The probable cause of existence of the concept of God

Personally speaking I am an atheist. I don't believe that there is any God. However globally we find that almost all cultures have assigned themselves one God or another. In India, which has been the spiritual capital of the world for centuries, myths and legends have assigned 330 million Gods.

    However there were groups of great Indian sages who never believed in the existence of God of any kind viz the Sankhyas. The Buddhists didn't believe in any God.

     Now we must realize living beings have evolved from simple unicellular organisms to complex and intelligent multi cellular beings like us. The process of evolution has not stopped it continues. Secondly what we think and do has a deep effect on our personality and character and hence over a period of time it goes into our genome. So the risihis created the concept of Gods and created Gods like Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Bramha etc so that people worship them, think about them and meditate on them, so that with the forces of evolution they become somewhat akin to them.

   

Research on Romantic Love

Love is a basic human emotion that connects human beings. Out of all the forms of love one of it is romantic love. A lot has been written over the ages about this form of love. If you are a movie fan, then you will find that romantic love is used to connect people movies. The movie makers use this human drive to make more people see their movies, as more people watching is directly proportional to the revenues generated by the movie.

But what does science say about romantic love. In a TED talk given by Dr. Helen Fisher a few years ago she mentioned how romantic love is much different from other forms of love. The FMRI scans of brain done of people who were involved in romantic love showed great amount of activity in that portion of the brain that is responsible for craving and focus.This is exactly the reason why you feel so strongly about the person with whom you are in love.The portion of the brain is called Ventral Tegmental Area(VTA). 

Since the part of the brain is also responsible for focus, you keep thinking about the person you are in love with all the time. This area of the brain is also responsible for craving. So romantic love is a wonderful feeling when things are going well, but when things are not going well it is equally horrible.

VTA essentially is the reward area of the brain. Now here is a catch, in her TED video on Romantic Love research, Helen Fisher mentioned that when someone is rejected in love, a greater amount of activity is shown in the VTA area. This explains why the rejected partners go through a period of anguish.
Here is her TED lecture given in 2006.

Here is the link to the Fisher's lecture given in 2014

Most of the stuff said in both the videos are pretty common. So it is clear that romantic love is not really an emotion, it is a drive as Helen Fisher mentions it. It evolved at the time of evolution of mammals, its a drive that makes you focus on one partner. 

Now that we know that the activity levels of VTA is responsible for the feelings and cravings that one experiences. So to overcome the negatives. Meditation is one way in which the activity of the brain can be controlled. VTA is the area of the brain that is responsible for expectations and cravings

This research will turn out to be invaluable in reducing the negative feelings that arises. When we start thinking in terms of VTA and not the heart, you will be able to control the levels of activity in your VTA and thus make romantic love a better experience. 

It is just figuring out the cure of a disease by knowing the cause of the disease and then working out a way to control the cause. The following points must be kept in mind:-

1) The cause of distress is craving, expectation. So having no expectation is a must. That reduces misery.

2) Since we know that it is the activity levels of the VTA that needs to be controlled. Hence following mind control practises like meditation is a must.  

Of course the research does not discourage romantic love. In of of the videos Fisher does mention that a world without love would be a dangerous place, but knowing how things happen makes life much easier. 

Solving Drinking Water Problem

With massive urbanization developing countries like India which have a creaky infrastructure can have great problems in delivering basic necessities to the people. Access to clean drinking water is a problem in many parts of India. But science does have the solution to the problem. 

Indian weather for most part of the year is hot and humid. Humidity is presence of water in the atmosphere in form of vapour. Now if you have a technology which can cool this atmospheric vapour down and accumulate the water at one place, you solve the problem of of shortage of drinking water. 

Luckily across the world in India and Israel, researchers have come up with solutions that work. Here are the links WaterMaker (India) Watergen (Israel).

Having machines like this installed at public places will help you get access to pure drinking water at very low cost, WaterMaker's cost of producing water is Re 0.80 to Rs 1.4 per litre as compared to bottled drinking water sold commercially for Rs 15 per litre. 

Having access to pure drinking water will reduce the occurence of waterborne diseases resulting in healthier population. 

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Questioning Vivekananda

This is a small part of a lecture given by Swami Vivekananda on January 8, 1900.

