The rare success of a cult leader

In what feels like a million years ago, I blogged wondering whether we should think about the money that is donated as philanthropy.  Was the money earned through justifiable means?  Or, is it the case that most people simply do not care about the stink of the money.

In that post, I quoted the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote about "Mother" Teresa, whom he referred to as MT:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.

She was a friend of poverty.  I loved the way Hitchens phrased it.

Back then, there were two frequent commenters.  One was from the right side of the political spectrum here in the US, and another came from the right side of the political spectrum in the old country.  And, of course, true to their political ideology, they commented that money has no stink and that MT did nothing but good to the poor.

Ten days ago, Michelle Goldberg asked in her NY Times column if MT was "a cult leader."

I wonder if the right-wing commenters of the past read that column.  Perhaps not.

Goldberg writes about Mary Johnson, who spent 20 years in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity:

“The Missionaries of Charity, very much, in so many ways, carried the characteristics of those groups that we easily recognize as cults,” Johnson told me. “But because it comes out of the Catholic Church and is so strongly identified with the Catholic Church, which on the whole is a religion and not a cult, people tend immediately to assume that ‘cult’ doesn’t apply here.”

Goldberg continues:

The former sisters describe an obsession with chastity so intense that any physical human contact or friendship was prohibited; according to Johnson, Mother Teresa even told them not to touch the babies they cared for more than necessary. They were expected to flog themselves regularly — a practice called “the discipline” — and were allowed to leave to visit their families only once every 10 years. 

A former Missionaries of Charity nun named Colette Livermore recalled being denied permission to visit her brother in the hospital, even though he was thought to be dying. “I wanted to go home, but you see, I had no money, and my hair was completely shaved — not that that would have stopped me. I didn’t have any regular clothes,” she said. “It’s just strange how completely cut off you are from your family.” Speaking of her experience, she used the term “brainwashing.”

Cult leaders maintain a tight grip over their flock.  It is difficult to flee from the leader.

Meanwhile, MT has been recognized by the Pope as as saint.

And you thought cult leaders always end up in trouble!

Start building new temples

The US military confirmed the image of a triangular, pyramidal, Doritos-like, shape as one of the UFOs that was photographed by a navy pilot.

Despite all our interest in UFOs and aliens, the military is trying its best to stall the report that it has been asked by Congress to prepare and present to the public.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence to work with the Defense Department to provide a public accounting by June 25 on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites and other surveillance systems.

The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

The truth is out there, as Mulder always told us ;)

I, for one, am not really looking forward to an alien encounter because history overflows with groups totally wiped out of existence, or nearly eliminated, by alien population.

But, curious I am about aliens.  I am way more interested in what any evidence of aliens might do to religions.  The grand faiths that tell their followers about how all these on earth came to be, and what happens after the faithful die, will suddenly have to account for an unexpected plot twist that we on earth are not alone in the universe nor are we special.

As Carl Sagan has pointed out in (the now out-of-print book) The Cosmic Question, “space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions”. We would need to consider whether our faiths could accommodate these new beings – or if it should shake our beliefs to the core.

What happens to the faiths that are built on a narrative of Adam and Eve and their original sin?  The children of Abraham will have to deal with Alf and Mork!

The old Hindu faith in all its variations--the local, the Vedic, and the offshoots like Buddhism--will easily work with the evidence that there is life out there.  

The Vedic philosophy discusses multiple lokas and the mahavakya says तत् त्वम् असि (You are that.)  The alien life and you are all manifestations of the same Brahma.   A framework that is not built around the divinity of a person, but instead uses concepts like reincarnation or a gazillion gods, will point to aliens as our relations.  A different incarnation.

So, get ready for a few Paralokaswamy temples!

But, at the end of it all, we will never know how all these came to be.  I will quote, again, from the Rig Veda:

Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen
- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -
the One who looks down on it,
in the highest heaven, only He knows
or perhaps even He does not know.

Observing Ramadan without fasting and prayers

It is the new year in the traditional calendar back in the old country.  This time, it coincides with Ramadan.

