Category Archives: Atheism

It is unfortunate that our Chief Minister chose to invite Stalin to the reopening ceremony of Yadadri. Stalin is a known atheist and his party has a background of not only strict atheism but a definite antipathy to the Hindu traditions which it 'others', wrongly and unfortunately, through the prism of a strict Dravidian ideology. Secularism and liberalism in India carry a peculiar flavour amongst the intellectuals and the politicians. It means to appease the minorities and abuse the majority respectively. This large-heartedness was a consistent policy since independence.

Nehru's state claimed all the rights of a 'Hindu state' in its relation to the Hindus. He took liberties with the Hindus like objecting to the President inaugurating the rejuvenated Somnath temple; objecting to Bande Mataram because of religious connotations; allowing Hindu Code Bill which included state temple management; insisting on debating religious issues as the Hindu personal law and ban on cow-slaughter in secular terms. But he dared not touch the Muslim personal law despite his anxiety to have a Uniform Civil Code. In claiming the rights of a Hindu state, the Nehru government's refusal to accept the obligations of defending and promoting their religion incurred charges of inconsistency and disingenuity in applying secularism.

Our founding fathers concluding for a secular India remained muddled on the meaning of secularism. The Indian state wanted to deny the dominant and distinct Hindu ethos from the beginning. No government has fully explained why India should be a secular state in its current sense; the arguments are unimaginative and derived from Western history. Most leaders have argued falsely for secularism as necessary for religious tolerance and harmony.

A secular state is not necessarily tolerant (Soviet Union during the Communist rule) and a religious state is not necessarily discriminatory against minority religions (traditional Hindu kingdoms in India, Muslim kingdoms in the Middle East and most of the time even in India). Secularism, with no Indian vernacular equivalents, does not even make sense in the Indian context where the private and public life clothes in many rituals and traditions on a constant basis.

Even pure atheism is not bothersome in Indian traditions unless it indulges in iconoclasm. Atheism, making sense only in a theistic 'religious' world, can be a route to enlightenment too in a traditional India. Materialism and atheism were known in Indian traditions since ancient times as Charvakism or Lokayata. Jains, Buddhists, and even some orthodox traditions either reject God or do not demand a belief in God for enlightenment. Most of Indian traditions are not even 'theistic' the way Judaism, Christianity and Islam are. Indian 'atheisms', 'asuras', or the 'immorality' of the devas do not rob Indians of their traditions the way atheism robs a believer in the West. However, the Dravidian antipathy is difficult to understand. It is the racial Aryan-Dravidian theory, proposed first by the colonial and German Indologists, which caused havoc with Indian social and political life including the nonsensical North-South divide we see in our country. The evidence for Aryan invasion or migration is weak from literary, archaeological, anthropological, or genetic disciplines. The persistent conflation between race, language and culture is misleading and dangerous.

Political uses of the Aryan scenario, wholly illegitimate and unnecessarily divisive, are an extension of the colonial agenda. As scholar Koenraad Elst says, the many social-political applications of the racially interpreted Aryan theory, which needs dismantling at the earliest, include the 'caste-system' (Aryans upper castes; Dravidians as tribals as lower castes); anti-Brahminism; Dravidianism; and Ambedkarism (lower castes as the aboriginals subdued by the Aryan invaders though Ambedkar himself strongly opposed the Aryan theory).

Indic culture is an amorphous mixture of Vedic/Sanskritic culture, Sangam culture of the south, and the rich ethnic (mainly tribal) strands of culture. Alien religions entered and absorbed into this culture creating a unique multicultural world, a solution for the world to deal with pluralism which it seems to be distinctly incapable of. Indian culture is a melting pot of six language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and Andamanese).

Over millennia, the unique Indian cultural unit has been a rich and complicated mixture of many elements. It is unfortunate, senseless, and even dangerous to try and separate the individual elements but our politicians are creating havoc using these dangerous theories to divide the country and pit one against the other. It is perhaps with good intentions that the Telangana CM has politely invited a neighbouring counterpart to inaugurate a Hindu temple but in the background of the strict beliefs of the person and the party behind him, it is another great example of taking the Hindu believers in the country for granted.

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Inviting Stalin to inaugurate Yadadri - The Hans India

On an evening in 1851, a mutton-chopped 28-year-old English poet and critic looked out at the English Channel with his new bride. Walking along the white chalk cliffs of Dover, jagged and streaked black with flint as if the coast had just been ripped from the Continent, he would recall that:

Matthew Arnolds poem Dover Beach then turns in a more forlorn direction. While listening to pebbles thrown upon Kents rocky strand, brought in and out with the night tides, the cadence brings an eternal note of sadness in. That sound, he thinks, is a metaphor for the receding of religious belief, as

Eight years before Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species (1859) and three decades before Friedrich Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5) with its thunderclap pronouncement that God is dead Arnold already heard religions retreat. Darwins theory was only one of many challenges to traditional faith, including the radical philosophies of the previous century, the discoveries of geology, and the Higher Criticism of German scholars who proved that scripture was composed by multiple, fallible people over several centuries. While in previous eras a full-throated scepticism concerning religion was an impossibility, even among freethinkers, by the 19th century it suddenly became intellectually possible to countenance agnosticism or atheism. The tide going out in Arnolds sea of faith was a paradigm shift in human consciousness.

