Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A couple of stories in David Eagleman’s collection of (very) short stories, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives , have a wicked sense of humour wrt God.   One such tale is titled “Mary”. As in Mary Shelly, the author of the famous Frankenstein’s Monster . It turns out that’s God’s favourite book! “The first time He read Frankenstein , He criticized it the whole way through for its oversimplification of the processes involved. But when He reached the end, He was won over. For the first time, someone understood Him.” Let’s understand that last part. Apparently, God’s “medical career” started with yeast and bacteria and went on to beetles and dolphins: “But then, unwittingly, He crossed His Rubicon. He created Man.” Before long, man’s savagery and destructive capabilities were out of control. Even God’s control. Hence His fascination with Frankenstein: “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”   Another tale starts with w...

All the stories in David Eagleman’s book, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives are about the afterlife. Each one has a new, interesting scenario with deep, sometimes troubling, commentary on how we humans are. The story called “Absence” starts with what sounds like a mystery: “God is gone. The rumour is that He stepped out long ago, saying He’d be right back.”   So people did what they always do. They came up with explanations of what might have happened. Perhaps He left for good. Or did He go crazy? Did He leave to spawn other universes? Maybe He’s angry with us. Or stopped caring about us. Or gone on a long vacation.   What followed is what we can easily relate to: “People have belligerently taken sides based on their disappearance theories… Now war has broken out on the consecrated plains of Heaven.” Inevitably then: “We have ascended and brought the front line with us… The new religious wars do not pivot on God’s definition but instead on His whereabouts.” ...

The investment bank, Goldman Sachs, draws its share of hatred and revulsion. Mostly (in)famously, it was described thus by Matt Taibbi : “The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” A very graphic description indeed! Like pretty much every other financial entity in the US, Goldman too received bailout money. Which, of course, added to the fury. It didn’t help that its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, made his (in)famous comment to a reporter while coming out a government hearing on the financial crisis saying that he was “off to do God’s work”. Outrageous though it sounds, this was Blankfein’s version of the context in which he made the remark, as described in William D. Cohan’s book, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World : “So I walked out and I was talking to a reporter, and the questions were running along the lines of ‘Ho...

Killing in the name of God: it’s been done for centuries and continues to happen today. But killing people because they are gay? That’s a phenomenon unique to the “Abrahamic God of the desert”, writes Richard Rodriguez . The most recent example of that was the massacre in a gay club in Florida, the worst mass murder in the US since 9/11. But what’s the connection of the “desert religions” to homophobia? Is it just coincidence? No, says Rodriguez: “In such a place, the call to belief was tribal, not individualistic. Sexuality was an expression of faith to increase the tribe. Allegiance to God and to one’s ancestors was fulfilled by giving birth.” Rodriguez also raises a very interesting point about context being very important in how we perceive the same (or similar) actions: “(Florida murderer) Mateen might have been offended by the sight of two men kissing in Orlando, but one wonders what he have would made of Arabian and Afghan societies, where men stroll arm in arm and e...

There’s that famous observation that if someone tells you to not think about an elephant, then that’s the exact thing that will leap to your mind. Pretty much all of us know that’s how our minds work, right? Reverse psychology is the technical term for the phenomenon. Except, it turns out only we humans know that. The Gods apparently didn’t know. At least not the Western ones anyway. Remember what they told Eve in the Garden of Eden? Eat anything except that apple. No prizes for guessing what she was going to do, is there? She didn’t need a snake to “make her do it”; she’d have done it anyway. That’s just the way we humans are wired. Or take that tale about Pandora’s box: the Gods gave her a box and tell her to not open it. Yeah, like she was not going to let curiosity or rebellious tendencies get the better of her! Almost makes you think that the (Western) gods were either dumb or wanted some wicked fun, doesn’t it? Take your pick which reason it was: it’s kind of like...

Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, is old news: but in case you didn’t know, it was developed by IBM and can answer questions posed in natural language (aka human speak). Watson shot to fame back in 2011, when it competed on the US game show, Jeopardy , against 2 former winners and won. That should give you an idea of how good it is. Obviously, Watson has a massive repository of both structured and unstructured content that it refers to. The IBM team then attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary meant for “slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and phenomena not found in standard dictionaries.” Soon the researchers discovered that Watson couldn’t distinguish polite language v/s profanity! So they decided to delete the Urban Dictionary from its memory. Nicholas Carr didn’t approve the decision to delete items from memory and wrote the following lines : “I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give...

Everyone knows that Hellenic (Greek) philosophy is the bedrock of Western civilization. By that, most people refer to the Hellenic legacies of democracy, abstractions and generalizations (the “Ideas” of Plato), the clarity generating “Logic” of Aristotle, and the concept of defining all terms. Including defining terms like justice, ethics and morality. You can agree or disagree with their definitions; but at least they were willing to stick their neck out and take a stab at such items. Far less, however, is said about the Greek impact on the idea of God in the West. The Greeks philosophers, be it Socrates or Plato or Aristotle, were all practical men. While they certainly had some idealism in them, they were pragmatic about what was possible in the realm of governance. Plato felt that no ideal society (Utopia) ever comes to be because men are not content with a simple life. That men are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous. Aristotle was a bit more cynical (realistic?) and ...