I suppose it can look bizarre for this atheist to post about religious observances like Ramadan.  But, I have never been one of those militant atheists making a fanatical religion out of atheism.  As long as the religious do not impose their practices on me, I seek nothing but peaceful coexistence with them.  And enjoy food and laughter and conversations with them. 

Furthermore, I am not that different from most atheists in that we reach the conclusion not with ignorance about religions, particularly the religion with which we were raised.  Even through my agnostic teenage years, I was curious about the Hindu faith and its philosophy.  Which is also why I am so familiar with ideas like dukrijnkarane that I talk about. 

Curiosity then made me find out at least a tiny bit about a few other religions.  Unlike most of the truly religious who are committed to only knowing about their own beliefs, we atheists often end up knowing a tad more about various religions.

For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  When bad things come my way, like when I get laid off in a Zoom meeting, I do not need a god to turn to.

"Shit happens" I tell myself.  And, for the most part, I expect shit to happen more frequently than it does.  I am acutely aware that the entire cosmos does not exist only to serve me!  The cosmos is. It doesn't have feelings towards me or you or anybody else.

In my framework, whether it is Rama Navami or Ramadan, or whatever, those religious days are designated times in order to help us mortals reflect on our fleeting existence on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so poetically put it.  These special religious days are intentional pauses to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet.

In fact, the disconnect between such need for introspection versus the believers merely reciting the Vishnu Sahasranaamam and the Bhaja Govindam and more was the point of departure for the young me questioning the idea of god and religion and belief.  I was convinced then, and even more convinced I am now, that living a moral life has nothing to do with god and religion.

What does a true believer do during Ramadan?

By abstaining from things that people tend to take for granted (such as water), it is believed, one may be moved to reflect on the purpose of life and grow closer to the creator and sustainer of all existence. As such, engaging in wrongdoing effectively undermines the fast. Many Muslims also maintain that fasting allows them to get a feeling of poverty, and this may foster feelings of empathy.

A noble idea, right?  And this is something we ought to think about every day.  Don't we want to be empathetic every day of our lives?

Empathy is what is emphasized in Gandhi's favorites among the prayer music.  While the reference to the Hindu god, Vishnu, might distract a militant atheist or anyone committed to other religions, I ignore the Vishnu part and appreciate, and love, the ideas expressed there: 

Vaishnav people are those who:

Feel the pain of others,

Help those who are in misery 

Wouldn't you want to be friends with such people?  Wouldn't you want to be such a person?  A wonderful ideal to work towards, though a tall order for most of us mortals.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. The Pope

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily barred New York from enforcing strict attendance limits on places of worship in areas designated coronavirus hot spots.  The case on which it ruled is this: Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York.

Let's take a religion roll call first:

Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo, who is Catholic

The five justices who ruled in favor of the Diocese:

• Amy Coney Barrett--Catholic
• Brett Kavanaugh--Catholic
• Neil Gorsuch--Episcopelian (raised Catholic)
• Justices Samuel Alito--Catholic
• Clarence Thomas--Catholic

The four justices in the minority:

• John Roberts--Catholic
• Stephen Breyer--Jewish
• Elena Kagan--Jewish
• Sonia Sotomayor--Catholic

How did Cuomo react?

Cuomo described Wednesday's decision as a political statement. In his daily coronavirus briefing Thursday, he said, "Look, I'm a former altar boy, Catholic, Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Jesuits at college. So I fully respect religion and if there's a time in life when we need it, the time is now. But we want to make sure we keep people safe at the same time, and that's the balance we're trying to hit, especially in this holiday season."

So, which Catholic would you believe?

Why not check with the infallible Catholic, the Pope himself?

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

Hmmm ... let's remind ourselves what the Supreme Court's majority opinion noted:

The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty

The Pope, on the other hand, writes:

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

I understand that a lawmaker who is Catholic doesn't take orders from the Pope on political issues. That was the very issue that JFK faced as the first serious Catholic candidate, and he made the separation of church and state very clear. 

For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.

I am glad that judges who happen to be Catholic don't take marching orders from the Pope.  But, what about the science of public health that guides the political decisions on restrictions on churches during Covid?  Why is Chief Justice Roberts' view not the majority opinion when he writes: "Only that our Constitution principally entrusts the safety and health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the states to guard and protect."