What Dover Beach expresses is a cultural narrative of disenchantment. Depending on which historian you think authoritative, disenchantment could begin with the 19th-century industrial revolution, the 18th-century Enlightenment, the 17th-century scientific revolution, the 16th-century Reformation, or even when medieval Scholastic philosophers embraced nominalism, which denied that words had any connection to ultimate reality. Regardless, there is broad consensus on the course of the narrative. At one point in Western history, people at all stations of society could access the sacred, which permeated all aspects of life, giving both purpose and meaning. During this premodern age, existence was charged with significance. At some point, the gates to this Eden were sutured shut. The condition of modernity is defined by the irrevocable loss of easy access to transcendence. The German sociologist Max Weber wrote in his essay Science as a Vocation (1917) that the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations, the result of this retraction being that the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

A cognoscente of the splendours of modern technology and of the wonders of scientific research, Arnold still felt the loss of the transcendent, the numinous, and the sacred. Writing in his book God and the Bible (1875), Arnold admitted that the personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and yet he mourned for faiths long, withdrawing roar.

Some associated the demise of the supernatural with the elimination of superstition and all oppressive religious hierarchies, while others couldnt help but mourn the loss of transcendence, of life endowed with mystery and holiness. Regardless of whether modernity was welcomed or not, this was our condition now. Even those who embraced orthodoxy, to the extremes of fundamentalism, were still working within the template set by disenchantment, as thoroughly modern as the rest of us. Thomas Hardy, another English poet, imagined a surreal funeral for God in a 1912 lyric, with his narrator grieving that

How people are to grapple with disenchantment remains the great religious question of modernity. And who or what shall fill his place? Hardy asks. How do you pray to a dead God?

The question was a central one not just in the 19th century, but among philosophers in the subsequent century, though not everyone was equally concerned. When it came to where, or how, to whom, or even why somebody should direct their prayers, Thomas Huxley didnt see an issue. A stout, pugnacious, bulldog of a man, the zoologist and anatomist didnt become famous until 1860, when he appeared to debate Darwinism with the unctuous Anglican Bishop of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce, at the University of Oxford. Huxley was the ever-modern man of science and a recipient of a number of prestigious awards the Royal Medal, the Wollaston Medal, the Clarke Medal, the Copley Medal, and the Linnean Medal all garnered in recognition of his contributions to science. By contrast, Wilberforce was the decorated High Church cleric, bishop of Oxford and dean of Westminster. The former represented rationalism, empiricism and progress; the latter the supernatural, traditionalism and the archaic. Unfortunately for Wilberforce, Huxley was on the side of demonstrable data. In a room of dark wood and taxidermied animals, before an audience of a thousand, Wilberforce asked Huxley which side of the esteemed biologists family a gorilla was on his grandmothers or his grandfathers? Huxley reportedly responded that he would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth. The debate was a rout.

Of course, evolution had implications for any literal account of creation, but critics like Wilberforce really feared the moral implications of Huxleys views. Huxley had a rejoinder. Writing in his study Evolution and Ethics (1893), he held that Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, have all had to pass through similar phases, before they reached the stage at which their influence became an important factor in human affairs and so too would ethics submit to the same ordeal. Rather than relying on ossified commandments, Huxley believed that reason will work as great a revolution in the sphere of practice. Such a belief in progress was common among the 19th-century intelligentsia, the doctrine that scientific knowledge would improve not just humanitys material circumstances but their moral ones as well. What, then, of transcendence? Inheritors of a classic, English education, both Huxley and Wilberforce (not to mention Arnold) were familiar with that couplet of the poet Alexander Pope, rhapsodising Isaac Newton in 1730: Nature, and Natures laws lay hid in night. / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light! For some, the answer to what shall fill Gods place was obvious: science.

The glories of natural science were manifold. Darwin comprehended the ways in which moths and monkeys alike were subject to the law of adaptation. From Newton onward, physicists could predict the parabola of a planet or a cricket ball with equal precession, and the revolution of Antoine Lavoisier transformed the alchemy of the Middle Ages into rigorous chemistry. By the 19th century, empirical science had led to attendant technological wonders; the thermodynamics of James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin gave us the steam engine, while the electrodynamics of Michael Faraday would forever (literally) illuminate the world. Meanwhile, advances in medicine from experimentalists such as Louis Pasteur ensured a rise in life expectancy.

Yet some were still troubled by disenchantment. Those like Arnold had neither the optimism of Huxley nor the grandiosity of Pope. Many despaired at the reduction of the Universe to a cold mechanisation even when they assented to the accuracy of those theories. Huxley might see ingenuity in the connection of joint to ligament, the way that skin and fur cover bone, but somebody else might simply see meat and murder. Even Darwin would write that the view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life is an intolerable thought. Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasnt an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.

