my blog-posts that I have packaged into collections, my father has understood that I have wandered far, far away from the religious reservation.  He also knows that I am not one of those atheists who goes around dissing religions for the sake of dissing them.

I stay silent when he talks about one of his beliefs--miracles.  I remember all too well how as a faithful young boy everyday I waited for miracles to happen.  The older I got, and the more I understood science, I figured that there are plenty of things wrong in interpreting the happenings via miracles.

As the polymath physicist Alan Lightman writes in this essay,

Miracles, by definition, lie outside science. Miracles are incompatible with a rational picture of the physical world. Nevertheless, even in our highly scientific and technological society, with most of us profiting enormously from cell phones and automobiles and other products of science—indeed depending on the consistent workings of science—a large fraction of the public believes in miracles. Most of us do not ponder that contradiction. One of my aunts was certain that her dead father visited her house and spoke to her every few months, and she got a tape recorder—a device of science—to document his voice. (Thereupon, the ghostly visits ceased.)
Miracles come from the world of imagination, of dreams, of desire; science from the world of practicality, of logic, of orderly control. I’ve always been fascinated by our ability to live simultaneously in these two apparently opposing worlds. Each in its own way, they reflect something deep and essential inside of us.

That excerpt gives away why I was drawn to that essay.  Through a number of posts in this blog, I have been trying to understand the simultaneous existence of people in "two apparently opposing worlds."  For a number of years now, I have asked quite a few science-educated people, including one who has a doctorate in astronomy--about their "faith" and how they reconcile the two.

I have also come to understand via this maniacal inquiry that people believe in their gods because it gives them that concise narrative of why we are here.  Without that clear narrative, we will be forced to think about questions like: who am I? What does life mean? What happens to this "life" after death?  Why is there death?  How did all these come about?  Those are all troubling questions.  Religious narratives, whether it is Buddhism or Catholicism or Scientology, provide answers to those questions.

And that is exactly what Alan Lightman also says:

Belief in a spiritual universe, I would suggest, arises to a large extent from a human desire for meaning, meaning both in our individual lives and in the cosmos as a whole. While science provides the psychological comfort of order, rationality, and control, it does not provide meaning. Such deep philosophical questions as “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “What is the meaning of this strange cosmos I find myself in?”, and such moral questions as “Is it right to kill an enemy soldier in time of war?” “Is it right to steal in order to feed my family?”, cannot be answered by science. Yet these questions are vital to our mental and emotional lives. We turn for answers to the spiritual universe, the realm that contains eternal truths and guidance, the realm that has some kind of permanent existence, in contrast to the fleeting moment of our mortal lives. In such a realm, logic, rationality, and regularity are not even part of the vocabulary.

It is like when we play a sport like football or cricket.  There is internal logic to how that is played, of course, but if you are not a "believer" then you find that the rules are irrational, bizarre, and comical.  We make fun of off-side and ineligible receiver and more.  But, to those who are passionate about the sport, well, there is nothing funny about those rules.  It, therefore, does not surprise me one bit that atheists are rarely found in the sporting world--way rarer than in society, I think!

I believe that father has also understood my profound appreciation for this universe that is awesome, beautiful, and mysterious. Which is why sometimes he even says things like "you refer to that as the cosmos."  To me, a wonderfully sunny day in fall is a miracle. So is the sparkling river, a rainbow, the blue waters of Sahalie Falls, the loving lick of a playful puppy, the unadulterated laughter of a two-year old,  ... Which is why I so easily agree with Lightman's concluding comments:

My wife and I spend summers on a small island in Maine, far from any town. At night, the skies are quite dark. Sometimes, when there is no wind blowing and the tidal flow is small and the ocean is very still, I can see the reflection of the stars in the water near our dock. At such moments, the water looks like a dark carpet with a million tiny sparkles of light, which gently bob and ripple with each passing wave. Even though I know all the science, I am totally mesmerized and awed. For me, that is miracle enough.

Have yourself a miraculous Sunday!

The meaning of life is ...

Perhaps it is just me; I think this is truly an interesting time in human history when it comes to thinking about god, religion, and the meaning of life.  ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban trigger questions about Islam.  The various fanatical Hindu groups in India raise questions about coexistence of different interpretations of life.  Buddhist monks are persecuting Muslims in Burma.  It is a global war on religions and gods, though not on any particular religion on god.

Of course, here within the United States, too.  Consider this:

A county clerk in Kentucky who objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds denied licenses to gay couples on Tuesday, saying she was acting “under the authority of God,” just hours after the Supreme Court refused to support her position. ...
Ms. Davis stopped issuing all marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June.

