October 31, 2018 Wednesday

Bedtime Story 

Dealing with the Absurd

Weinberg thus is only confirming the assertion that Albert Camus makes in the first chapter of his essay that the universe is pointless which makes this world and all life forms on its surface including human lives pointless.

Anything pointless to human way of reasoning becomes by default nonsensical and unreasonable since all of us strive to seek purpose in existence of any and everything our senses are capable of perceiving.

Camus stresses that we apes have incorporated a sense of romanticism abound this world that is in actuality very alien and inhuman.

“Nature, red in tooth and claw” is a phrase very commonly found in literature concerning the brutality that is very commonly displayed in nature but goes unseen or rather ignored by human eyes since cruelty to other animals is often not seen as such.

The human activities and its relation to other species are rife with almost wanton cruelty.

In a major report published by World Wildlife Fund just a couple of days ago as reported in ‘The Guardian’ that since 1970, 60% of the vertebrate animals have been wiped out.

The annihilation by human activities of the fresh water habitats is even worse with their populations having collapsed by 83%.

The two biggest causes of this unprecedented destruction of life forms by a single species (it is now being called the sixth mass extinction) is agriculture and hunting of animals for food – our insatiable need for food of the ever growing population.      

In short, there is nothing to be proud or romantic about humans.

Yet there is constant longing and endeavor in us apes to search out for meaning even though it is plainly obvious that there is none to be found.

It is absurdity and a paradox that our lives are replete with.

The other similar paradox that we encounter constantly is the construction of our lives on tomorrow that will only bring us closer to death which is our ultimate enemy.

Yet most of us continue to carry about our lives as if the surety of death does not exist.

Camus then goes on to describe some other philosophers and their philosophies who too had understood the absurdity of the human situation but was deeply dissatisfied with the way they dealt with the problem.    

In the end some of them eventually to reconcile with this absurdity had to abandon reason and switch on to religions and gods where as others resorted to Platonism.

Platonism is a form of escapism from reality in that it suggests that what we perceive of the world through our sensory systems is not the reality.

There exists certain reality beyond our perception, that he labeled as “Forms” or “ideas” which is true knowledge and which can be considered as the objective blueprint of perfection.

Platonism is merely another form of escapist fantasy.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 30, 2018 Tuesday

Bedtime Story 

The Punishment of Sisyphus

In his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” which fascinatingly and I would add appropriately is built upon a Greek mythology Camus introduces his philosophy of absurd.

Sisyphus as some of you may know was a King who was punished in the underworld for playing out deceit and fraud upon some very senior gods.

The story behind the punishment is irrelevant in our case; the punishment itself is the crux of the matter at hand.

The penance came in the form of rolling a massive boulder of stone up a steep hill.

Since the punishment was against the deceit and cunning act of Sisyphus against the god Zeus, the great god Zeus comes back at him with similar act of cleverness by rigging the game and making the boulder slip away from the hands of the victim the moment he is about to make it atop the steep hill.  

This act of deceit by Zeus seals the fate of Sisyphus to eternal misery with all his efforts to be proven useless and leading to despair and frustration.

This is why any activity that will bring no reward in any true materialistic sense is deemed to be Sisyphean with a derogatory connotation and if I would be fair and candid then even my bedtime stories should also be classified as Sisyphean.  

  

Though the work of Albert Camus was first published in 1942 it was available to English readers only as late as in 1955.

Camus breaks his philosophical essay into four parts and one appendix and very strangely enough dedicates this work to a French writer and illustrator Pascal Pia who kind of specialized in erotic literature.

The reason I think for this dedication is the shared philosophy that these two writers had in common which isolated them from other men.

The essay has four chapters titled:

1. An Absurd Reasoning

2. The Absurd Man

3. Absurd Creation

4. The Myth of Sisyphus

Appendix

Camus does not question the futility and meaninglessness of human life but begins with it as a self-evident assertion.