Praying towards science, art or an idol all responses to disenchantment, but not honest ones

Art was the way out of the impasse. Our prayers werent to be oriented towards science, but rather towards art and poetry. In Literature and Dogma (1873), Arnold wrote that the word God is by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence a literary term, in short. Since the Romantics, intellectuals affirmed that in artistic creation enchantment could be resurrected. Liberal Christians, who affirmed contemporary science, didnt abandon liturgy, rituals and scripture, but rather reinterpreted them as culturally contingent. In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion. Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw God as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being pure contemplation of the Universe. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lyman Stewart, the Pennsylvania tycoon and co-founder of the Union Oil Company of California, had a different solution to the so-called problem of the death of God. Between 1910 and 1915, Stewart convened conservative Protestant ministers across denominations, including Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, to compile a 12-volume set of books of 90 essays entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, writing in 1907 that his intent was to send some kind of warning and testimony to the English-speaking ministers, theological teachers, and students, and English-speaking missionaries of the world which would put them on their guard and bring them into right lines again.

Considering miracles of scripture, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the relationship of Christianity to contemporary culture, the set was intended to be a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity. Targets included not just liberal Christianity, Darwinism and secular Bible scholarship, but also socialism, feminism and spiritualism. Writing about the natural view of the Scriptures, which is to say a secular interpretation, the contributor Franklin Johnson oddly echoed Arnolds oceanic metaphor, writing that liberalism is a sea that has been rising higher for three-quarters of a century It is already a cataract, uprooting, destroying, and slaying.

Like many radicals, Stewarts ministers such as Louis Meyer, James Orr and C I Scofield saw themselves as returning to first principles, hence their ultimate designation as being fundamentalists. But they were as firmly of modernity as Arnold, Huxley or Schleiermacher. Despite their revanchism, the fundamentalists posited theological positions that would have been nonsensical before the Reformation, and their own anxious jousting with secularism especially their valorisation of rational argumentation served only to belie their project.

Praying towards science, art or an idol all responses to disenchantment, but not honest ones. Looking with a clear eye, Nietzsche formulated an exact diagnosis. In The Gay Science (1882), he wrote:

Nietzsche is sometimes misinterpreted as a triumphalist atheist. Though he denied the existence of a personal creator, he wasnt in the mould of bourgeois secularists such as Huxley, since the German philosopher understood the terrifying implications of disenchantment. There are metaphysical and ethical ramifications to the death of God, and if Nietzsches prescription remains suspect Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? his appraisal of our spiritual predicament is foundational. Morning star of 20th-century existentialism, Nietzsche shared an honest acceptance of the absurdity of reality, asking how it is that were able to keep living after God is dead.

Another forerunner of existentialism was the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had a different solution. The Brothers Karamazov (1879) enacts a debate about faith far more nuanced than the bloviating between Huxley and Wilberforce. Two brothers Ivan and Alyosha discuss belief; the former is a materialist who rejects God, and the latter is an Orthodox novice. Monotheistic theology has always wrestled with the question of how an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God could allow for evil. Theodicy has proffered solutions, but all have ultimately proven unsatisfying. To imagine a God who either isnt all good or isnt all powerful is to not imagine God at all; to rationalise the suffering of the innocent is ethically monstrous. And so, as Ivan tells his brother, God himself is not worth the tears of that one tortured child. Finally, Alyosha kisses his brother and departs. Such an enigmatic action is neither condescension nor concession, even though the monk agrees with all of Ivans reasoning. Rather, its an embrace of the absurd, what the Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard would call a leap of faith. It is a commitment to pray even though you know that God is dead.

Shsaku End, in his novel Silence (1966), about the 17th-century persecution of Japanese Christians, asks: Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent? Following the barbarity of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, all subsequent authentic theology has been an attempt to answer End. With Nietzsches predicted wars, people confronted the new gods of progress and rationality, as the technocratic impulse made possible industrial slaughter. If disenchantment marked the anxieties of Romantics and Victorians, then the 20th-century dreams of a more fair, wise, just and rational world were dissipated by the smoke at Auschwitz and Nagasaki. Huxleys fantasy was spectacularly disproven in the catastrophic splitting of the atom.

These matters were not ignored in seminaries, for as the journalist John T Elson wrote in Time magazine in 1966: Even within Christianity a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of Gods death, and get along without him. That article was in one of Times most controversial and bestselling issues. Elson popularised an evocative movement that approached the death of God seriously, and asked how enchantment was possible during our age of meaninglessness. Thinkers who were profiled included Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren and Thomas J J Altizer, all of whom believed that God is indeed absolutely dead, but [propose] to carry on and write a theology without God. Working at progressive Protestant seminaries, the death of God movement, to varying degrees, promulgated a Christian atheism.

Such an idiosyncratic movement is bound to be diverse, ranging from those who believed that God had literally died to others who understood this language to be symbolic of the malaise affecting the Church and society. What unified these thinkers Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish was a desire to do new work, new writing, new singing, new preaching, new testifying, new protesting, new resistance, new and faithful heresy, and new and renewed means of artistic expression, as Jordan E Miller and Christopher D Rodkey explain in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology (2018). Of the various approaches to disenchantment a retreat to fundamentalism, an embrace of atheism, a denial that anything has changed at all radical theology was that which promised to look at meaninglessness directly and to wrest some sort of transcendence from the abyss. In the Western world, more laity than ever are searching for theological language and answers to the recognised theological problem that is the Western world itself, write Miller and Rodkey, and yet though the options of New Atheism and secularised evangelicalism are immediately accessible and available, they are neither helpful nor productive answers to larger theological problems.

Nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists

By contrast, radical theology is able to take religion seriously and to challenge religion. Vahanian, a French Armenian Presbyterian who taught at Syracuse University in New York, hewed towards a more traditional vision, nonetheless writing in Wait Without Idols (1964) that God is not necessary; that is to say, he cannot be taken for granted. He cannot be used merely as a hypothesis, whether epistemological, scientific, or existential, unless we should draw the degrading conclusion that God is reasons. Altizer, who worked at the Methodist seminary of Emory University in Atlanta, had a different approach, writing in The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) that Every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event and that Gods death has actualised in our history a new and liberated humanity. What unified disparate approaches is a claim from the German Lutheran Paul Tillich, who in his Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (1951) would skirt paradox when he provocatively claimed that God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.

What does any of this mean practically? Radical theology is unsparing; none of it comes easily. It demands an intensity, focus and seriousness, and more importantly a strange faith. It has unleashed a range of reactions in the contemporary era, ranging from an embrace of the cultural life of faith absent any supernatural claims, to a rigorous course of mysticism and contemplation that moves beyond traditional belief. For some, like Vahanian, it meant a critical awareness that the rituals of religion must enter into a post-Christian moment, whereby the lack of meaning would be matched by a countercultural embrace of Jesus as a moral guide. Others embraced an aesthetic model and a literary interpretation of religion, an approach known as theopoetics. Altizer meanwhile understood the death of God as a transformative revolutionary incident, interpreting the ruptures caused by secularism as a way to reorient our perspective on divinity.

In Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Womens Liberation (1973), the philosopher Mary Daly at Boston College deconstructed the traditional and oppressive masculine symbols of divinity, calling for an ontological, spiritual revolution that would point beyond the idolatries of sexist society and spark creative action in and toward transcendence. Dalys use of such a venerable, even scriptural, word as idolatries highlights how radical theology has drawn from tradition, finding energy in antecedents that go back millennia. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, in his writing on the Holocaust, borrowed from the mysticism of Kabbalah to imagine a silent God. The best interests of theology lie not in God in the highest, writes John Caputo in The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (2015), but in something deeper than God, and for that very same reason, deep within us, we and God always being intertwined.

Challenges to uncomplicated faith or uncomplicated lack of faith have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes Gods death. Within Christianity there is a tradition known as apophatic theology, often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises that God the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal cant be expressed in language. God is not something God is the very ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. We do not know what God is, the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not [my emphasis].

How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsches infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a dead God: by understanding that neither the word dead nor God means anything at all.

Eleven centuries before Arnold heard the roar of faiths tide and Nietzsche declared that God was dead, the Hindu sage Adi Shankara recounted a parable in his commentary to the Brahma Sutras, a text that was already a millennium old. Shankara writes that the great teacher Bhadva was asked by a student what Brahma the ground of all Being actually was. According to Shankara, Bhadva was silent. Thinking that perhaps he had not been heard, the student asked again, but still Bhadva was quiet. Again, the student repeated his question What is God? and, again, Bhadva would not answer. Finally, exasperated, the young man demanded to know why Bhadva would not respond to the question. I am teaching you, Bhadva replied.

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How to fulfil the need for transcendence after the death of God - aeon.co

Academics from the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Marys University, Twickenham have secured 2.7m funding in partnership with five other universities to conduct a research programme on the social-scientific study of atheism.

The funding from the John Templeton Foundation will allow researchers from Queens University Belfast (lead institution), Coventry University, Brunel University, Kent University, Notre Dame Australia, and St Marys to investigate atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief in God or gods. This research will expand upon the same teams earlier Understanding Unbelief project, funded by a 2.3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which ran from 2016 to 2020.

Non-belief is widespread and growing and is raising public debates about its personal and social impacts, and how to include such perspectives in legal frameworks, education, and public policy.

The research programme has several components. Firstly, it involves grant competitions, to generate and fund research from across the human sciences, investigating the causes of atheism across demographic groups, cultural settings, and historical periods.

Secondly, its core interdisciplinary research team will work across these areas to build a more integrated understanding of the causal origins of individual and societal non-belief through new cross-cultural surveys and secondary data analysis of several existing datasets.

Finally, the programme includes public engagement activities that aim to develop knowledge exchange between academic researchers in this field and wider publics. Together, these strategies aim to produce the most systematic scientific account of the causal origins of atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief to date.

The new Explaining Atheism project will also involve Benedict XVI Centre PhD student Tim Kinnear, who will be working with Prof. Bullivant on research into the role of the internet in secularization.

Speaking of the research, Director of the Benedict XVI Centre Prof Stephen Bullivant said, Im delighted to be working again with the Project Lead, my longtime colleague and friend Dr Jonathan Lanman at Queens, and the rest of the team. Its a particular pleasure to be involving one of the Centres brilliant postgrads, whose own PhD research is pioneering the application of Machine Learning methods within the sociology of (non)religion. The study of atheism and related areas has rapidly grown over the past two decades, after a long period of neglect. So this is one more exciting step forward for the subfield.