And this is after:

After the state’s governor told county clerks to issue marriage licenses to all eligible couples, Ms. Davis filed suit in federal court, arguing that she should be excused from the obligation, given her religious beliefs. A District Court judge ruled against her, as did the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and she appealed to the Supreme Court.

I am impressed with the fight that the county clerk is putting up, though I thoroughly disagree with her belief that she can bring her faith into political administration.  She is not merely talking her faith but is following through in her actions.

Meanwhile, Catholics, who were warned by their religious leaders that abortion is "such a grave sin that it warrants automatic excommunication" are now told this:

"I have decided, notwithstanding anything to the contrary, to allow all priests for the Jubilee Year to absolve of the sin of abortion those who procure it and who also seek forgiveness," Pope Francis said.

I find all these developments interesting because whether it is the county clerk, or Francis, or me, we are all sincerely interested in figuring out what this life is all about.  I am always amazed at how much the vast number of "religious," whatever their religion is, do not seem to inquire into the meaning of life.

This bottom-line of the meaning of life is why I don't care much for the militant intellectual atheism that portrays atheism as science triumphing over faith.  Yes, there is reason and science involved in the understanding, but those militant atheists forget that even many science-trained people follow their faiths because of the meaning it gives to their lives.  It is not "scientism":

In recent years we've come to think of atheism as an evangelical creed not unlike Christianity. An atheist, we tend to assume, is someone who thinks science should be the basis of our beliefs and tries to convert others to this view of things. In the type of atheism that's making the most noise today, religion is a primitive theory of how the world works - an intellectual error without human value, which we'd be better without.
But this isn't the only kind of atheism. History shows that atheism can have a complexity that reaches well beyond our currently dominant version. Though many today seem unaware of the fact, by no means all atheists have wanted to convert others to unbelief. Some have actually been friendly to religion. Nor have atheists in the past always turned to science for inspiration. There have been many varieties of atheism.

Source

I got to read that essay thanks to this note at the Economist; it refers to Karen Armstrong, "a former nun and best-selling writer, who became badly disillusioned with Catholicism":

She insists that the word God refers not to a true-or-false proposition but to a human quest for meaning and transcendence. 

Exactly.  Debating with believers about whether or not god exists interested me only when I was younger and way more of an idiot than I am now.  As I have gotten older, I find myself engaging in discussions with believers, who talk with me, on how they deal with the contradictions within their faith.  And, above all, to engage with them to find out whether they think about the meaning of life even within their own faith.  I am always disappointed that most believers do not seem to care much about that existential question at all and, instead, merely mouth the words in very unthinking ways.

All these, and more, will make the rest of my life on this pale blue dot exciting.  I truly "believe" in that and have "faith" that it will be a fascinating time ;)

Why does god hate Nepal?

As I have often blogged here, living a Socratic examined life reveals a lot about our own priorities. A literal and metaphorical example came up in the context of the devastating earthquake in Nepal.  I captured this flow of tweets in my Twitter feed:

The juxtaposition of Pepsi and aspartame, and American kids and money, on either side of news about the tragedy in Nepal says a lot about the lives that we lead.  In all fairness to Vox, the Nepal news featured a lot in the tweets from that organization.  I value Vox as a news and analysis source; why else would I subscribe to that feed, right?  And, of course, WSJ tweets about all things trivial too.

Which is why I use that juxtaposition as a metaphor.  Think about some of the major events over the past few months that have terribly affected humanity.  The civil war in Syria.  Boko Haram in Nigeria. The convoluted Greek fiscal tragedy.  Ferguson and Baltimore.  The list is endless.

Caption at the source:
On Sunday, Nepalis in Bhaktapur, near the capital, Katmandu, cremate relatives killed in in the earthquake

Sure, we humans cannot be immersed in tragedies all the time and we might get tired of the bad news out there.  But, seriously, what percentage of our lives do we actually spend on the bad news?  Both in terms of time as well as money.  Or, let me put it this way: should we not at least match the time and money that we spend entertaining ourselves with time and money on the unfortunate situations that are all around us?  I don't mean our work time, how much ever that is entertaining to us.  I wish there were a meter of sorts--a meter that lets us watch sports for an hour, for instance, only after we spent at least half that time reading/watching in-depth news and reports about some of the issues that trouble fellow humans.

I suppose this rant is nothing but a secular version of the old religious ideas of caring for others, donating to help, not to be preoccupied with entertainment, and more.  But then most believers, of whatever gods they fancy, have long since walked away from those teachings, while this atheist continues to pound on those old-fashioned ideas!  Such is life :(

Just as I was writing that previous sentence, an emailed popped up--it was about Nepal:

If you feel like donating, then here is a list that the NY Times has put together.