It is a given that life is bereft of any intrinsic meaning and hence is nonsensical and yet humans keep posing questions about its meaning and trying to make sense of it.

Science can surely explain the mechanism of life and its origins but it fails to explain why there is life rather than not.

In that sense Spinoza was proven wrong as he had once hoped science would be able to provide as assuring answer.

The truth is, in the legendary words of physicist Steven Weinberg, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 29, 2018 Monday

Bedtime Story 

Why Myths are not Always Treated as Fiction

With this we have made a fair assessment of the deep connection that mythology has with world religions.

Before we finish off and depart from this subject there is just one last question to be dealt with and that is the subtle difference between myth and fiction.

Why is it that most fictions are obviously considered fictitious whereas others are given the status of religious mythologies and thereby “true” is a fascinating point to ponder.

To be very blunt, myth is a fiction that society or a culture regards as true for the strange reason that perhaps it gives them certain sense of “meaning” of their existence (where in reality there is none).

The “meaning of life” is perhaps one question that is asked by every person no matter what his or her intellect is.

Whereas such a question is easily asked by any ape to himself the greatest stumbling block comes to us apes is in accepting the true answer which is inherently distasteful to our minds.

When Richard Dawkins posed this question to James Watson in the form “what it is all for” Watson’s reply was:

“I don’t think we are for anything.

We are just the products of evolution.”

To apes endowed with such tremendous cognitive powers of self-perception and self-analysis (just note how often we examine ourselves in the mirrors picking out tiny flaws and extra flab) to accept that we are by products of some natural law with great role played by chance and accidents would indeed come as a great disappointment.

There is a school of philosophy known as absurdism that exactly has its origins in this dilemma- the obvious conflict and disharmony that exists or arises between the human tendency to seek intrinsic value and meaning in life and human inability to find any due to actual lack of any meaning or value.

One must understand that this sort of absurdness is not of logical nature as understood in the subject of formal or mathematical logic but simply because of the nature of two simultaneously existing realities.

There is no true contradiction or absurdness present here simply because just because human mind is capable of asking the question of ‘meaning of life’ there need not exist an answer (intrinsic value in our existence) that should be pleasing to the mind.

One of the several ways for the human cognitive mind to come out of the shock of meaninglessness of life (most will arrive to this blunt reality no matter what they may manifest to others) is the creation of religious mythologies (the other two are suicide and acceptance of absurd and live with it).

This philosophy shares some of its ideas with existentialism and nihilism and out of which was also born the legendary work of Camus – the Myth of Sisyphus.

Both these sister philosophies accept the meaningless of life and make it their starting point on which to work upon.

The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay that Albert Camus the French philosopher published in 1942.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 28, 2018 Sunday

Bedtime Story 

Appeal of Mount Kailash in Hindu Mythologies

Following this Hindu tradition other religions too followed suit taking a similar liking to this mountainous abode of Hindu gods.  

According to the Jain mythology their first tirthankara or the first savior and spiritual teacher Rishabhanatha (also from a Royal family) attained his moksha (some form of spiritual enlightenment which really defies any scientific and rational explanation and is a self-made unverifiable subjective claim) in this very same Mount Kailash.

Moksha is a subjective claim about achievement made by a soul and since the subject matter of soul has no evidential basis, it lies beyond the parameters of the story telling chimpanzee.  

In Buddhism too, Mount Kailash occupies a significant place; in fact it is central to Buddhist cosmology.

This makes Mount Kailash a popular pilgrimage site for all these three group of believers with a commonly shared belief that circumambulating its base by foot will beget them good fortune.

In the end all rituals entice us apes with some kind of materialistic greed and pleasures.

I think I can figure out the reason why so many Indic religions have found such an appeal in Mount Kailash, say instead of Mount Everest which is far more in height.

Mount Kailash is the highest peak of Kailash Range that in turn is a subrange of the Transhimalaya system which is a 1600-kilometer long mountain range in China.

Transhimalaya is a mountainous range that runs in the west-east direction parallel to the Himalayas.