 I was in the city of Hyderabad(the Hyderabad mentioned over here is most probably Hyderabad, Sindh. Which is now in Pakistan.) in India, and I was told of a Brâhmin there who could produce numbers of things from where, nobody knew. This man was in business there; he was a respectable gentleman. And I asked him to show me his tricks. It so happened that this man had a fever, and in India there is a general belief that if a holy man puts his hand on a sick man he would be well. This Brahmin came to me and said, "Sir, put your hand on my head, so that my fever may be cured." I said, "Very good; but you show me your tricks." He promised. I put my hand on his head as desired, and later he came to fulfil his promise. He had only a strip of cloth about his loins, we took off everything else from him. I had a blanket which I gave him to wrap round himself, because it was cold, and made him sit in a corner. Twenty-five pairs of eyes were looking at him. And he said, "Now, look, write down anything you want." We all wrote down names of fruits that never grew in that country, bunches of grapes, oranges, and so on. And we gave him those bits of paper. And there came from under his blanket, bushels of grapes, oranges, and so forth, so much that if all that fruit was weighed, it would have been twice as heavy as the man. He asked us to eat the fruit. Some of us objected, thinking it was hypnotism; but the man began eating himself — so we all ate. It was all right.

He ended by producing a mass of roses. Each flower was perfect, with dew-drops on the petals, not one crushed, not one injured. And masses of them! When I asked the man for an explanation, he said, "It is all sleight of hand."

Whatever it was, it seemed to be impossible that it could be sleight of hand merely. From whence could he have got such large quantities of things?

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Reading this piece raises more questions than it gives answers. First of all, if it is true that such a man did exist then why we don't find any record of the man by anyone else?

Secondly Why the man did not use his powers to feed the starving and poor. It was a well known fact that most of India back then was poor and people were starving?

Finally why didn't Vivekananda learn the tricks himself and feed the people whom he thought about so much?

The above questions raise an obvious question. Did Vivekananda create a story while giving his lecture? What was the need of such a lecture. ?

It is a very well known fact that one cannot create stuff out of zero. One form of matter can be transformed into another form of matter and why today we don't have a single person who can emulate such a feat.

Obviously what's described by him violates the laws of physics. So I believe its very much possible that he just made a story up while giving his lecture. 

Double Solution - Producing petroleum from waste plastic

Plastics are basically hydrocarbons that are extracted from petroleum. Plastics are used in every sphere of life whether it be bags, electronic devices, clothing, sports material, construction, vehicles etc.. While plastics are low cost and durable once the plastic products are of no use they are disposed off in the garbage bins. It is here that the problem starts.

It takes hundreds of years for plastics to completely decompose as a result plastic waste is on a rise and its choking up the oceans and rivers across the world for years. However scientists from across the world and India have come up with solutions that would not only convert this waste plastic into gold but also eliminate the land and water pollution that is caused because of plastics.


As mentioned earlier plastics are hydrocarbons produced from crude oil. Hence if we can find a technology that can reconvert waste plastic back to crude oil, we can solve many of our problems. Over the last couple of years scientists in India, US and a few other countries have successfully extracted petroleum from waste plastic. In fact Indian Railways had announced its plan to set up a plant to produce diesel from waste plastic back in April 2015. 

According to government figures 60 Indian cities produce 15,000 tonnes of plastic waste each year. As per the report one ton of waste plastic can produce 850 litres of diesel/petrol. So we can get millions of litres of petrol and diesel from waste plastic that would reduce our oil import bills and eliminate the pollution caused by plastic waste. 

Globally speaking each year 8 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the oceans. So this technology will reduce our need to extract oil from wells and at the same time we can prevent any plastic going into the oceans. In fact if we are able to retrieve at least some of the plastic that is dumped in the oceans we can get billions of litres of petrol and diesel. 

This is an example of the advantage that we have when we invest in science and technology research. We not only find solutions of complex problems but also enrich our lives. 

Astrology is no science

Astrology has been there since ancient times. It was supposed to be a science that would foretell human future. People believed in astrology got their horoscopes made. In India astrology was taught to all Brahmins as a subject. 

However the belief in astrology was more out of fear and the priests of ancient times fueled that fear by telling the people about various shortcomings and bad events that are going to happen in one's life and how can it can be overcome. The Brahmins got lots of gifts from people and kings and also tremendous amount of respect in the society because of this.

Astrology is supposed to tell us about of the future by just looking up to the stars in the sky. In ancient times when the rules of astronomy were formulated, humans can only look up to the sky and believed that what they saw comprised of the entire universe a few thousand stars, a moon, the sun and a few planets. 

It was only much later that the telescope was invented and subsequent rapid development in technology led to the discovery of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each of them. The universe also comprises of black holes.  Later it was discovered that the major amount of universe comprises of invisible dark matter and dark energy. 

It is absolutely impossible for the astrologers to take all this celestial bodies into account and formulate any set of rules that would predict the future of an individual. Astrology is all myth. It is no science at all. People believe in astrology out of fear and a bunch of unscrupulous astrologers make good money out of their fear.

So my advice to you all is "Stay away from astrologers and astrology".