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St Mary's Academics Part of Team Winning Multimillion Research Grant - St Mary's University, Twickenham

When SJ Sindu was younger, she couldnt wait for her annual family vacations to Scarborough.

Scarborough was a completely different world to where I grew up, says Sindu, an assistant professor in the department of English at U of T Scarborough.

You could go to Tamil stores, get Tamil food, and just be surrounded by Tamilness. That was very meaningful to me.

She says her early experiences growing up in a conflict zone, immigrating to the U.S. and exploring her own identity as a Tamil living in the mostly white, suburban town of Amherst, Mass. were instrumental in shaping her voice as an author.

Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, tells the story of Lucky and her husband Krishna, who married to hide the fact they are gay from their conservative Sri Lankan-Americanfamilies.Her new novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, follows Kalki, a boy born with blue skin and black blood who is believed to be the reincarnation of Vishnu. He begins to doubt his divinity as his personal life and relationships fall apart, then moves to New York where he becomes embedded in the underground punk scene.

Published in Canada by Penguin Random House, the book was described by Roxane Gay as abrilliant novelthat will take hold of you and never let you goand received glowing reviews in The Guardian and The New York Times among others. Itwill launch at Glad Day Books as part of theirNaked Heart Festivalon Dec.18.

UTSC News spoke to Sindu about her early influences and how faith, identity and family continue to shape her writing.

How have your early influences shaped you as a writer?

I was born and lived in the northeast part of Sri Lanka until I was seven years old. A lot of my childhood and early years were shaped by the war, and being a Tamil living in Jaffna during the war.

The other was immigrating to the U.S. I was very much isolated as a kid. There were other Indians around, but there werent Sri Lankan Tamils. So I read a lot of books and escaped into stories. It was a way to cope with being taken out of a war situation and put into this very suburban American life without any peers or ways to explore my own identity.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I didnt really start writing until I was in university. In fact, I started out in computer science and then fell in love with creative writing. I just loved the potential that writing fiction had for communicating the ideas that were obsessing me.

Where did the inspiration for Blue-Skinned Gods come from?

Partly the inspiration came because I lost my faith in religion. I was raised Hindu, and as a teenager I started to lose my faith and began to explore atheism. At the same time, my family became increasingly religious. So I wanted to explore that relationship.

I also saw a documentary by Vikram Ghandi called Kmr where he pretends to be an Indian guru and ends up gathering this large following. I was also closely watching the growing popularity of the BJP, a right-wing nationalist party in India,and interested in exploring what it meant to have a strain of fundamentalist Hindus on the rise in India and how that might affect the region.

In your first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, you also explore themes of identity, sexuality, faith and family. Why do those themes inspire your writing?

There are things Im still trying to work out in my own life. Im trying to figure out my relationship with my family, especially my extended family now that Im living in Toronto. How to be part of a family that fundamentally rejects parts of who I am the queerness, the atheism, the progressive beliefs I hold. Negotiating that with the older family members has been interesting. Im still trying to figure it out, and I think I explore those things in my writing.

Did you have a favourite book, or one that influenced you as a writer?

There are two. The first is The Things They Carried by Tim OBrien. It was the first novel I read where I realized that I should and could write about my experiences with war. Its the book that made me want to be a writer.

The second is Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. For the first time I saw Tamilness and queerness explored together, and that was very important to see, especially in my development as a writer.

What advice do you have for your students and aspiring writers?

Write the stories you want to read. Many of my students at UTSC are racialized, many are from immigrant families, and they havent read a lot of stories that reflect that experience. I hope they can be inspired to write about their own experiences.

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'Write the stories you want to read': SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods - News@UofT

If the Jets had a great tight end, it could be a real game changer.

This years consensus top rated TE coming out in the 2022 NFL Draft is Colorado States Trey McBride.

Is it possible the Jets can get him?

Sure, it is possible. The question is what round McBride might go in?

Currently, McBride is slated to go anywhere between late in the first round, to the end of the second round.

The challenge is one of the better teams in the NFL could select him in the bottom of the first round. It is very possible Tampa Bay could target McBride as Rob Gronkowskis eventual replacement and complimentary TE in the meantime. A one-two punch of Gronkowski and McBride would be lethal for quarterback Tom Brady, and it would create mismatch problems for opponents.

That is really the biggest advantage of having a top-tier TE. It creates mismatches against smaller corners and slower and less agile linebackers and safeties.

A classic example of this is with Detroits Pro Bowl tight end T.J. Hockenson. He currently leads the Lions in receptions and he made his first Pro Bowl last season on a team that has been challenged to win games. This third year TE is versatile and Detroit does a nice job lining him up at different locations pre-snap, to exploit defenses. Hockenson does a really good job of using his big frame and atheism to box out defenders and make the catches.

McBride is comparable to Hockenson as a receiver, who was a top-10 pick in 2019, and McBride is also a better blocker. They are both said to run a 4.7 (40) and both have similar styles. They are also comparable in terms of their height and weight. Hockenson is listed at 6-foot-5, 248 pounds, while McBride is listed at 6-foot-4, 260 pounds.

