prateekshac

I feel quite like a hypocrite living a religious life while at heart being a staunch atheist. Penning down this is perhaps a way to reduce my guilt.

I was born into a quasi religious family who; though were God fearing, were not religious. They believed in the existence of God as a creator; more for the lack of another theory, than anything else. However it was believed in our family that religion was nothing more than a set of man made organizations intended to bring some tangibility into the vague concept of God and to establish practices which would enable us to display faith in God in ways that would not come across as utterly obnoxious and insane to the surrounding community. To drive home that point, imagine there was no religion and people wanted to believe in God. How in the wide world would they express it? Would they all evolve different ways to express themselves? In which case, would it not look ridiculous to one person the weird ways in which his neighbor chose to express his affection for God, because after all any way you choose to acknowledge an invisible intangible being is unnatural and funny, much like how kids speak to their invisible friends and dolls. And being the social beings that we are, would we be able to live with this absence of consensus? Hence evolved religion.

In short, while it is impossible for someone who is religious to not believe in God, it is perfectly possible for someone who does believe in God to not be religious. And we belonged to the latter class.

Life was peaceful with no interference from religious differences while I was growing up, mainly because we lived many many miles away from most of our relatives; as a result of which we were never present at any of our pujas and rituals. On the other hand, we in fact lived amongst Christians, attended their masses and prayed to their God. I should mention at this point that I am technically a Hindu in that I was born to Hindu parents, in that my parents were born to HIndu parents, in that my grandparents were born to HIndu parents.. and so on. I often wonder where it all started. Which one of my ancestors, on one fine day, woke up and decided to be a Hindu. Well, getting back to my point, when I was growing up, if one had asked me which religion I belonged to, I had to say that I was as much Christian or Muslim or any other religion as I was Hindu. I spent the first two decades of my life in this state.

Then Science happened. Science is wonderful in that it strives to ask questions and provide explanations. It exercises your mind by making you think and reason rather than memorize and adopt. It encourages rational thinking and is not afraid of being questioned. When Science happened, it beat all the other ideologies in my life downright. And while doing so, it provided the most elegant and beautiful explanation to various questions I had had growing up as to who created us and how we all came into being. Science provided the answers that the theory of God could not.
When a child hangs a sock out on the eve of Christmas, and finds his much anticipated toy in it the next morning, one can reason it out in the following two ways. You can believe that a jolly old fat man in red with a white beard driving a cart drawn by rein deers flew in, picked from his sack the goodie that the kid had prayed for, and put it in there; OR you can believe that your pretty young dad in pajamas , possibly clean shaven, went to the store, bought it the previous night, wrapped it with love and put it in there. Up to the age of five or ten maybe, the first theory is highly fanciful; after which it increases in its ridiculousness quotient so rapidly that by the age of fifteen, if you still believe in Santa Claus, you will be harassed out of your wits by your peers.
If you spend even five mins thinking about the above example(maybe fifteen for the highly religious), it becomes impossible to deny that it sounds suspiciously similar to the God versus Science explanations we have for nature, and how we all came to be.

Getting back, it was fairly easy for me to be seduced by Science given that the God theory was getting weaker and weaker in my mind, owing to the fact that it had not an ounce of evidence to support, nor any reason why we should believe something that had no evidence to support it whatsoever. And quite rapidly I moved on to being an Atheist. I should at this point accept that there was a short period in time when I claimed to be agnostic for the fear of coming out into the open. I believed that it is simply easier to ignore the entire issue rather than go up against family members and friends with years and years of conditioning.

However, after I got married, a bunch of questions arose in my mind, which jolted me out of my comfortable position as an Agnostic. Given that my extended family was highly religious and performed every single puja without fail, these questions arose in my mind with higher frequencies. The most important of those questions was, What stand am I going to take with my child (if and when I have one) when he/she asks me what I think about the God that his grandparents and friends worship. Do I believe in it?

I know now that when my child asks me that, I will answer in the negative. I will say ” I do not believe in God dear. And I have a reason for it. The earth is flat. We breathe air. Sugar is sweet. Killing is Bad. There is no SantaClaus and there is not God.”

For the past few days I have been spending a lot of time reading about ‘Dreams’. How/Why they occur. What do they mean. How can you get rid of recurring dreams.And a lot of other interesting trivia.

Did you know that..

1.there is a kind of dreaming, where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. Here, dreamers are often able to exercise a certain amount of control over their dreams and their dreams appear to be much clearer in nature to them. This is called Lucid dreaming.

2.one of the explanations for Deja vu is that it is actually the memory of dreams. That when you feel like ‘this has happened before sometime’, it is probably because you dreamt about a similiar situation earlier.

3.we dream on an average of one or two hours every night. And we often even have 4-7 dreams in one night. (phew)

4.men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women. (hmmm :-))

5.little babies do not appear in their own dreams :-( until the age of 3-4. They only dream about other things/people..

6.Dreams are normally telling you something about yourselves. Your unconscious mind is trying to bring to your attention what your conscious mind is trying to ignore.If you remember only bits of your dream, those bits are probably what your unconscious mind chose to bring to your notice.Apparently one of the ideal ways of getting rid of recurring dreams/nightmares is to lucidly dream about it and face your fear in your nightmare. You should check out The Dreams foundation for more details.

7.The above site also tells you how you can improve your Dream Recall which is the ability to remember your dreams :-)

8.Another exciting thing I read about was that there is a category of sleep called the REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement Sleep) which constitutes close to 20-25% total sleep for a grown human being.REM is characterized by rapid eye movement(obviously), low muscle tone,irregular heart and breathing rates etc. It is believed that one tends to strongly remember and visualize the dreams that they had during REM sleep,after waking up. This is quite interesting, inspite of the fact that it has been proved that dreams and REM sleeps are not directly related as they are controlled by different brain mechanisms

9.Also, Most dreams(the bad ones atleast :-)), generally belong to one of the following genres. where you are being chased or attacked, falling,unprepared or late for something,stuck in slow motion,nude in public, trapped or drowning etc..

Whew, I could go on and on. Dont forget to check out the wikipedia article on Dreams.

Oh I forgot to tell you why I ventured upon this in the first place. I had this dream the other night.Now I know it was a lucid dream because I was amazed at how I was so aware of the fact that I was sleeping. I wanted to record the dream because I did not want to forget it and I even remember feeling too lazy to get up and note it down.So I kept telling myself ‘Girl, you got to remember this.’ And all this was while I was dreaming. I know this because I continued to dream. :-) It was quite an exciting experience.
I will tell you about that dream some other time as I cannot possibly fit it here. And do not fret, there is not a chance in the world I am going to forget that dream. It is really amazing what you can tell your unconscious mind to do. A typical example being when we are travelling (usually alone), and we remind ourselves to get up at 5:00 because the train reaches our destination then. And yes, without fail, you will open your eyes at 5:00. Try it out :P and Sweet dreams…:-)