The God Delusion

Just yesterday, I was watching this video on Richard Dawkins' address at Lynchburg, VA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJUfU

He is a British Ethologist, Evolutionary Biologist and a popular science writer. But the talk was not about any of this. It was the talk about the most pressing question for many thinkers/philosophers/rationalists of the day: "Does god really exist?". The talk consisted of excerpts from his recent book "The God Delusion," in which he claims to have "proven" that god, almost surely, doesn't exist. He presented a 40-min argument on the morality of this Christian god (most of his references were from the Bible) and showed that given the understanding of mankind to date, and given the moralities of the day, god should be classified as a barbarian, someone in the ranks of Hitler, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein. Youtube also hosts a question answer session, which I personally couldn't watch due to time constraints.

I am self confessed agnostic. I do not admit the presence or absence of god. However, I am humble enough to admit that, god, as described by the religious scriptures, if were "found" to exist, would be beyond my understanding. God, by definition, need not fit the description of what most humans think as "moral". God is not a democratic government, whose fate/actions/properties are decided by majority of humans. I find the speakers' actions of trying to "rationalize" god at best laughable and at worst blasphemous. Hell! Most of my friends cannot even rationalize their wives and the speaker is trying to explain away god (or the lack of it)!

A couple of points about the talk itself and some arguments to the same:

The speaker points to a myriad of stories in the Bible where the "hero" commits what could be described by most modern men as "utterly barbaric deeds" with the blessing of the god. Then he concludes that God, who is the orchestrator of such massacres, should be called nothing but a Barbarian.

To this, I suggest the following thought experiment; Say you come home and switch on a TV. You see a English movie that you have never seen before and cannot recognize the actors. You see one guy killing the other guy with his bare hands. There is blood all over the guy's face. The guy is pleading but the other person goes on to kill him. If you fit the bill of what "most" people call moral today, you would most likely think "What a deplorable act."

Now, say your friend comes along and he can recognize the movie. He tells you the storyline and the horrific crimes committed by the guy who just died in the movie. I suspect that after hearing the entire storyline, your perception about the "hero" might change. You might even think that the "villian" actually deserved it.

My point is the following: By just observing a speck of the time line, estimating the morality/rationality of the entire time line will be error prone. We could still estimate it, but the confidence levels of the estimation will not be too high.

Science has become extremely successful in explaining a lot of the mysteries of this planet. It does so by advocating questioning, logic, reasoning, rational thinking, experimentation, etc. which are all the basis of what most scientists call the "scientific approach." In doing so, Science has transformed itself into a religion, where its followers believe that everything in this world can be explained by its own tenets (i.e., logic, reasoning, rational thinking etc.). Scientists and "rational thinkers" of the day are becoming extremely narrow minded in their approach by condoning everything that does not follow the rigorous scientific approach. This to me, is like, Christians using Bible to declare that Allah/Eshwar are farce.

Hopefully, someday Science would mature enough to leave god in peace.

Democracy for the free world

Given that Democracy can lead to "Majority rule all" situation, and that people's judgment based on rather incomplete information is questionable, why is it that so many countries are pushing for democracy all over the world? Is democracy the best form of government that we can come up with? Or, is democracy vs non-democracy an ideological conflict?

My personal view is that its not an ideological conflict. Its pure business! Typically, countries like to sign up trade agreements, bilateral treaties, MoUs, etc that lead to what is called a "win-win" situation. There will be a tug-of-war between the two governments since each would want to squeeze the maximum out of the other. When governments fail to yield to the external agents, it creates a problem for the agent (Ex: Saddam Hussien threatening to switch to Euro for Oil trades. BJP refusing to sign up the nuclear treaty with the US, etc.)

If the government was non-democratic (like dictatorship, communist regime), its a huge problem for the external agent, since these forms of governments cannot be dismissed so easily. One has to wage a huge war and remove the form of government or create subversive coup attempts to bring in leaders who are inline with the expectations of the external agent. While these have been attempted in the past, the current situation in Iraq is a strong example of how things can go wrong.

Democracy, on the other hand, provides an easier alternative. You see, there are two things that are appealing to an external agent about a functional democracy

1. Every government rule is of finite duration
2. Every government has an opposition

When there is an opposition, there is a way. Anything that cannot be got with the current government can be pushed into the future as a deal to be discussed with the next government.

Fast forward to the election time: Campaigning is hard. It takes effort and it takes money. Often huge sums of money. The external agents don't have a dearth of this "money." It can be collected, raised and transferred to the opposition party's election fund. Elections can be rigged, Ballots can be stolen, people can be disenfranchised, threatened, etc, all with the help of "money".

Once the opposition comes to power, deals can be renegotiated and signed upon.

In conclusion, democracy provides an easier alternative for external agents to get the deals they want. A coup less/warless alternative.

The Common (man) Solution

Every man/woman in a country has an equal right to elect a candidate. This, largely is based on the premise that all men/women are equal and therefore no one's judgment is better than the rest. Every man/woman gets a weight of one in any general body election.

The problem is that the assumption about judgment of people is fundamentally flawed. I believe that good judgment requires at least the following two components

1. Person's ability to digest the information at hand and take the "best" course of action.
2. The penchant to get information in the first place.

Fact 1: People are not equal. Therefore the "goodness" of their judgment is likely to be different.

Fact 2: With red-tape reaching almost every body of governance all transparency is lost. Therefore, not all are well-informed.

Given these two facts, any general election where everyone is treated equally will lead to a questionable outcome. The decisions of people tends to get averaged out leading to a "average" solution to the problem (given the recent election results, I am more inclined to believe that the collective decisions of a bunch of average individuals leads to a sub-average result).

So, should democracy prevail? Should voting be a right or should it be made a responsibility?
Next post: Why does US want democracy everywhere?