The biggest differences between the two is Hockenson looks more athletic and despite having similar 40-times, Hockenson plays faster than McBride on film.

So, that means McBride is not a top-10 prospect like Hockenson. However, it would be shocking if he was still on the board when the second round began.

Jets general manager Joe Douglas comes from Philadelphia, where they have had good tight end play. One would have to believe Douglas would love to have a top-tier TE to give quarterback Zack Wilson a big target downfield to throw to when everything else is breaking down around him.

It is distinctly possible Douglas could trade down at least with one of the Jets first-round picks, and target McBride mid to late in the first round.

One of the most impressive things about McBride is he has played on a predominately run-heavy offense at Colorado State, where he is the main target and he has still managed to stand out and put up breakout production this season.

#85 Trey McBride 6-foot-4, 260 pounds40-yard-dash-time: 4.7 (walterfootball.com)Games reviewed in 2021: Utah State, Toledo and Vanderbilt2021 production (currently) 90 receptions, 1,121 yards, 12.5 avg., 50 long, 1 TDGrade: First Round (15-32)NFL Comparables: T.J. Hockenson and Kyle BradyConcerns: level of competitionScouting Report:Complete tight end who is a big frame target polished receiver and he is an excellent blocker. Excellent technique as a receiver and blocker. Versatile player who they line up in tight, in the slot and out wide. Good target in the short to intermediate route levels. Reliable hands. Excels at inside pitches and slant routes. He does an excellent job knowing how to use his big frame to box and block out defenders to make the grab. Lack of playing speed shows up against defenders on crossing routes and short drag routes into the flats. Lacks vertical jumping ability and flexibility extending (looks tight in upper body). Decent (not great) athletic ability. Decent YAC (yards after catch). Not the easiest to bring down. Takes effort to tackle him. Really gets after it as a run blocker. Holds the point very well and was seen on several pancake blocks. Stays with it and he is extremely good, dependable and consistent run blocker. Top 15 TE in the NFL.

With the Jets not getting enough production out of TE Ryan Griffin the past three seasons, drafting McBride makes even more sense.

Griffin is also scheduled to become a free agent after the 2022 season, and all of Griffins backups have far less production and experience than he has.

McBride would be a great catch for the Jets.

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Is Trey McBride the Jets Tight End of the Future? - Sports Illustrated

Ridley Scotts last Alien movie may have been lackluster, but the legendary filmmaker did bring us a great new sci-fi property with Aaron Guzikowskis Raised by Wolves on HBO. The series is set to come back next year, and we have a new trailer featuring Mother, Father, and their surviving human children.

Watch the trailer forRaised by Wolveson HBO:

Heres the official plot description for Season 2:

In season two of RAISED BY WOLVES, Android partners Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), along with their brood of six human children, join a newly formed atheistic colony in Kepler 22 bs mysterious tropical zone. But navigating this strange new society is only the start of their troubles as Mothers natural child threatens to drive what little remains of the human race to extinction.

While the first season only had us focusing on small tribe of atheists, it looks like were going to have a full colony of people for Mother and Father to interact with. On the other hand, Marcus (Travis Fimmel) has fully embraced Sol, and is now set to be some kind of Neo-Jesus on the search for new followers.

Just like Westworld before it, Raised by Wolves is a property that doesnt hold the audiences hand when it comes to the story, and the plot is rife with metaphors and biblical allusions. We dont know what Mothers snake baby is going to do, but Im sure this next season is still going to be full of twists and turns, and several discussions about theology and atheism.

Raised by Wolves returns to HBO Max on Feb. 3.

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Raised by Wolves Season 2 Trailer Asks What it is to be Human - Geek Feed

We are beginning to understand that our existential challenges are no longer just local or national, but rather are global in nature that we are all one and must all be working on solving the problems together.

BAY PORT, Mich. (PRWEB) November 30, 2021

I see the escalation of divisiveness in an already troubled world as a serious threat to our existence. Religious differences between individuals, groups, and nations are high on the list of ideological divides, and high on that list is the schism between theismand in particular, Christianityand atheism. In large part, that schism exists because of the enormous lack in understanding of each side for the other. I wanted to do my part to help heal that divide by offering to each side an opportunity to learn perhaps more about their own metaphysical views, but much more so to learn about the others, David G. Mutchler states.

Theism Vs. Atheism: Where the Twain Shall Meet (published by Balboa Press) is about healing the theism/atheism divide while there is still time. Mutchler believes that doing so will bring renewed hope that peace on earth is still a real possibility. This book is divided into four parts. Part One is a series of introductory chapters that establish the foundation upon which the remainder of the book stands. Part Two puts Christianity under the microscope, first from the Christians point of view (Two A), followed by the atheists perspective on the Christian faith (Two B). In reverse order of Part Two, Part Three focuses on the subject of atheism, first as seen by atheists (Three A), followed by the Christians view of atheism (Three B). Part Four is Mutchlers own perspective on how Christianity and atheism can come together and actually help each other resolve their differences.

We are beginning to understand that our existential challenges are no longer just local or national, but rather are global in nature that we are all one and must all be working on solving the problems together. Doing so requires international cooperation to alleviate tension whenever and wherever it exists. The theism/atheism divide is a mounting case of world tension, since atheism is on the rise and Christianity is in steady decline. There needs to be a clear pathway for people on both sides to join in the cause of understanding and respecting people who look and think differently than themselves, Mutchler says.