I suppose the Pope is not infallible even to justices who happen to be Catholic.

Bridge of faith

I was almost done with walking the full clockwise loop by the river.

Starting on one side near my home, I walk for a while to a bridge that gets me to the other side.  And then towards the end of the loop, another bridge to re-cross the river.

It was on that second bridge that I spotted two older people and their bikes.  The man seemed to be getting ready to leave, and the woman appeared to have decided that the bench where she was sitting would be her spot for a while.

I neared them.  They both looked 70-plus.  She had an accordion resting across her chest and abdomen.

The woman waved her hand.

I looked at her and waved out as I continued walking.

"Jesus loves you," she said.

"Thanks."

To believers, Jesus rose from the dead.  Not right away, but more than two days after he died.

To have that kind of unshakable belief is something.  Of course, every religion has something comparable that is the foundation of the faith that their followers have.

The faithful's claims about Jesus are extraordinary claims.

The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 

The extraordinary evidence is not there.  It is the same case with other religions too.

"In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it a truth.

Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.

The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:

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!

We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

Who will live and who will die

That was literally the title of my post on September 19, 2018.

Now, in the COVID-19 context, we are tragically witnessing that question being played out in real time in the ICUs.  Who will live and who will die is, unfortunately, not a mere philosophical or religious construct; if only we as people and as humanity had always been thoughtful about the important questions in life!

Like how we survived the 1918 pandemic, humans will survive this one too.  I hope we will learn our lessons from this crisis.

The following is a slightly edited post from September 2018.
*******************

“How many will pass away and how many will be born? |
Who will live and who will die?”

I had no idea of that couplet until I read this opinion piece in the NY Times.  It is a part of Yom Kippur prayers.  A day in which we remind ourselves that "No one makes it out alive."

There’s the obvious — the plastic surgery and the digital surgery and the obsession with achieving perfect quantities of tautness and plumpness and dewiness. But look through the death lens, and you’ll see our fixation on wellness and workouts in a new way. Look through the death lens, and Silicon Valley’s project to extend life indefinitely looks as foolish as Gilgamesh’s efforts to do the same. Look through the death lens, and Instagram and Twitter look like nothing more than numbing agents.

I am not Jewish. I am not religious either. Yet, my suspicion is that I think a lot more about my mortality and, therefore, what I want to do with my limited time, more than most religious do.

Such an atheist life should really not surprise anybody; as the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle wrote, way back in 1682:

It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible? 

Whether it is Ramadan, or Vaikunta Ekadasi; or any religious high holy day--and I don't really observe any of those days--those are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive and, therefore, we better figure out our priorities before it is way late.

One of the biggest advantages with facing up to the reality of my coming expiration is that I am less and less interested in people whose words and actions seem to miss that perspective.  I have encountered one too many "god-fearing" people who refuse to feel the pain of others, and who refuse to help those in misery.   Of course, their behaviors bother me, but once they reveal who they are, I keep away from them.  They are not worth my limited time here on this pale blue dot!

The author of that opinion piece quotes a Manhattan rabbi, Angela Buchdahl:

thinking about your death can bring you much closer to experiencing true joy. It “compels us to squeeze out every bit of life out of every day that we have”

That has been my experience too.  As I have blogged in plenty here, thinking about my mortality makes me appreciate the good people around me; the blue sky with puffy white clouds; the sparkling waters in the river and the ocean; the giggles of a child; ... it is an endless list of miracles.

Finally, even though I am far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

I apologize for all my misdeeds and to all those I have wronged.

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

If only the damn liberals will have babies!

I read the NY Times column that had a polemical title: Are Liberals Against Marriage? 

I got ticked off.  I am a damn liberal and I have nothing against marriage.  I don't care if it is a heterosexual or same-sex marriage.  If people want to marry, fine.  If they don't want to, fine.  Isn't the whole point of conservatism to leave people alone and not interfere with their lives?

Conservatives want to interfere when they want to.  And, oh boy, there are lots of instances when they love to tell the rest of us what to do!

