Category Archives: faith
Hinduism as open-source faith
Huffington Post has a great post up defining the Hindu way against the backdrop of what religion is commonly understood to be. The author Josh Schrei compares it to the open-source philosophy in software. If we consider god, the concept … Continue reading
The universe as imagination
This post begins with a little story that I can’t quite remember where I read (I suspect it was somewhere in the Vedas). It is about a dissatisfied disciple going to his guru and asking him a question. The disciple … Continue reading
The search for the father
I recently watched a TED talk by Shekhar Kapur in which he talked about the urge to tell stories. Kapur said that we tell stories to fill the gaps in our understanding of the universe. For example, it is perhaps … Continue reading
Why is there suffering in the world?
One point about the world that is often brought into the debate about whether God exists or not is suffering. What sort of God would watch as his creation rips itself apart with violence? What kind of God would let … Continue reading
Did man create God?
In the comments to one of my last posts, Ankur Banerjee pointed me to a beautiful speech (even more so because it was made impromptu) by the late Douglas Adams. It was about the possibility of there being an artificial … Continue reading
Death proves the soul’s existence
Many religions say that what fuels us is something indestructible and, for all practical purposes, invisible – the soul. Hinduism believes that all living creatures — from the tiniest of germs to largest of the redwood trees — have a … Continue reading
How I came to believe in God
“Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. BUT Faith will move mountains.” The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once proposed something that has come to be known as Pascal’s wager. The theory goes to suggest that regardless of whether God exists or … Continue reading
Why do we have rituals?
If you remember the last scene of The Da Vinci Code movie, you will remember that the hero Dr Robert Langdon finds himself running with barely-concealed hurry towards the place where Mary of Magdalene, he deduces, must be buried. He … Continue reading
Why do we believe in strange things?
In my last blog post on why religious myth relies on fantasy, I implied that superstition works better than a starkly objective view of the world. I can believe that superstition exists because it works; that it has fought for … Continue reading