Through the publication of this book, Mutchler wants theists/Christians to develop a clear understanding of and respect for what atheists believe, and why; for atheists to develop a clear understanding of and respect for what theists/Christian believe, and why; to gain an awareness that the two sides have something deeply in common; and that joining together to follow the path they share in common where the twain shall meet will be a giant step toward achieving peace and harmony in the world. For more details about the book, please visit https://www.balboapress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/833705-theism-vs-atheism

Theism Vs. Atheism: Where the Twain Shall MeetBy David G. MutchlerHardcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 264 pages | ISBN 9781982276324Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 264 pages | ISBN 9781982276300E-Book | 264 pages | ISBN 9781982276317Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the AuthorDavid G. Mutchler earned degrees in education, philosophy, social work, and psychology, in addition to doing advanced studies in theology. He has taught at the secondary, university, and business levels, with honors in each. He is also the author of "Beyond the Ego: Where Love, Joy, and Peace of Mind Await You," and "Lessons for Living Beyond the Ego." As an integrative thinker, he has once again brought his various studies and life experiences together to help people dissolve the walls that separate us from our inner selves as well as from one another. Two of the trademarks of Mutchlers work are his focus on disentangling and simplifying concepts that are typically thought to be both complex and esoteric, and his how-to approach to help people assimilate and apply those concepts to the betterment of themselves, others, and the world.

Balboa Press, a division of Hay House, Inc. a leading provider in publishing products that specialize in self-help and the mind, body, and spirit genres. Through an alliance with the worldwide self-publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the self-publishing model. For more information, visit balboapress.com. To start publishing your book with Balboa Press, call 844-682-1282 today.

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New book speaks about healing the theism/atheism divide to bring renewed hope that peace on earth is still a real possibility - PR Web

(Photos courtesy of Stack's Bowers Galleries) This 1804 draped bust silver dollar.

By Susan Wolfe | The Public Forum

| Dec. 1, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

In Mathew Hansens letter Belief vs. scientific method, he points to indoctrination as one way to explain many peoples belief in God. I will use myself as an example in which he is wrong.

I didnt start going to church until my 20s, after taking World Religions in college and thinking for a long time about God. What brought me to church was not a belief in any one church, it was a belief in God. I had always felt it despite not ever going to church (except for an extremely short stint when I spent 4/5s of the time in child care before being allowed to sit on pews and not understand a thing being said).

For many it just comes from inside. It does not have to be dissected, looked at under a microscope, submitted to a rigorous multi-pronged double blind study. You have your belief (atheism) and the rest have our own. You believe that youre being logical because you cant find any basis for what we believe. Yet you cant study what is in our heads and hearts.

Call it illogical if youd like but your contempt for what you dont understand does not make what you think any more correct than those who go to church and think you are illogical.

We are just opposite sides of the same coin.

Keep your belief in nothing and be happy and the better of us will leave you alone to believe in what you dont believe.

Susan Wolfe, Salt Lake City

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Letter: Believers and nonbelievers are just opposite sides of the same coin. There's no sense in being dismissive. - Salt Lake Tribune

The apostle Paul makes a bold claim. He says that the marvels of the cosmos and the ordered reality of life on Earth were designed to encourage us to reach out to God. He said that God created this order so that people, would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27).

So I invite you to reach out. I do so because all the evidence suggests that there will be an ending. You will physically end. And interestingly, so will our solar system. Scientists tell us that our sun will die in 4.5 billion years time. If you manage to escape to another solar system, you are not out of the woods, because the universe itself is due to die and fade away in what is known as heat death.

The British astrophysicist and theologian, David Wilkinson, writes about how non-Christian scientists are feeling about a world without hope. In his book, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, he says: This end of Universe in the heat death of futility raises a great deal of pessimism within the scientific community.[i] Certainly, the 20th-century atheistic philosopher, Bertrand Russell, didnt express much hope. He said:

The world which science presents for our belief is even more purposeless, and more void of meaning all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction and the whole temple of mans achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.[ii]

Science has uncovered the fact that time is linear. It has a beginning and an end. This reality forces us to face the reality of both our beginning (why we exist), and our ending (have we lived the purpose for which we were created?).

The British cosmologist, Paul Davies, echoes this sentiment and says: An almost empty universe growing steadily more cold and dark for all eternity is profoundly depressing.[iii]

The huge question each of us needs to answer is: Why does anything exist if its all just going to end? What on earth are we here for?

The Bible makes it clear that this is a question God expects us to ask. The apostle Paul says that it is reasonable for people to look at existence, ponder its meaning, and let it introduce them to the possibility of God (Romans 1:19-20).

Science has uncovered the fact that time is linear. It has a beginning and an end. This reality forces us to face the reality of both our beginning (why we exist), and our ending (have we lived the purpose for which we were created?). The option of lazily shrugging our shoulders and saying that everything is meaningless is not a stance that has much rational credence. There is simply too much order in the cosmos, with many of its forces tuned to the level of many trillionths of a degree so as to allow life, to believe that everything is meaningless. It is hard to believe that everything came from nothing, as a result of nothing, via a mechanism that has never been discovered and for which there is no precedent and which fractures the law of cause and effect that underpins all of science. To believe that, is I suspect, simply the wilful hubris of people not liking the idea of letting God be the leader of their lives.