So ... I emailed the paper a version of the following:

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

Ross Douthat argues that the downward trend in the fertility rate can be reversed if only the population were religious and conservative. Mr. Douthat assumes that conservative and religious societies favor higher fertility rates, and his entire column is woven around that assumption.

Evidence does not help his case, however. 

In the southern part of India from where I immigrated a long time ago, fertility rates have been considerably below replacement--at 1.6 to 1.7.  This region is not “liberal."  Instead, the more than 250 million in the five southern states, have high levels of religiosity, and with significantly low divorce rates. Yet, very few kids! 

The explanation for decreasing fertility rates comes down to a simple phrase that the conservative pundit Milton Friedman popularized--”Free to choose.”  If women, in particular, are free enough to choose, then, on an average, they choose to have fewer kids, or even forego motherhood entirely.

Ross Douthat should stop chasing the red herrings of liberalism, “out of wedlock”, and LGBTQ activism.

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

If this topic interests you, here are a couple of posts from the past:

This from 2013, in which I wrote:

Tamil Nadu, where my people hail from, has fertility rates that are lower than the rates here in the US.  Americans, who are long used to images of too many babies in India, might find it a shocking revelation that we in the US have, on an average, more children than women do In Tamil Nadu, or in Kerala, or in Karnataka, or in .... These are not states with small populations either.  As this Wikipedia entry helpfully points out, Kerala's population makes it a Canada-equivalent. Tamil Nadu is like Turkey. With its low fertility rate, Karnataka is really like Italy!

From 2017, in which I argued that immigration will help counter low fertility rates:

As reported by the Pew Research Center, “were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970.” While immigrants accounted for only one in seven Americans in 2015, a quarter of all the births in America were to immigrant women. “Births to women from Mexico, China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico accounted for 58% of all births to immigrant mothers in the U.S. in 2014.” Even here in Oregon, births to immigrant mothers have offset what would have otherwise been a decrease in births from 1990 to 2015.

From 2009:

The fascinating aspect to this story of decrease in fertility rates is that it has happened without strict government mandates. While public health messages do advocate for smaller family sizes, there is no strict government-imposed one-child policy, a la China.

All the more why I think that it is a lazy political argument that Douthat has written!

When men come to god's defense

We live in such godawful times of a President tweeting and uttering incoherent rants that we have forgotten how much we used to adore, revere, and quote presidential observations and rhetoric.

Oh, don't worry; this post is not to vent about the horrible human being in the Oval Office nor about his 63 million bootlickers.  Nope. It is about the maniacal goings-on in the old country.

We used to quote Presidents.  Like Abraham Lincoln, who said,  "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."  If I were a believer, then that would be my position too--a true believer knows that god doesn't need us mortals to defend her honor.  Instead, it is us mortals who need god to protect us. This simple logic is apparently lost on most fanatical faithful!

And thus the Hindu fanatics--almost always men, across all the religions--continue to fight to keep menstruating girls and women away from a temple where the god is believed to be a bachelor.  I blogged about this issue back in February 2016, when tRump was looming as a threat, and when even those who hated him but later turned around and voted for him used to comment at this blog.

I wrote there that in India, the government oversees the functioning of temples.  As a result, of course, the judicial arm of the government has a say in whether menstruating women should be barred from entering temples.  Such is the theatre of the absurd!

That was in 2016 as the lawsuit was filed.  Two years later came the verdict: "In 2018, while lifting the ban on women's entry into the shrine, the Supreme Court had said that everyone had the right to practice religion and that the ban was a form of "untouchability"."

Last December in India, protests and counter-protests I saw and read about.  Intellectuals and leaders wrote commentaries.  Women were turned away from the temple.  The fight continues:

India's Supreme Court said Thursday it will set law on women’s entry into temples and mosques after being asked to review its decision lifting a ban on some women entering the Sabarimala temple in Kerala state.

Back to square one:

A temple official welcomed the ruling and appealed to women to stay away.
Women trying to enter the temple after the verdict last year were attacked by mobs blocking the way.
Many checked vehicles heading towards the temple to see if any women of a "menstruating age" - deemed to be those aged between 10 and 50 years - were trying to enter.