This makes Mount Kailash to lie in Tibet but claimed by China to be a part of its territory and hence given the fancy name of Tibet Autonomous Region.

The very presence of the word “Autonomous” signifies that it is not truly autonomous but given such a status as a palliative to its people and government.

In height Mount Kailash is 6638 meters (against Mount Everest which is stands at 8848 meters) and yet while more than 4000 people have scaled the summit of Mount Everest Mount Kailash has till date remained unconquered.

Its North cliff is sheer vertical making the logistics of mountaineering extremely complicated with the climatic conditions of extremely low temperatures and winds only worsening the operation.

It is also possible that because of the political Sino-Indian border dispute and religious restrictions relatively fewer people have been given legal permission to climb it.

The aura of “unclimbable” around it (and the fact of it till date) has sent the religious zealots off spinning yarns of gods and demons protecting the mount, and once such fairy tales begin they only get exaggerated over the years.

So this perhaps is the reason why Mount Kailash has found its place in the Holy Books and narratives of so many Hindu religions.

(7.) Yet another leitmotif that is very popular with religious mythologies is the idea of large unprecedented global floods.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 27, 2018 Saturday

Bedtime Story 

Some Common Traits of Religious Mythologies

The term creation ex nihilo means “creation out of nothing” which makes sense as the whole purpose of creation is to explain why there is something rather than nothing.

(3.) Supreme Deity – that range from Abrahamic ones such Yahweh, Allah, Trinity, Jesus to Sky Ones such as Brahman of Hindus, Jupiter, Zeus and many others

(4.) Exploit of a Hero – common ones being Buddha, Moses, Muhammad and Jesus where the general trend would run something like this.

The hero or the messiah gets a rally call from heavens who ventures out and faces dark forces or suffering (he may even encounter female temptress which he may or may not be able to resist).

These are the trials that he has to undergo that will result in his initiation and eventually transformation.

Finally this ends in some form of return after some type of magical flight.

(5.) Resurrection motif or more simply a dying-and-rising deity is a very popular and ancient thread that runs though several religious mythologies centered on the Fertile Crescent.

The Egyptians had a full-fledged and fulltime god dedicated to afterlife, under-life and rebirth.

The Egyptians called him Osiris (greened skin deity with a pharaoh’s beard) that was later transformed by the Greco-Romans into Serapis with classical European looks and flowing Romanesque locks of hair and rich beard.

Of course, both these names now mean nothing to any of us no matter how religious we may be though I am very sure at their time men must have fought and shed blood over them as it is done today.

(6.) Center of the World – this is yet another appealing notion found in all mythological religions.

It is often the case made out in the mythologies that it is not the Earth that is at the center of the Cosmos but something else that lies exactly in between the axis of the Earth and Heavens, the so called axis mundi.

It is at this point that some sort of connection or link is made between the lowly earth and celestial Heavens and on reaching this point (which ironically can often be on this planet) an average human can develop some sort of connection or even communication with higher Gods.

In some religious mythologies this point can also act as navel or omphalos as it is known in Greek depicting the power or centrality of certain empire such as Delphi used to be for the Hellenistic/Ancient Greek Empires.   

Such a point or place in Hinduism (one that I am often tagged with in my official documents just on account of the lottery of birth through certain parents in certain period of time limited by certain geographical and political boundary) is Mount Kailash, the abode of Hindu god Shiva who even unknown to most Hindus is supposedly the founder of Yoga.

This is the reason why his alternate name is “Adi-Yogi”, the patron god of yoga, meditation and arts.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 26, 2018 Friday

Bedtime Story 

Myth as Religion's Backbone

This led to the creation of moral panic in the society leading to witch-hunts, pseudo trials and lynching of women the most famous and well-popularized example being the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut.

This is a good example of a religious story that no one would label as a mythology and yet most religious stories clearly appear as mythologies to people of other religions.