PS: Why the title, you ask?  Click here for the answer.

One nation under Jesus. Hindus, shut up and get back to where you belong!

I imagine a day when there will be nothing to comment about.  The world is a happy place.  Rainbows and unicorns and pots and pots of gold all over!

When that comes true, there will be nothing to blog about.  Until then, it is party time at this blog ;)

Today's festivities sponsored by a few idiots in the Idaho legislature:

Seven Idaho senators remained outside the state Senate chamber Tuesday morning as guest chaplain Rajan Zed delivered the chamber’s first Hindu invocation, then took their seats immediately after it was done.
Three said their absences were unrelated to the prayer – they were just running late from other meetings. But three said they stayed away on purpose, and a fourth questioned why a Christian prayer wasn’t offered as well.

Wait, here comes a juicy quote from one of them, Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll:

she believes the United States is a Christian nation and that “Hindu is a false faith with false gods.”

I love that. False faith with false gods.  Good thing then that my Pascal's wager is not on one of those false gods!

How about her colleagues?

Sen. Lori Den Hartog, R-Meridian, said she didn’t feel comfortable personally taking part in a prayer of a religion different from her own.

Oh, of course, not comfortable.  Is that better or worse than her colleague,

Senator Steve Vick, who walked out of the Senate chamber before Mr. Zed’s invocation said that Hindu prayers should not be allowed because the U.S. was “built on the Judeo-Christian, not only religion, but work ethic, and I don’t want to see that undermined”, the Statesman reported. Hindus “have a caste system,” he added. “They worship cows.”

They worship cows and Senator Vick eats them. So, there, we are all even!

What a bunch of morons who get elected to govern!

BTW, Al Jazeera adds one more that Senator Nuxoll said:

I think it's great that Hindu people can practice their religion but since we're the Senate, we're setting an example of what we, Idaho, believe.

Yes, the "Hindu people" can practice whatever they want as long as they do it back in "Hindu people country" eh.  Because this sets a bad example of what Idaho is.

Ah, if only those who so fanatically believe in their religions can understand that they are infidels according to the fanatics in other religions.

Source

Why do they even have prayers in the legislature, at city hall meetings, and other government spaces?  And why have chaplains?  Oh well, remember the US Supreme Court ruling a few months ago, in the case where "Two women — one atheist, one Jewish" sued the town of Greece in New York?

the high court held that the council was using prayer for "permissible ceremonial purposes," not as an "unconstitutional establishment of religion."

Yes, that case, too, was a 5-4 vote.  Interestingly (I think this is no coincidence) the Jewish justices dissented.

Oh well ... I will have to wait a long, long time for unicorns and rainbows and pots of gold.  I will simply imagine!

When science and technology work "miracles" do you thank god?

Back when I was a teenager, I loved going to the Park Club in order to watch movies in the open.  Well, ok, it was also look at that girl.  As one classmate put it during the reunion thirty years after high school ended, I was "besotted with her" ;)

Every once in a while, before the movie--usually a decade or two old--began, a short documentary or information piece for a few minutes played.  One that I remember all too well was about industrial safety.  I suppose they showed that because of the setting--a company town that it was.  The bottomline in that was "accidents do not happen but are caused."

It is a surprise that I paid attention to it despite my "besotted" mind ;)  

Thinking back about it, I suppose that bottomline stuck with me because those were also the days when I began to systematically think about cause and effect, and doubting the powers of the "divine" and "astrology" and all such, ahem, crap.  "Miracles" slowly stopped appealing to me, and "saints" working miracles were mere master magicians.

Thus, when disaster strikes, when people "thank god" for sparing them, the cause-effect exploring person in me feels so compelled to ask them for evidence and, even more, reasons for why their god saved them but killed the other person.  

Our life now is phenomenally miraculous.  Life expectancy is long, way too long for my liking!  We speak into the air and a person on the other side of the planet hears us, and even sees us.  We get into a heavy container that lifts up by itself and floats through the air at previously unimaginable speeds.  And more.  When a gazillion such "miracles" happen, nobody thanks god.  Nobody!  Because, we know god did not create them. 

In such a setting, I find it fascinating that the mother of a son, who was in a horrible car crash but suffered not even a scratch, wrote a letter to Honda expressing thanks:

I want to extend my thanks to the engineers who used their intelligence and skill to create a car that safe, to the crash test dummies who have died a thousand horrible deaths and to your executives who did not scrimp on safety. Thank you, Honda.

