This is a touchy subject, and the cause of many a war throughout the years, but I thought I’d put my thoughts out there on this subject, because it is something I have thought about a lot, and is something which is very interesting. Before I begin, I will say where I am coming from. My ethnicity is Indian; I was raised a Hindu. It was never forced upon with me with any sort of fervor, and so I can’t say that I’m well-versed in it. Hinduism is an interesting religion and there are many similarities between it and other religions. It is not as polytheistic as many people would think. One thing that I have an impression of is that one can only be born into being a Hindu. You can’t just convert or anything. Which is why I’m hesitant to say I’m not; it looks like I am one whether I truly believe in it or not, according to one definition. But truly, I consider myself to be an agnostic. An agnostic is one who neither believes nor disbelieves in a God/Supernatural Deity, a middle road between theism and atheism. The reason is simply that there is no empirical proof that God (I will use this term and the pronoun He for convenience, although these are just conventions) exists, but if one did exist, it would certainly be within His power to make the seams of the universe invisible. I believe that both theism and atheism are leaps of faith that are somewhat arbitrary, no matter how soothing they are to the soul.

As an agnostic, I cringe at the fundamentalist leaders who I see on TV and who rule certain countries, and also at atheists who proclaim that there is no God. I cannot take the leaps of faith that they do so readily. However, I try and understand them. It is my belief that if I could know all religions, I would be able to understand everyone, because so much of culture is embedded in them. Even so, I have many problems with organized religion.

It is my belief that any relationship with God should be personal. Organized religion seems to take that bare spirituality away from people and replace it with more people. When I look around campus and see the various religious organizations, many of them seem to exist for social reasons rather than religious. In his book “Snow Crash”, Neal Stephenson (my favorite modern author) has some interesting commentary on religion. In particular, one of the characters says something to the effect that most intelligent people don’t put stock in Christianity because Christianity isn’t about Christ. To a certain extent, this is echoed in Dostoevsky’s (my favorite all-time author) “The Grand Inquisitor”, a chapter in “The Brothers Karamazov”. Jesus set man free and told him to be free, and as soon as he left a Church was founded in order to tell people what to do. The Catholic church is a gigantic hierarchy that tells people what they need to do to get into heaven, how they can be clean from sin, and how to please God. Hundreds of years later, Martin Luther protested, and with him and the printing press, Scripture was no longer only in the hands of the priests. It was a great chance to have everyone learn for themselves. Instead, we have another set of hierarchies telling people how to interpret the Bible. If I was an evil dictator, and I wanted to figure out the surest way to control a people, I would not use secret police or hypnosis; I would use religion. It wouldn’t be the first time that Divine Right has justified ruling authority.

So what do I believe? I believe that we can understand the physical characteristics of this world by using the scientific method, and can explain these workings by developing natural laws. Once we go beyond the physical into the metaphysical, though, we can’t guarantee anything using science, and must resort to reason as our best bet. I could “imagine” a God, but the only purpose this God would have would be to be there at the beginning, to put things in motion and set the natural laws by which everything would work. No further influence on the universe. On the other hand, this is no more outlandish than everything springing to being out of nothing, quarks appearing from vacuum and exploding into the Big Bang. Myths and religion were partially created because we didn’t understand the world around us very well. Today, we know why the sun appears to trek across the sky and what causes disease, and we don’t need to resort to supernatural explanations. What about the afterlife? I don’t think there is one. All the more reason to make sure you do what you have to in this life. I think that the world and our own achievements are amazing enough without having to ascribe it all to a supernatural being. And certainly not an omnipotent being who we try and personify and give human emotions. Why would such a being be wrathful? Or jealous? These are qualities we identify as vices in humans. Why create imperfect beings? Why give us the freedom to be bad or good, and then destroy us when we go bad? I realize I don’t speak for all religions when I ask these questions, but they are valid when addressed at the major ones. I admire religious texts for their literary and cultural qualities, but I certainly don’t view these documents as being fact. They were composed hundreds or thousands of years ago, probably passing through word of mouth for much of the time, finally being recorded in print many years after the events they speak of transpired. In the years til today, they have been translated from their original language, the nuances of which might be lost to the modern scholar. I highly doubt any of the texts are originals, and were probably copied from some still older text, which was copied from some still older text, etc. Anyone with a grasp of modern genetics would recognize the potential for random mutations caused by copying errors. It is for these reasons that I question those that say they are privy to the Word of God.