It is a disgrace that quite a few men are so obsessed with the reproductive system of women.  And these men so firmly believe that they are doing god's work?

Roaches, monkeys, and man

The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, it is so clear that I could have either had a complete and total mental breakdown or I could have achieved clarity on how to move forward.  I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

All that was from thinking about what I had known from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and man.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions instructed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

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.

In search of happiness, fulfillment and meaning

A month short of two years ago, I blogged about the difference between a religion and a cult, in which I referred to the old joke:

Question: What's the difference between a religion and a cult?
Answer: 200 years

As I quoted there,

Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire.

Yep, when it began, Christianity was a cult.

A middle-aged writer, who grew up in a cult when she was a kid, writes in The New Yorker about her experiences that point out how complicated it is to understand cults, and why people are drawn to them.  She writes there:

But, to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are going to take you to live on Venus is not obviously crazier than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to mention the unscientific beliefs put forth by other mainstream religions. Sheer popularity and longevity can do a lot to render odd convictions reassuringly familiar.

A longevity of 200 years can easily mainstream a cult into a religion.

She writes, "There will always be people in search of what cults have to offer—structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

Such a search leads people to all kinds of cults and leaders.  Like Rajneesh.

Or, like this latest one, which sounds way bizarre:

It was called “collateral” — nude photos and other embarrassing material that female members of an upstate New York self-improvement group turned over to their “masters” to ensure obedience, silence and sexual fealty to the organization’s spiritual leader, Keith Raniere.
Now some former members of the group, NXIVM, are poised to break their vow of silence for the first time by testifying against Raniere, who has been compared to a cult leader.

These included educated, professional, women.  "The women are instead described as “independent, smart, curious adults” in search of “happiness, fulfillment and meaning.”

I suspect that we will witness the rise of cults along with a diminishing status of mainstream religions.  People know well about religions for them to submit to religious leaders en masse as we humans once did.  However, as technological challenges, in particular, make us angst-filled beings who are compelled to worry about our existence, cults will step up to provide "structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

I suppose we have a choice: Understand our mortality and deal with it in our daily lives, or follow the orders from a cult or a religious leader, who claims to know the truth but does not.  A long time ago, I decided to understand my creation and death on my own terms, however difficult the task is.  To quote the Nobelist Steven Weinberg, again:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God

Om Shanti Shanti Shantihi

We need a new way entirely to think about what it means to be a human being and what the purpose of our lives is.

Yep.

That excerpt is from this Kristof column, in which he continues the series on conversations with the religious.

To me--born into a traditional Hindu Brahmin family, and an atheist by choice--the question "what it means to be a human being" has nothing to do with any religion.  It is an existential one that all of us have to think about, given the certainty of death.  I sometimes think that I spend time thinking about all these more than most religious do!

I have blogged in plenty about this topic.  A few years ago, a neighbor, who had known me well over the years, commented that I was more of a Christian than many of the people who went to their church.  Coming from born-again Christians, it was high praise.

I am far from confident that religions--old and new--have succeeded in making people think about what it means to be a human being.  It is clear that millions of born-again Christians here in the US have a strange interpretation of what it means to be human.  Elsewhere, there are even Buddhist monks who systematically advocate for violence against others.  Hindus seem to be increasingly jingoistic about their faith in ways that lead to oppressing others.

Kristof's interviewee notes:

The structures of religion as we know it have come up bankrupt and are collapsing. What will emerge? That is for our children and our children’s children to envision and build.

It is irresponsible of us to collectively place such a burden on future generations.  Hopefully, they will do better than us.

Hare Krishna!

I had no idea about Leonard Bernstein until I came to the US for graduate school.  I watched West Side Story on a rickety old television set, and was hooked.

Bernstein, whose centenary was this year, was a music giant, and a public intellectual and a social activist, who spoke up on important issues of the day.   A deep thinker he was, as much as he was a musician.  When artists like him, with their broad and deep knowledge, speak, society listens.  Even when they point out to the uncomfortable truths.

Back in the old country, TM Krishna continues with such a tradition of the public-intellectual-musician.  He is not new to this blog, of course.