Unless your world view has something sensible to say about your origins, your purpose, and your ending, then I respectfully suggest you have some honest thinking to do. Rather sadly, modern philosophy may not prove much help. This is because modern philosophers have generally adopted atheism as their foundational core belief. As a result, they are unable to give humankind any grounds for knowing its identity, meaning, truth, or hope. They can only offer silence when it comes to the big questions of life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has resulted in philosophys relevance fading in the West.

Constrained by its atheistic prison, modern philosophy has only done two things: First: it has stopped asking questions about the big issues of identity, meaning and values, and has concentrated on bickering about the rules of logical thought. In other words, todays philosophers have turned philosophy into a sterile academic mind game. And who cares about that! Second: because modern philosophy has concluded that life is meaningless and that there is no such thing as truth, nothing is inherently good or sacred. This, of course, gives modern philosophers the mandate to do their own thing. If you read modern philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Foucault, it is difficult to escape the conviction that they designed their philosophy to cater for their sexual addictions.

In the early 20th century, a reformed alcoholic, Arthur Stace, wrote the word, Eternity, over half a million times on Sydney footpaths. That one word embodied more useful philosophy than given by most modern philosophers. And the big question is: are you ready for it?

[i] David Wilkinson , Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, (London: T&T CLARK, 2010), 21.

[ii] Bertrand Russell, The Free Mans Worship, The Independent Review1 (Dec 1903), 415-424. Title of essay changed after 1910 to A Free Mans Worship.

[iii] Paul Davies, Eternity: Who Needs it? pp. 41-52 in The Far-Future Universe, George Ellis (ed.), (London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002), 48.

DrNickHawkesis a scientist, pastor, apologist, writer and broadcaster. He also describes himself as an absent-minded, slightly obsessive man who is pathetically weak due to cancer and chemo, who has experienced, and needs to experience, the grace of God each day.

Nick has written a book Soar above the Storm in which he draws on his experience of cancer to encourage anyone walking through a storm in life to find rest and hope in God. It offers a 40-day retreat to be refreshed and strengthened and find deep peace in God. Order it at Koorong.

He blogs and records podcasts at nickhawkes.net

Nick told his life story to Eternity https://www.eternitynews.com.au/good-news/deadly-storms-heroin-addicts-cancer-and-my-faith/

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Things I'm Asked: How will the universe end? - Eternity News

A Reflection for the Monday of the First Week of Advent

Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith!

When Jesus speaks these words in Matthews Gospel, we might suppose he is lauding a righteous member of his own communitya person who checked all of the boxes according to the Jewish laws, a person who avoided sin and impurity and had their life entirely in order.

Wrong. Jesus is speaking to a Roman centurion, a member of the hostile power occupying the Jewish people in Palestine. He comes to Jesus in desperation: His servant is paralyzed and suffering. When Jesus offers to go and heal the servant, the centurion jumps in confidently: Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed.

To appreciate the shock value of this story, let's use our imagination: If I were a QAnon conspiracist, it would be like Q him or herself heaping praise on a powerful and influential Democrat in President Bidens administration.

In no way can we compare the person of Jesus to QAnon, but it is important to wrap our heads around the controversy inherent in this encounter between Jesus and the centurion, andoften overlookedthe ordinary people in Capernaum who witnessed it. How would you feel at that moment?

The Gospel writers spent a lot of ink and papyrus recounting the stories of individuals whose faith impressed Jesus and provoked his healing acts. They were not the people we would expect. More often than not, they were outsiders: socially compromised men and women who were easy targets for ridicule, judgment or excommunication. If Matthew were writing an account of our parish, school or diocese, highlighting the individuals with the most sincere and profound faith, who would stand out? Perhaps not the pastor or the chair of the parish council. Rather, we might read the stories of undocumented immigrants, Protestants and even criminals on death row.

During the Advent and Christmas seasons, some Catholics lament what they perceive to be the diminishing influence of Christianity on the culture. They see uncontrollable movements and shifts among the people and worry that something has been lost. They might conclude that a hostile secularism and atheism are on the rise. But a perceptive Christian would note Jesus uncanny abilityeven tendencyto recognize and promote the seeds of faith he encountered in the most obscure people and places.

Advent is no time for lamentation. It is a time to open our eyes, pay attention and learn to recognize and praise the faith of those who do not necessarily believe in or belong to the same community as we do. That is what Jesus did. That is one of the things Jesus came to do.

1. Favorite Christmas Hymn

O Come Divine Messiah

2. Favorite Christmas Tradition

Listening to classical Christmas carols while decorating the tree with my family

3. Favorite Christmas Recipe

Shortbread cookies!

4. Favorite Video You Made This Year

Documentary: Meet the woman who runs her Catholic parish

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Advent isn't the time to lament the church's decline. Jesus recognized faith in the most obscure people and places. - America Magazine