I generally distrust organized religions because there is too great of the element of brainwashing in them. They tell you how to act and what to believe and tell you it’s okay to question, as long as you solely question on certain lines. I think this allows people to be open to all that other pseudo-scientific bullshit that’s out there, ready to take your money. Personally, I find reason enough to go on, and I have yet to rape, pillage, or maim anyone or anything. Feel free to mail me your thoughts, although please don’t try and convert me or tell me I’m going to Hell.

Hate has historically been used for bad purposes. National Socialism and the Klu Klux Klan are just two examples of this. But while sitting in class today, I realized that Hate, much like Love, can bring people together. There was a very annoying person in my group today, who didn’t really hve the prerequisites for the course, and was asking a lot of questions. This in itself wasn’t so bad. Asking questions is just the mark of a curious mind. However, he wouldn’t wait for answers before he asked another one, and was just overall not very cool. Eventually he left, after much needless discussion, to talk with an advisor about perhaps getting out. When he left, all of us agreed that this was a guy that we could do without. And you know, it created a bond between us all. We were able to converse and joke freely. And icebreaker, almost.

Hate is also a much more efficient unifying force than Love. Just try and get people to agree on pizza toppings. They’ll argue for months about what is better. But I bet that they’ll all agree that yak dung is a horrid pizza topping. There are so many more things to hate than to love, that it’ll be much easier to use Hate than Love. I think we’ve given love a great chance to solve our problems. Now it’s time to bring in the big guns.

Hate is kind of like The Force, and there are a lot of people on the Dark Side. Really, we need to to focus our hate on something more constructive than blacks, gays and mimes. Well, okay, I suppose the mime part is fine, but at any rate…. As you may have figured out, I really don’t like ignorant people. And cucumbers. But I can’t really justify ridding the world of cucumbers. I can however, put out the idea of getting rid of stupidity. And as collaries, we can get rid of racism and Scientific Creationism too. There are so many horrible things out there to Hate, and once we get them knocked out of the picture, we can get back to loving each other. Or if that can’t be done, tolerance is also acceptable.

In short: invest in Hate; it gives much better returns than Love. Make Hate, not War!

If perhaps you haven’t picked up on it, I really don’t like stupid people. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’re good for being the minions of smart people, I would say that they are wastes of skin. I will admit that at times, I am guilty of being an idiot. If I’m an idiot, though, I understand, and try and never be an idiot in quite the same way again. I may be an idiot, but I’m not ignorant. As we speak, all over the world, in all the time zones and in perhaps every corner of the inhabited world, smart people are doing great things and making the world a better place for all, and stupid people are screwing it up and taking us all back to square one.

In my short summer break a few weeks back, I happened to come across Superman II on some cable station while surfing channels. According to those ratings they give in the newspaper, this was the second best Superman film, second only to the first one. I think they just went all downhill from there. Anyways, this is the one where Lois finds out Clark’s secret, they get married or something, and Clark voluntarily opts to get his superpowers sucked out of him so he can be a normal person just like everyone else. At the same time, coincidences of coincidences, three exiles from the planet Krypton who have been enslaved in some crystal mirror plate thingie come wafting into our solar system, escape their bounds, and start wreaking havoc. These dudes have all of Superman’s powers, and there are three of them. Within minutes, it seems, they have the president on his knees, following a laughable scene where the army tries to defend the White House against super-beings who can shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Meanwhile, everyone is crying for Superman to save their asses. When he finally does come, they set up for a great battle. There are concrete blocks flying and eye beams blazing, the whole nine yards. And at one point, a stray fragment of giant concrete block hits the spire of a building, sending it crashing to the ground, heading right for a crowd of people. Comment # 1: Here we have four titans duking it out in the streets of Metropolis, and everyone and his mother is out there ogling them, getting in the way, rooting Superman on, as if their cheers will help him. No, the most they do is present themselves as great hostages, so that Superman will have to waste his time saving them instead of whupping butt. So anyways, this spire comes down, and everyone moves out of the way, except, of course, some woman with a baby carriage, who chose to just look up and scream instead of moving out of the way. Fractions of a second before she would have been wasted, Superman picks up the spire and tosses it.

