Guess you can take the girl out of STEM, but cannot take the STEM out of the girl.
Jokes apart, I consider science to be the bright beam of hope that shines to illuminate the dark nooks and crannies of the knowledge that we have accumulated. When I say knowledge, I refer to the entirety of what we verifiably understood about nature. Anything that lies beyond this is as vast and unfathomable as the starry space that lies beyond the farthest galaxy that we have discovered.
While all that science has discovered is accessible and available for everyone’s consumption, it is not accessed and availed by everyone. This explains the obsession with the supernatural, the esoteric, and the paranormal. If this is the nature of conversation in the realm of discovered knowledge, you can imagine the sheer range of mythologies and fallacies propagated as reality by us outside that realm.
What is it that makes one want to explain something which is not yet known? Why can’t one just say, “We don’t know yet” with honesty and humility? Why the rush to explain it all away attributing power to the black cats and voodoo dolls? Is it out of fear? Or is it an instinct to create fear? Could it be a power game? Or is it just spirituality done badly?
The great scientists of our times have beckoned to us that spirituality goes hand in hand with science. “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”, said Albert Einstein. There has to be a yin-and-yang of these two schools of thought. I subscribe to this view and though the word ‘religion’ has acquired a bad taste in recent decades, we probably have to replace “religion” with “spirituality” in the quote, as that is what Einstein saw it as, in all likelihood.
Organized religion thrives by provoking fear and outrage, which is why I am opposed to it. But I am all for spirituality as the universe amazes me no end as I often wonder who ordained it all. Could such a phenomenon called life be a matter of chance? Will instinct trump faith when it comes to the hour of reckoning?
Fear is a monster that keeps you repressed, gnaws at your self-belief, and clouds your judgment. We probably need oodles of faith to carry on life, and even a scientist probably needs his daily shot of spirituality to endure the miseries that are inherent to life. But for faith to prevail, we need to turn in our fear. This is something that is lost on most people, as they consider God to be feared rather than a form of faith to invest in.
I am not this atheist who staunchly opposes the belief in God. I need help. I need to be assured from time to time that somehow, it all makes sense. It is a different matter that my knowledge of things is not so vast that it would all really make sense. So, when it doesn’t, I put a stop to that line of thinking. I will never know it all, so it happens more often than I’d like.
Kids have the most amusing and thought-provoking questions. A little girl asked me why she can’t be best friends with a boy student who she dotes on. Our social conditioning and our matrix of perspectives are so warped that we just don’t know how to answer this simplest of questions. We all know that they are innocent, but our judgment is so skewed towards paranoia sometimes, especially when it concerns children.
The problem doesn’t stop with organized religion which is already addling the minds of people. Our societal conditioning, our manufactured consent, and our frenzied advertising are some of the other forces that distort our perceptions. They are all equally rotten. An uneven distribution of resources is at the heart of all evils, but it could have led us down a path of collaboration and coexistence, but no; it led us down the path of strife and war instead, which is politics by other means.
As Carl Sagan quipped, you need to reinvent the universe if you have to make the apple pie from the scratch. So, it’s not going to happen in a hurry – we will have to deal with the smoke and mirrors that perceptions have collided into. And the only way to deal with it is – surprise, surprise -through the looking-glass of science.
I always had a lot of respect for scientists, and I had it irrespective of their inevitable biases. These days, however, I am looking for those who try to overcome the thinking fallacies that include biases. Do you also have some STEM left in you? Do you swear by your choicest scientists? Do you have different notions of spirituality?
Do tell!
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