As a musician, Krishna is one of the best; even my father, who after listening to the jambhavans of old the days rarely ever elevates any of the contemporary young artistes to the stratosphere, has a favorite story about how Krishna moved him to tears at a homage to Musiri.

As a public intellectual, Krishna is turning out to be equally accomplished.  From the other side of the world, it seems to me that Krishna's activism are about injustice, of which there is plenty in India.  The latest incident was no exception; he has pumped up his activism:

Performing today at 6.30 pm at the Garden of Five Senses, New Delhi with RK Shriramkumar, Praven Sparsh and Anirudh Athreya. pic.twitter.com/ZFicBCuaVp

— T M Krishna (@tmkrishna) November 17, 2018

"Krishna sings, Krishna is heard", reports The Indian Express.  "A soiree on the art of politics," reports another outlet.

The political overtones of this musical soiree are surely difficult to miss. Ranged on one side are dogged opponents of the values and politics Krishna and AAP stand for. This fusion of politics and music – Carnatic music and north Indian politics – sends out a signal of the political direction that could take place in the days and months ahead. ...
The 2019 Lok Sabha elections are just five months away. If the routine silence of the ruling BJP is a way of endorsing the intimidation and threats made by right-wing social media trolls, swift retaliatory tactics by its opponents are also a way of getting back at the party.

Critics telling Krishna to shut up and simply focus on his music are no different from the right-wing nutcases here in the US who tell football players to shut up and simply play ball.  Krishna is ballsy; a lesser man would have quit being an activist a long time ago.

Again, one can learn from Bernstein's life:

Bernstein was named in Red Channels, a publication from 1950 that targeted people in the entertainment industry who were suspected of having Communist affiliations. Since he was prominent, and a lot of people around him had leftist affiliations, the FBI paid attention to him. He kind of slid past the McCarthy hearings. Copland and Robbins were called to testify, but he was not. He lost his passport for a time in the 1950s, but that was it.

I am thankful that there have been, and are, people fighting these good fights.

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.

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!

Were Adam and Eve the first ever to fuck?

I doubt that I knew anything about homosexuality when I was a kid.  I was drawn to girls from a very early age, though the feelings were forcefully repressed and buried deep down thanks to the screwed up social mores of those days.

As I got older, I have always wondered whether the love for the other sex does not preclude satisfying physical relations with the same gender.  Not having tested this out myself, I can only rely on what scientists and commentators have written about, and it seems like sexual fluidity is for real.

Whether or not straight people have sex--or fall in love--with others of the same sex, the more I have walked away from the old traditions of the old country, the more I have wondered what place law has in who people love, or who they have sex with.  I can even understand the religious orthodoxy issuing decrees on what makes something a sin.  If people do not like those religious decrees, then they can always shed that religious cloak.  But, the law?  One cannot simply walk away from one country to another, right?

In the old country, homosexuality as a crime was leftover from the years of the bastard empire's rules. A free India merely replaced the white masters with home-grown brown masters.

The criminalisation of homosexuality or what is popularly referred to as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) dates back to 1860 when the British introduced it as sexual activities against the “order of nature.” ... The roots of the legality, however, can be found in European culture which for a long time had influenced Indian ways and thoughts.

We then have to ask ourselves where the white colonizers got the idea that homosexuality is not the “order of nature.”

Britain was Christian, though Catholics and Protestants killed each other in the name of Christ!  In the narratives that developed a couple of centuries after the death of Jesus, Saint Augustine invented the story of sex:

He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by projecting himself back into the remotest human past.

Or, to put it in simple words, Augustine had a penis problem!

How weird it is, Augustine thought, that we cannot simply command this crucial part of the body. We become aroused, and the arousal is within us—it is in this sense fully ours—and yet it is not within the executive power of our will. Obviously, the model here is the male body, but he was certain that women must have some equivalent experience, not visible but essentially identical.

So, what did Augustine do?

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.
This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy

Augustine blamed his own penis problem on Adam and Eve's sexual relations!

That whopper of an explanation from 1,700 years ago bled into Catholic, and later Protestant, doctrines, which the white settlers brought to the United States too.