Fast forward about five minutes through the fight scene, and Superman has knocking the big goofy looking exile into the stratosphere. He’s about to get started on the other two when a bus comes tooling through the intersection, even though any half-competent police force would block off the streets. Needless to say, the two villians took this chance to pick up the bus and toss it down the street, and Superman has to give up his body to save the people, getting crushed against a building in the process. When he doesn’t appear from the wreckage, the mob, stupid as they are, start shouting about how the evil people killed Superman, and then together as a mob pick up pipes and pieces of wood and start to converge upon the fugitives, because hey, just because Superman can’t beat them doesn’t mean a bunch of imbeciles can’t! Never underestimate the power of stupidity, I say. Using some of that great Kryptonian lung power, our antagonists blew everyone away, and surprise surprise, the mob’s attack was ineffective.

At this point Superman lifts himself out of the wreckage. Perhaps seeing the pointlessness of fighting with all these cretins getting in the way, he retreats to the Fortress of Solitude. All everyone else thinks, though, is that he’s running away, and that Superman is a coward, even though he has proven time and again he had more guts than all of them multiplied together and then some. They start bad-mouthing him. Another characteristic of idiots. They have short memories. They don’t remember how often he’s saved them and their pathetic little lives. They jeer him off. Back in the Fortress of Solitude, Superman manages to trick the evil-doers into giving up their powers, although he was stopped from offing one of them when they grabbed Lois.

This past summer I read Paul Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie which chronicled the actions of a lietenant colonel in the army, John Paul Vann, during the Vietnam Conflict. This is the book that the HBO special was based on. Alas, I don’t get the premium channels, so I was forced to go straight to the source. I found the book very interesting, in fact more interesting than I thought a ‘history’ would be. There was a lot of talk about the Army leaders at the time, who were so full of themselves after their World War II victory that they tended to underestimate their opponents and began to think that all wars could be fought in the same way as the wars of Europe and the Pacific, regardless of enemy, objective, or terrain. For instance, the audacity of General MacArthur was one reason that the Korean War was not as successful as we liked.

At the beginning of the war, the South Vietnamese weren’t winning, but the US generals didn’t want to admit that, so they stated that everything was going well and things were under control. However, when things started going from bad to worse, the generals were caught because they had already stated that they were winning…so they continued to lie. The effect of this was that instead of changing strategy to win, the same things were done to lose. This, and a regime that promoted ineffectiveness and low casualties over moderate casualties and winning (partly because Diem, the South Vietnamese, US-backed leader wanted his army intact to insure his personal security at the head of state) led to defeat. John Vann tried to tell people this, but wherever he went, whenever he tried to tell superiors he was either blocked by those in command who would be hurt by this information, or he just ignored. This, together with corruption among the Vietnamese and a well-prepared, thoughtful Viet Cong, led to the failure of the Vietnam Conflict.

The lesson of this thought is that Ignorance and Greed ruin the quality of life for everyone. This is pretty obvious, I’m sure everyone realizes it. But oftentimes, I just get very angry when I realize that so often in life, stupid, thoughtless, selfish people drag down the geniuses and those that would make a difference (for the better!) in this world. If only we could just create a scientific test that would detect the intelligent, thoughful, selfless people among us, we could give them nifty identification cards that would permit them to do almost anything and give them access everywhere. I think everyone out there is responsible for themselves. Not everyone can afford a first-rate college education, but I think that anyone can resolve to not be ignorant, to not let stereotypes and personal agendas cloud their judgement, to use common sense and a love of the truth to guide them through their lives. That is my hope for the human race.

If you are a normal member of the masses, you have no doubt either seen a movie or a read a book which involved time travel as a main premise. Some notables that come to mind are H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”, the unforgettable Terminator movies, and the somewhat confusing Back to the Future series. In all these movies, we find that things get pretty messed up in the future. A key plot element in these stories is that people are trying to change the present by affecting the past. But you know, things get pretty messed up whenever you start to think about things. If the directors of these movies ever sat down and thought about their plots before they decided to start filming, I’m sure that they’d sit down and go “Hmmmmmm….” And after that they’d probably blow their brains out, because it kinda makes your head hurt.

