Iqbal Latif

'Man has just learned to walk upright, and now he presumes to create his gods.' Trevor Karsdale

Man is fresh out of cave. 10,000 year of known civilization starting from Jericho is only a fraction of time of our one billion year plausible and likely stay here until sun implodes and busts us. The Prophets and Gods we have created in this cave age era of ours will all be forgotten as small foot note of our pagan humble beginning.

One thing will continue i.e. the ideas perpetrated by likes of Carl Sagan: ''For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.'' Future recorder of events will treat us 'the knowledgeable creatures of this age of information' as 'upper cave age' limited mortals due to our pre dominant addiction and mental enslavement on set of beliefs originated from hearsay, scriptural myths and legends. 4 billion of practicing faithful are oblivious to the fact that mankind is at cusp of a new era of information that shall last million of millenniums.

The true literary inheritance of mankind in probably few hundred years and for future millenniums will be Homers Iliad or Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy or Milton's Paradise Lost not any consecrated scripture.

(Odyssey is a major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature.Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books.)

''That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

“Does faith matter? Absolutely,” Gingrich said. “How can you have judgment if you have no faith? How can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?” He continued, “the notion that you are endowed by your creator sets a certain boundary of what we mean by America.” Gingrich said that Americans should value religion first, above morality and knowledge. The reason our life is devoid of the richness of renaissance men is that the days are past when our present schools could give time and attention to a child to learn knowledge.

History is the first step of learning for any child; history teaches man to learn from the mistakes of the past. That knowledge will lead him/her to Geography and finally to familiarity of classics and our globe. Once he/she knows our earth well, some unanswered queries will lead him to know our solar system where our 'blue pearl' sits as a third planet around the sun in quite a silent part of our galaxy.

Once we discover our triviality in the system of the Universe, the road to self-discovery is laid bare. The idea of a 14 billion-year-old Universe raises an enquiry and questions the entire logic and philosophy of Abrahamic scriptures. Faith tells us a story that is the greatest myth of all times. If that is the litmus test of trust that Gingrich imposes“How can you have judgment if you have no faith? How can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?” then USA/mankind has a big problem. Either we are created in 7 days / are only 6,000 years old, or came out of nothingness 14 billion years ago from the womb of Providence and The Big Bang. The two positions are incompatible, one has to give way to other.

It is this dichotomy and basic error of understanding of our age that is rarely addressed. Majority of the Faithful across the lines of Abrahamic scriptures refuse to believe science of creation that evolved through a carbon-based life from the throes of dead stars. From the womb of death we are formed, to quote Rumi who inspires me a lot:

I died as a mineral and became a plant,

I died as a plant and rose to animal,

I died as an animal and I was Man.

Why should I fear?

When was I less by dying?

Rumi

When a star dies we form! Yes, every carbon atom in our body is the primordial 'star dust.'

Though the 'faithful' have broken the hearts of atoms, discovered particles that travel faster than light very near to the Vatican at CERN, they undertake journeys to study distant galaxies but the eternal sin and guilt of reconciliation with the scriptures that acquaint us with an allegorical tale of creation still remains a collective burden on mankind's conscience.

Human progress and our mental capacities are driven by our creativity; by maintaining status quo we become crude and intellectually self-indulgent. Nothing is perfect or faultless, we are in midst of dynamic changes; only our continuous flux and change of opinions by asking the right questions, sceptical enquiry will set up the foundation of a great society, a culture that frowns on questions and condemns analytical enquiry is bound to implode. Human progress and our mental capacities are driven by our creativity; by maintaining status quo we become crude and intellectually self-indulgent.

Nothing is perfect or faultless, we are in midst of dynamic changes; only our continuous flux and change of opinions by asking the right questions, sceptical enquiry will set up the foundation of a great society, a culture that frowns on questions and condemns analytical enquiry is bound to implode. What consumes my mind is the void and slow pace of human history and phase of discovery from 500 BC to 1600/1800 AD and the huge exponential growth from 1600 to 2011. I am obsessed with discoveries that led to the causes and origins of that massive exponential increase in rate of growth of our knowledge spectrum. If you want to discover those nations who failed, and those who progressed, just see the names from where the prophets of knowledge appeared in between ‘1600-2000.’ In between 1000-2000 AD, "Medieval theologians" have been singlehandedly responsible for the arrest of growth of knowledge in some geographical regions of the world.

Ideas should be rewarded, not persecuted. The idea-man should be loved, not condemned. When Galileo was condemned and arrested, the emphasis of science moved from Italy to Northern Europe. When in 1200 AD Ghazali arrested free will over philosophical dialogue of Averroes and introduced the concept of predestination as the favourite strain of Allah’s ideology, Middle East descended into a chaos which it has not recovered so far. History takes time but grinds very fine and destroys those who deny the flow of knowledge.

The holy scriptures in succession tend to wean authority from the previous and tend to support the incoherence of the myths, though supportive of fables, but defining them for their own geography. The stories of Torah, Bible and Quran are not supportive of each other rather contradict each other, Newton negation of Aristotle made Aristotle even the greatest of beings.

"Come, come again, whoever you are, come!
Heathen, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come!
Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times,
Ours is the portal of hope, come as you are."