Hindu Hootenanny

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

      -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

I participated today in what could generously be called a debate with someone identifying themselves as @HinduismVideos (no grown-up name provided), very briefly and clumsily touching on a handful of the recurrent themes that are the backbone of the current fight against infantile bronze-age superstition. I found it, in some small way, thrilling to be directly engaged in this manner by a member of the faithful, as I expect the anonymity of his situation allows a person a certain measure of bravery I do not find in many of my face to face arguments.

This argument was spurred by a news article published by the Rationalist website concerning the unequivocal cowardice of the Indian division of Penguin Publishing in their decision to reverse their stand taken with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and pulp all copies of Wendy Doeniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the result of a frivolous and groundless lawsuit brought against Doeniger for her “zeal” and “disrespect” of the multitude of Hindu deities. Setting aside for the moment the crushing of the free press, the sheer arrogance of a handful of people saying they decide what all Hindus find offensive, and the disgusting failure of the collective spine of Penguin Publishing, a young woman replied to the Rationalist's post with an interrogation into why the claimed factual errors in Doeniger's book had not been enumerated. Anonymous Hindu (hereafter A.H.) then responded, provided links to what he claimed was evidence and the young lady reported back as being chauvinist propaganda from a man called Rajiv Malhotra, with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. The young lady's posts were in her own name, while A.H. felt very comfortable lobbing insults from his unassailable anonymity, so without examining his evidence myself I am comfortable ceding the point to the young lady. A.H. then got a little slimy with the young lady, calling her “your highness” and being generally unlikeable, which is when I spoke up regarding his behavior and he engaged me.

He attributed my assertion that he was an asshole to his being Hindu and claimed the young lady agreed with him, which I refuted as well as explaining that his particular glimpse into the untrue was irrelevant. He was, perhaps, unfamiliar with those words in that order, and accused me of being Shakespeare. I am not sure if he was directly asserting I was a reincarnated soul who was previously an English writer, but did not seek clarification as one can only juggle so much crazy at any given time. He imitated a 60's surfer stereotype and suggested I bump up his video views, and I countered with the argument that it's not fair to listen to the mentally feeble's delusions without putting money in their little cup.

We began in earnest. He claimed a fondness for scientific debate and asked me to name a part of his belief system I disagreed with. I informed him that nothing in his belief structure was scientific, that he sullied the word when he used it, and began on dismantling the childish and absurd principles of karma and dharma. Karma, as a word, seems to have a dual meaning in that it describes both an action and the intent behind that action, an extremely oversimplified explanation of something that is not even understood in a unified way among the practitioners of the shattered and jumbled mess that is greater eastern theology. Karma is an affront to the idea of free will, which I hold very dear, and is a petulant construction of a dissatisfied people who wish that there was some kind of retributive order to the universe. It is no different in that way from the western celestial totalitarianism that lies through its teeth about delayed justice and your dead relatives going “to a better place.” Dharma, to force a translation, is a right way of living as dictated from an external source. A.H. would awkwardly try and reinforce this argument with his later claims that our brains are radios receiving ethics and guidance from the Akashic field promoted by the indefensible Stanislav Grof, but no amount of contortion can demonstrate that free will and morality are both externally-generated things. There is no edict from any god or from any vibrating mass consciousness that dictates our behavior. Our life is our own.

A.H. asked me what happens when we die, as a way of continuing the line of discussion on karma and reincarnation I was so fervently trying to immolate. Reminding me to keep things civilized (a remarkably arrogant thing to say from such a normally charming fellow), he accepted and approved of my assertion that there was no verifiable way to demonstrate consciousness after death, and that neither I nor anyone else could provide him with an accurate answer to that question. He explained that he could never accept a materialist concept of the universe because his intuition and experience informed him that nothing could be random, then asked me why I thought so many people were born into poverty. I was a little shaken by the non-sequitur and accused him of explaining poverty as a consequence of being sullied in the view of an unknown pantheon, which he did not deny.

A.H. explained to me that I couldn't possibly be a random collection of molecules, as there was no evidence for a materialist world view and science has no ability to prove the origins of consciousness. He then asked me if I would be comfortable believing in a random universe or one in which karmic laws held sway, which he described as being equivalent to the observable laws of cause and effect. This is a horribly fatuous and casuistic argument that I run into almost constantly in the community I live in, filled as it is with brash young neo-hippies that cannot imagine anyone before them could have possibly thought of this horrible line of reasoning. In no way, I explained to my intrepid A.H., can the vapid premise of a fabricated celestial scorecard be compared – can be, in no way, compared – to the phenomenon of demonstrable causality. Not only this, but the notion that one's preference or comfort is in any way relevant to anything at all has taken dangerous foothold. I don't care about your comfort, or if an idea is displeasing to you, and neither does anyone else with anything resembling intellectual honesty. But, as one could easily expect, in the splintered factions of religious white noise the idea of momentary comfort or respite is all these people have left.