The foremost movie I have problems with is the Terminator series. The whole success of the plot hinges on how fast time travels. By that I mean how long it takes for a change in the past to propagate through time to the future. You see, there must be some finite time before changes in the past affect the future, or the human race is doomed. The computers of Skynet sent a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Connors. The humans sent Kyle Reese back to save Sarah Connors. But I would expect that the second time traveler was a reactionary one. They wouldn’t have sent him back unless the computers sent the Terminator back. In this case, it is highly probably that the terminator was sent back first. In fact, the script shows that this is true. Now, if time “traveled” instantaneously, all is lost. The second the terminator goes back in time, kills Sarah and the future has changed, sans John Connor. However, if there is a slight delay before the future changes, the human side has a few moments to send back their own warrior, and combat the Terminator. Also, we are presented with the whole “chicken and the egg” deal, because John Connor sent his dad back in time to combat the Terminator, and while he was there, Kyle brought about John’s conception. John must precede his father in time. But at any rate, the plot hinges on the velocity of time. What kind of units is that?

In general, changing the past is a bad idea. You never know how things are going to end up, because a thousand permuatations are created for every second which passes. Back to the Future is an idealistic example of precision surgery on time. In real life, horrible changes would probably have ensued, and I get the feeling that Micheal J. Fox would never have been born in the altered future that Back to the Future ends on. And isn’t his Dad surprised that his son looks exactly like that dude from high school? I would wonder where his wife has been, if I were him. I can remember a science fiction story I once read a couple of years back. It was “The End of Eternity,” by Isaac Asimov, and it involved a group of people who’s job it was to change history. They lived in a quasi-real timespace, kinda outside mainstream time. They could travel to most every time period, except far in the future (for reasons unknown to them but revealed at the end of the story). The managers of this group decided what was best for mankind, and altered the past in very subtle ways to change it. For instance, one worker went back in time to a certain spaceship, and moved one tool from one place on the shelf to another. This small change caused gigantic ramifications. At any rate, I wouldn’t even doubt that such seemingly insignificant changes would greatly change the future.

Some people say that the best argument against the possibility of time travel yet is that we haven’t seen people zipping here from the 25th century. Since people haven’t come from the future, that probably means no one will ever have the means to do it. There are two other possibilities though. One is that the beings who possess time travel technology are so advanced that they can easily fool us. The other is that our present time is so uninteresting that future historians reallly don’t care. I can see the possibility of the second reason. However, I doubt the first one. I find it hard to believe that time-travelers can be so 100% diligent as to never make a mistake, or that idiots don’t sometime hijack the time machine and go into history to pull wacky pranks. But who knows, perhaps time-travelers regularly visited the Dark Ages. Arthur C. Clarke once said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic”, so perhaps all those miracles and witchings that have occurred in the past two millenia are the result of time editers! Well, I’m sure they meant well.

I end this thought on some advice. If you somehow come across a time machine in your daily travels, do not attempt to work it. Instead, make a more prudent choice and bash it into tiny tiny pieces with a big bat. You’ll be doing history a world of a favor.

Sometimes I wonder what happens after we die. This is a matter of great debate, although perhaps for strange reasons, since it doesn’t quite matter since you’re, well, dead. It’s interesting how the afterlife, or even just the suspicion of one, influences the way we live and how we interact with each other. There are many schools of thought, ranging from the whole “hell and heaven” idea to reincarnation. Well, I just started wondering about the logistics of reincarnation……

If I figure reincarnation correctly, you get your little turn on earth, and after you die, you come back in altered form, in another body and place in the social order that is dependent on how well you lived your previous life. For reasons beyond my control, the criterion for what qualifies as a good life isn’t available at the time of the writing of this thought. And I further understand that reincarnation isn’t just limited to people, but also other animals. Maybe even plants, but then that would make even vegetarianism unacceptable. At any rate, people are born, and then are reborn, except for the select few that are just so kick-ass and one with the universe that they don’t have to go through the loop anymore.

This got me to wonder just how many souls there are. I mean, it’s not like tissues; use one, throw it away. You get to reuse them over and over in a giant cyclical movement. Well, at some point there were only a few hundred million people on this earth. Now it’s approaching seven billion. Where are all those souls coming from? Some may say that many animals have died, more than picking up the slack, but I would argue that many other animals, such as rats, ants, and cockroaches have easily made up for the decimation of many species, and most probably number hundreds of times more than the loss. Again I ask, where are these souls coming from?

Another thing to consider is the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I’m a firm believer in extraterrestrial life. I just don’t believe that they’ve visited us. But I find it hard to believe that in the vast cosmos, amids the trillions and quadrillions of stars, there won’t be at least a few that can support life. And it would be unreasonable to think that these beings wouldn’t be able to reincarnate too. So we have to add them to the pot, too.