In his deeply researched new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century, Geoffrey R. Stone gives his answer to these and other questions about our country’s regulation of sex, with a special emphasis on same-sex activity. According to Stone, a scholar of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Christianity has exerted the biggest influence on how we have addressed the issue from colonial times to today. The “central theme” of Sex and the Constitution “is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs—more particularly, by early Christian beliefs—about sex, sin, and shame.”

Stone reminds us that life was different in the pre-Christian, pre-Augustine Europe:

In a brief survey of sexual attitudes in the ancient world, he blames the early Christians for having taken all the fun out of sex. In pre-Christian times sex was considered “a natural and positive part of human experience” and not “predominantly bound up with questions of sin, shame, or religion.” He echoes previous scholars in finding that “classical Greek morality and law focused not on sexual sin, but on whether an individual’s conduct was harmful to others.”

The missing link between Augustine and the British sodomy laws?

If Stone holds Augustine responsible for promoting the idea of sex as an evil force, he presents Saint Thomas Aquinas as “the man most responsible for the hardening of the Church’s attitude toward same-sex sex.” Aquinas “systematized and expanded upon Augustine’s thinking.” His Summa Theologica (1265–1275) “rewrote the whole of Christian moral theology” and pronounced same-sex activity, which could not be for procreation, “especially contemptible in the sight of God.” Aquinas distinguished sinful acts carried out by opposite-sex couples from the sexual activity of same-sex couples. The latter activity was per se the “more grievous sin.” The church conferred formal authority on Aquinas’s views on these and other matters at the Council of Trent in 1563.

At some point in time, the sooner the better, we better develop for ourselves an understanding of what it means to be human, which will then provide clear answers to questions such as who the fuck cares what Adam and Eve did!

A kumbha mela in Oregon

You recall Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?  Yes, that fraudster who reinvented himself as Osho.

Back in the early 1980s, he and his fellow criminals bought up a ranch in Oregon and called that Rajneeshpuram.  As if people were hell-bent on confirming PT Barnum's "there's a sucker born every minute," devotees descended on the ashram.  With a matter of months, the place had the largest collection of Rolls Royce cars.

Source

But then the Bhagwan and his minions could not fool everybody.  They then engaged in bioterrorism, were prosecuted, and Rajneesh, who was kicked out of America, went back to India where he lived the rest of his life as Osho.

The police mugshot of Rajneesh.
Source

What has all that got to do with the kumbh mela?

That ranch area is prime viewing spot for the solar eclipse on August 21st!

You see the town of Madras (yes, named after the city in India--long story!)?  The ranch was close by.

Motels and campsites at those Central Oregon locations sold out months in advance.  People are renting out rooms in their homes for quite some rates.  Because, in those dog days of summer, that is a place in the mountain where the probability is very high that no clouds or weather events will spoil one's experience.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists will be flooding Oregon close to that date.  The transportation department has issued an advisory that traffic will be chaotic.  Small towns are worried that they won't have enough toilet facilities--even the portable ones.  Madness!

This is a secular kumbha mela.  People want to be awed by a celestial event over which we humans have no control.  Not even the tiniest of impacts.

When we cannot make sense of events around us, and when we have angst about our own existence, then we turn to the cosmos for answers and comfort.  Or, we turn to religions.  Or, we fall at the feet of fraudsters.  It is all the same to me.  Religions have better, and time-tested, institutional mechanisms to defraud people, unlike Rajneesh whose schemes were blown away.

We can submit to the likes of Rajneesh.  We can be devout our religions.  We can smoke weed.  We can go to religious and secular gatherings.  But, the angst about the meaning of life can be resolved only from within.

As for my own solar eclipse plans?  I live outside the belt of totality.  I don't care.  A colleague, whose home is smack in the zone of totality strongly advised me to get up to one of those places.  "It is a once in a life time event," he said.

I merely smiled.  Because I could not tell him that every breath that we take is a once in a life time event.  Every second that we are alive is a once in a life time event.  If only we cherished every second of our lives as we value the kumbha melas of many types!

I suppose it is because we refuse to understand and appreciate such a life that we seek the fraudsters of the world, who come in many shapes.  Beware!