She did not "thank god" for saving her son but, understanding and appreciating the science and technology that saved her son, wrote to thank Honda's commitment to safety.  

over many years of thinking about religion and faith, I have noticed that something sad and somewhat strange happens when we thank God: We tend to stop there. We simply overlook the decisions, the science, the policies and the people who contributed to the “miracle.” To put it another way: When we focus on supernatural deliverance from harm, we often ignore all of the human ways we can improve our own safety. I am concerned that we may associate survival of serious accidents with the unpredictable hand of Providence, not with airbags, safety testing and the regulations that have put them in place.

Exactly!

Accidents also are not an act of God. No matter what you believe about a divine creator, I think most would agree that an all-poweful and all-loving being would not need encouragement to do the right thing. Unlike people, God does not require regulations and oversight – or even thanks – to be sure that human beings are never sacrificed for profit. The truth is, we cannot make our roads and our cars safer if we ignore what makes them that way: science, regulations and corporations that prioritize safety.

How about an "amen!" ;)

This world was not made for you or for me. But for cockroaches!

"Damn cockroaches" father cursed in the morning.  "I killed one in the bathroom.  A second one ran towards the front door and out the door and I made sure it kept going.  The problem with tropical countries" he added.

"Oh, they are in colder countries too" I eased his mind.  "Various species have come and have become extinct, but the cockroach survives everything."

I was reminded of this discussion on where everything came from, and on the issue of whether or not a creator made this entire universe for humans to exist on this pale blue dot.  The discussion is between Tim Maudlin, a professor of philosophy at New York University, and Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.  Professor Gutting asks:

So is your view that we don’t currently know enough to decide whether or not fine-tuning for human life supports theism?

Which is when the cockroach relevance kicks in; Professor Maudlin responds:

First, note how “humans” got put into that question! If there were any argument like this to be made, it would go through equally well for cockroaches. They, too, can only exist in certain physical conditions. The attempt to put homo sapiens at the center of this discussion is a reflection of our egocentrism, and has no basis at all in the actual structure of the universe.

Egocentrism. Anthropocentrism. We have barely been around for a few thousands of years when the roach has been on this planet for much, much longer:

Fossil evidence indicates that cockroaches have been on earth for over 300 million years. They are considered one of the most successful groups of animals.

Where did the roach come from?  Did a creator create a roach too?  A male roach and a female roach so that they can reproduce and inherit the earth?  Professor Gutting asks whether we can bypass such messy issues by postulating a minimal theistic view:

that the universe was created by an intelligent being (regardless of its purpose). Does scientific cosmology support the atheistic position that there is no such creator or does it leave us with the agnostic judgment that there isn’t sufficient evidence to say?

Sounds tempting, right?  Removes the complications of figuring out how and when a creator set about creating each and everything that ever existed.  But, wait a second for Professor Maudlin's response:

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were “agnostic” about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.
As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the “minimal view” is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds.

Why do people continue to cling on to fancy narratives of how we came about?  Why this anthropocentrism?

Of course, I dared not to engage father along these lines.  There are some topics that a father and son should not discuss--it is stated so in the holy book according to cockroaches ;)

It's a miracle! It's a miracle!

My father is not unusual among the faithful, whatever their religion might be, with a selective bias in tagging some fortunate developments as miracles while referring to the unfortunate ones--from deaths of children to natural disasters--as simply a variation of "god's will hath no why."

But, more than once in my younger years, father has commented about how even everyday happenings can be miracles.  Like when a friendly face swings by when we feel down. A neighbor knocking on the door only to share some sweets. A good Samaritan's act.

Father's logic was that if a god--imagine Kali, for instance--were to appear in front of people, well, most would run in fear and that, therefore, god sends these human messengers instead.

As an agnostic, and then as an atheist who came out of the religious closet, I never cared for the godly explanations.  But, I do agree with him that miracles happen every single day.

They happen all the time.

As she started her medical schooling, my daughter remarked more than once that given how delicate and complex the human anatomy and biochemistry are, it is a miracle that more of us are not dying all the time.

When I saw those bright stars up in the sky on a dark Tanzanian night, those sparkling lights above seemed like miracles.

A pretty young woman smiling at me is always a miracle.  Heck, any woman smiling at me is a miracle!

The Willamette River and the blackberries are miracles.

In my interpretations, that is what Walt Whitman wrote about:

Miracles
by Walt Whitman 

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of  the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night  with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer  forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.  

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with  the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves— the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?                                  source