So a couple of thousand years into the future, when we’ve no doubt colonized other planets and are fruitfully multiplying there, too, and other civilizations are busy prospering, too, there’s gonna be a lot of souls running around in the universe. And this number will only increase.

Assuming there are a finite number of souls, there are two extreme choices to choose from. There could be a small number of souls (small meaning only a fraction of a googol) and eventually all the souls will be used up, meaning they will be in existence. That, I suppose, would create some sort of mysterious limit on the population of the universe. No one can be born until someone dies. This isn’t even including the gradual attrition of usable souls because people attain nirvana. This number will only increase with time, assuming nirvanage isn’t a revolving door. The other possibility is that there are a vast number of souls, enough to keep us going for a great long while, longer(dare I say it?) even than the lifetime of this page. In that case, at our present point in time, there isn’t a lot of turnover among souls. In fact, we could still be going through our first turnover, in which case no one has been reincarnated, and no one will be maybe for some time. Those souls who’s material bodies have already succumbed to biological death are at the end of the line(even if the reincarnation lottery o’ souls is a random process, the vast number of souls insures that the probability of dying and then immediately reincarnating is small enough to be pragmatically comparable to going to the end of the line) and won’t get around to being reincarnated for quite some time.

It seems to me that if people are already talking about reincarnation, then reincarnation must in fact already be going on, meaning that there are a relatively small number of souls. But this is just unfeasible. Really, the only way to accomodate everyone would be have an infinite number of souls. But if there are an infinite number of souls, then there would effectively be no reincarnation. Which is just as well. I would really be scared about what I’d come back as.

Despite what you may think, UIUC is not the edenesque Valhalla that I may portray. For instance, it rained today. And there wasn’t even a rainbow! Would there be rainbowless rain in Shangri-la? No sir, at least not if I was running it. Don’t get me wrong though. We’re not in Gotham City here. As far as the main campus is concerned, meaning the main and engineering Quads and the surrounding dorm-laden areas, sidewalks are well lit and sparkly clean, except for the occasional homeless person. Crime in the form of assault on this main part is pretty rare except really late at night. Most of the rest of the crime is petty theft. However, the police have a campaign warning you not to be complacent. Crime exists, and the putrid dregs of our society still depend on the unsuspecting, naive pedestrian to support their high-class consumer lifestyle. To the credit of students, most assaults take place to the north and west of campus, up where not all of the residents are people enrolled at the university. The campus police have put together a pretty successful and effective(at least in my eyes) program called Truth or Dare. The posters and flyers often contain statistics and excerpts from actual police reports from people who were mugged or otherwise wronged.

One of these statistics is that 8 out of every 10 people who are assaulted on campus are male. This is supposed to get across the point that men are not immune to crime, and that macho men who think that they can take care of themselves will have that idea seriously challenged by a group of five men, who don’t play very fair. Another explanation is the natural “pack-behavior” of women. The way they herd together, even when going to the bathroom, shows that they believe in safety in numbers. Women tend to be more group-orientated than manly men, in my experience, and one could say that this instinct is an appropriate one.

However, I have a different explanation. 8 out of 10? That seems rather harsh, don’t you think? Hmmm…this isn’t just a statistic, it’s a pattern. My theory is that there is a secret underground roving band of ultra-violent feminists. Yes, my fellow male gendered friends, your worst fears have come true. This roving band roams the lawless streets at night like a pack of hungry velociraptors, searching for another innocent victim. Innocent, that is, except that for the fact that this person has certain genitalia that correspond to having the x-y chromosome pair. And so, like a vengeous pack of wolves, they descend upon the hapless stranger. Ambushed, the man is no match for crazed estrogen frenzy.

And so the man makes a police report, because with his cut-up exterior, he can’t very well say that he just fell down the stairs or something. And please…will he say that he was attacked by a bunch of GIRLS? No way! The next day, it would be in the police blotter in the Daily Illini, and from there my home page, and from there…the world. The man would never hear the end of it. No, he says that “Gee, it was so dark!” and “There were so many of them!” And so no one is the wiser, and the females, who read us quite well, are still at large.

Men of the world, I implore you to speak out against the crimes that have been committed against you. If a pack of raging women beat you, tell the police exactly what happened. And to all those who have been past victims, stand up and rectify the situation by telling the truth, and know that you are not alone. Together, we can fight this injustice.