The argument began to spiral at this point, as I could see A.H. was losing the thread and retracing his steps regarding his preference and his intuition. He repeatedly questioned why I thought my preferences were more important, ignoring my reply that preference had no importance or value to our discussion. He made several self-effacing comments about his faith, complete with unreadable smiley-face emoticons. We revisited molecules and karma, where he offered me the false choice between random molecular interaction and the same dictated by karmic influence. This belied, I think, one of the missteps made by the religious when they try and attribute things like ethics or intent to our molecular makeup, an argument intended to make one try to scramble to provide a chemical composition which will suffice. It seems obvious that there is no molecule where ethics come from just as there is no karmic sway at a molecular (or any other, for that matter) level. Ethics, and to a lesser extent, intent are functions of higher organisms; perhaps the earliest example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. There is, I explained to A.H., no one keeping track of the score for him as every slight received and transgression committed was his and his alone.

 

This is the biggest scoreboard in the world. It is in Houston, not heaven.

  



A.H. was in a corner now, and had no choice but to bring out the double guns akimbo of quantum mechanics and Deepak Chopra (the knowledge of the former sadly having come entirely from the latter). He began with the statements that Roger Penrose's argument on quantum behavior in the microtubules of neurons proved the assertion of reincarnation, but never got around to explaining his reasoning. I was unfamiliar with Penrose's work, but a short amount of reading showed me that I sided with one of his primary opponents, a man called Marvin Minsky. I informed A.H. of this, he replied by asking me who Minsky was, and I reinforced for him the folly of offering someone evidence without reading all the way through it first for yourself, seeing as you can be made to look very stupid should you have to ask for clarification on your own points. He rallied about quantum physics' sound thrashing of Newtonian physics, about how scientists couldn't even understand it, about how Chopra does understand it and how there are “TOP guys” who agree with him, linking me to the review section of Chopra's latest copy of chloroform in print. He furiously defended the stone backwards view (that I know for certain he got from Chopra's stunningly ignorant misinformation) that quantum mechanics is something which applies to all things at all scales, and how my molecules were governed based on these rules. Because of snake oil-selling, predatory charlatan idiots like Deepak Chopra, poor A.H. thinks firstly that quantum mechanics has something to do with atoms. It does not, quantum refers to things of a subatomic scale. He also thinks, as Chopra does, that the rules of quantum mechanics mean that the moon isn't there if he personally is not there to witness light reflect off it. Flagrant dismissal of any kind of joy in learning about how our universe is actually put together, coupled with and trading in self-based arrogant solipsism.

 

However unfairly, I expect my opponent resembles this smelly gentleman.

 



The ease with which great holes were casually rent in his carefully-built tapestry clearly frustrated him, as he resorted to challenging me to “educate” him and “shower some knowledge” on him. His slightly unusual sexual fetish-themed plea fell on deaf ears, however, and I reminded him that the point of our argument was not for me to explain quantum mechanics to him, but to destroy and belittle his faith and worldview. I did however, remind him that he was to be welcome and encouraged on my part to educate himself for education's sake. His final responses to me were to clumsily invoke Heisenberg for no discernible reason and to direct me to an article on quantum physics from someplace called Krishna Path which, let's be honest, I'll never read. I won't trust them to sell me flowers at the airport, why would I ever turn to them for an understanding of physics. We parted ways with his very civil wish for my well-being, which was thoughtful but wholly unnecessary.

 

Fuck you, sign! Don't tell me how to live!

 



I don't wish for my tone in describing this encounter to make it seem as if I regard this man as someone deserving of respect. His beliefs are stupid and wrong, a sloppy collection of mismatched holdovers kept around like commemorative plates. His attitudes about science and ethics infuriate me to my core, and what he finds most holy and precious is most hateful to me. We are enemies, him and I, but he did me the respect of challenging me, and by my count I resorted to sarcasm and barbs on more occasions than he did, and not for noble reasons.

 Quick, send money! Those glasses aren't going to bedazzle themselves, people!

I wanted to relate this experience and reinforce the idea that these beliefs are dangerous to us as a society, and that when they are met in the public square or from the cowardly comfort of an anonymous account they must be gutted head on. I hope this is the first of many conflicts I have with the religious outside my narrow purview, as I feel that every time even the smallest antitheist or secular humanist argues with a believer against their nonsense claims and hateful beliefs, in some small way Thomas Paine is vindicated.

 

Not my creation, but this nicely sums things up.