Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

I grew up in a pretty reli­gious fam­ily and was an active par­tic­i­pant in many “holy cer­e­monies”. Look­ing back at it, it had a lot to do with what peo­ple around me were doing, and my own lack of inter­est­ing things to do or abil­ity to think/question the things peo­ple did. Then, around the 3rd grade, my fam­ily moved into an apart­ment com­plex where I had about ten other kids my age to play with. And I was too busy play­ing, every day and every hour, to need an alter­nate activ­ity. And thus, a gap evolved, and it was not until later that I actively embraced this and thought about it. Being a lazy pro­cras­ti­na­tor, I was agnos­tic for the longest time, but in real­ity, was a closet athe­ist. And I needed Richard Dawkins (how pre­dictable) to help me stand up! So, that is what this post is about. More about the need to rec­og­nize the fact that athe­ists need to stand up and be counted, than be pas­sive, non-confrontational and all that.

Why did I use “non-confrontational”? To quote Dou­glas Adams (a quote that Dawkins uses a lot, with good reason),

Now, the inven­tion of the sci­en­tific method and sci­ence is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most pow­er­ful intel­lec­tual idea, the most pow­er­ful frame­work for think­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing and under­stand­ing and chal­leng­ing the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it with­stands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t with­stand the attack then down it goes. Reli­gion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has cer­tain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or what­ever. That’s an idea we’re so famil­iar with, whether we sub­scribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actu­ally means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say any­thing bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If some­body votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; every­body will have an argu­ment but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If some­body thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argu­ment about it, but on the other hand if some­body says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Sat­ur­day’, you say, ‘Fine, I respect that’. The odd thing is, even as I am say­ing that I am think­ing ‘Is there an Ortho­dox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?’ but I wouldn’t have thought ‘Maybe there’s some­body from the left wing or some­body from the right wing or some­body who sub­scribes to this view or the other in eco­nom­ics’ when I was mak­ing the other points. I just think ‘Fine, we have dif­fer­ent opin­ions’. But, the moment I say some­thing that has some­thing to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irra­tional) beliefs, then we all become ter­ri­bly pro­tec­tive and ter­ri­bly defen­sive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irra­tional belief but no, we respect it’.

We are not here by chance. And while we might not know a lot of the answers, there is absolutely no rea­son to use a made-up entity as the answer. Sci­ence has pro­vided us with knowl­edge. Read Darwin’s the­ory of nat­ural selec­tion (I am try­ing to) and you will know what I mean. Of course, sci­ence does not have all the answers. But using reli­gion and god is just you being lazy. Inves­ti­gate and yearn to under­stand. Don’t be a lame ass and say it can’t be explained, hence it is god. This applies a lot to other things in life as well — be relent­less in your pursuit!

To know why I used “tooth-fairy agnos­tic”, buy The God Delu­sion or lis­ten to his TED talk.

And finally, I do not mean to offend any­one with this post. Relax, keep an open mind. Check this out. Either you are the first com­menter or you are one of “us”.

tldr — if you are agnos­tic coz you are lazy, stop. stand up. regard­less, have an open mind. and try to lis­ten to the TED talk. Any­thing unex­plained is not attrib­uted to God, it just makes you a lazy and ignorant!