For instance no matter how appealing the ideals of Buddhism may be to its followers and even to few of its non-followers such as the average Pan narrans, the story of Buddha being conceived by a white elephant holding a white lotus flower when his mother Queen Maya was fast asleep is impossible to believe.

So it is a myth to me as surely and certainly it is to the non-Buddhists.

For the same reason the parting of the Red Sea as described both in Exodus (the founding myth of Israelites) and in Surah 26 of Quran, Muhammad’s Night Journey “to the farthest mosque” and from there his ascension to heavens and lastly the most popular one of Resurrection of Jesus must sound patently irrational both to Hindus and Buddhists alike.

These events not only contradict the fundamental laws of physics (specially the conservation laws which very aptly the whole narrative is all about) but also our daily experience of reality that we go through every day.

Those past bygone years were no special than today.

If religions and mythology were not confusing enough, there enters yet another entity known as theology which makes the water muddier so to speak by seeking some kind of rationality to both the above.

Theology though is a subject is many universities it is truly speaking a sophisticated attempt of believers to explicate or illuminate their faith is a more intellectual manner.

Sincere and truthful theologians would of course realize what various religions are all about.

It would not be too difficult for them to grasp the reality of the mythical backbone that all religions are propped up with.

Theologians who deal with comparative religious studies would find that religious mythologies often share some common features that include:

(1.) Preexisting paradise much before the creation of the universe that support human apes and which is the ultimate temptation for all humans to vie for and die for.

You might be surprised to now that the origin of the word “paradise” is not from Greek or Latin which of course engineered in its evolution to its present form but old Iranian language paridayda- which means “walled enclosure”.

As per the Christian and Islamic understanding, Paradise is a place where one attains paradisiacal relief which quite ironically even the Story telling chimpanzee agrees in a strange sort of way for he considers the dead ones to be lucky and those never born the most fortunate.

(2.) Creation myths – the most common and appealing one being the creatio ex nihilo.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

October 25, 2018 Thursday

Bedtime Story 

Religion and Myth

Here is where it is important to have a decent understanding of both our religions and mythologies as they both form an essential ingredient of our rich literature and cultural past.

In fact, mythology is the bed-rock of all religions, from the most primitive to the most modern off shoots of some specially privileged ones.

Religion is a larger form of mythology that incorporates rituals that seemingly have a purpose to please the deity in order to receive benefits from it.       

It has been seen that any mythology if ancient enough is bound to be associated with some religion or the other, either of the present or a dead and forgotten one.

It is funny but even what one will define as a “myth” depends to which religion one is affiliated to or more likely born in.

It is almost by definition of religion and faith that one would classify a traditional folklore as a “myth” if and only if one does not belong to that specific religion.

Broadly speaking, though all religious stories are mythologies some would like to disagree with such a broad generalization and try to limit myths to those religious stories that pertain to the creation aspect.

They argue that those part of the religious stories that pertain to biographies or more correctly hagiographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders should be left out of the definition of myth.

I must let you know that the very word “hagiography” is a derogatory equivalent of the word “biography” holding in doubt the authenticity of such unverifiable biographies of god-men, saints and accounts of miracles.

Then there is another side of argument.

There are a bunch of people called folklorists for formally and academically dedicate themselves to the study of folklore which is not only limited to the study of lore or stories of primitive and rural folks but also their activities and various artifacts.   

Understandably, such departments can thrive only in well-funded universities of developed nations since most nations simply cannot afford to spend their already limited resources on such luxuries.

These folklorists have come to the consensus that all myths are religious/sacred stories to the respective tribes/societies but not all religious stories are myths.

There is a good example to justify this kind of definition by the folklorists.

It is a common knowledge that in the Early Modern Europe starting from around the 15^th century (marked by the invention of the first moveable type printing around about 1450) the Christian leadership and churches developed elaborate stories concerning women that brandished them as witches.

The idea that was wielded about passionately and became quite popular among the masses that malevolent Satanic witches were in operation as an organization thus making them a threat to Christianity.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg