Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "freethinker"

No belief is worth losing your humanity over,
No intellect is worth losing your kindness over.
Facts, faith, reason, religion all come later,
First and foremost we must humanize our behavior.
If a belief or intellect makes you a better person,
More power to your belief or intellect I say.
But if they become a hindrance to your humanity,
Throw it immediately like poison far, far away.
Beliefs have cast shadows of wars throughout history,
Facts have provided weapons for those wars.
Then again beliefs have taught us to love our neighbor,
Facts have helped us fight calamity and disorders.
Let all beliefs and facts be guided by a warm heart.
Warmth alone will make our world fit for human birth.

Faith is no declaration of character,
It is just a matter of mental necessity.
It has nothing to do with truth and holiness,
In many cases, it makes a person quite unholy.
I often find myself speaking to my dead teacher,
It gives me strength and helps me take the leap.
The scientist in me knows it’s all in my head,
But sometimes all logic must take a backseat.
The problem however is not our imaginary friend,
It is our loyalty to it at the expense of our humanity.
Keep your faith if it helps you through hard times,
But never let it be an impediment to universality.
Imagination is healthy when it sustains us as human,
When it ruins our humanity, it’s time for its demolition.

Enough with leaving this world,
In the hands of old fuddy-duddies.
Mark you, I ain't talkin' about age,
I am talkin' about mental maturity.
Long enough we've allowed tradition,
To wreak havock on our precious planet.
It's time for reason and nonrigidity,
To stand up and take charge, all unbent.
Inhumanity persists in our world,
Because the humans give a consensual wave.
It's time for the grown-ups to grow up and,
Redeem reins from those with both feet in the grave.
Ancient relics belong in museum, not in driver's seat.
It's for the young of head 'n heart to get the society lit.

Better a marvelheaded idiot,
Than a marbleheaded bigot.
Better a self-proclaimed dope,
Than an arrogant dilettante.
Better a kindhearted commoner,
Than a cockeyed intellectualist.
Better an egalitarian infidel,
Than a dogmatizing evangelist.
All dogmas are born in the mind,
So is the duster to wipe them.
It is up to you what will you be,
Vessel of dogma or the duster untamed!
Convert none, help all, without imposition.
Let uplift be the motive behind all conviction.

If we teach kids history,
They say we’re indoctrinating them.
If we immunize them against disease,
They say we’re microchipping them.
If we teach kids science,
They say we’re practicing blasphemy.
If we teach kids biology,
They say we’re messing with their identity.
With such mentality of a caveman,
How on earth did you manage to conceive!
I guess, to raise a human takes common sense,
But to make a baby takes only genital breach.
Hence it is more reason for reason to persevere.
There is no way we can let stone age reappear.

I am neither a believer, nor an atheist. Believers care about the existence of God, atheists care about the nonexistence of God. I care about neither. I only care about human existence. I only care about the uplift of human condition.

If you believe, God is the supreme creator of everything, then God is also the one who gave you a brain. Use it. Likewise, if you know that we have evolved from the apes through natural selection, then you should also know about the fascinating mental faculty we developed alongside reason, called empathy. Use it.

Some might say, it is cowardly of me to not pick any side with confidence. Well, I am a behaviorist after all. You don’t expect me to peddle the same old dualistic ideologies that philosophers and theologians have been peddling for centuries, do you – that too with a complete disregard for the necessities of the everyday mind! I want to induce integration in the world, not conversion.

So I say, if you believe in God, make it a reason for assimilation, not segregation. If you prefer reason, use it for warm ascension, not cold and fancy descension.

Whole human is the first human,
All else are but wannabe.
Designation human says it all,
Yet why do you chase terminology!
Even when you broke free from religion,
You could not handle that utter freedom!
Like a rightful new descendant of divisionists,
You chained the word “human” with an “ism”.
It is like you can’t handle being free,
You have to stay enslaved by one ism or another.
They used to keep the world apart with religions,
Today the same is done by new-age dividers.
Human, human, human – that is all we ever are.
Not humanist, not socialist, just carers of each other.

If a scientist has no humility,
what’s the difference between
a scientist and a computer!
If a doctor has no warmth,
what’s the difference between
a doctor and a butcher!

If a teacher has no curiosity,
what’s the difference between
a teacher and a circus trainer!
If a filmmaker has no originality,
what’s the difference between
a filmmaker and a photocopier!

If a cop cannot practice self-correction,
what’s the difference between
a cop and an executioner!
If a theologian has no integrative spirit,
what’s the difference between
a theologian and a mumbling parrot!

If a modern human cannot balance reason and warmth,
what’s the difference between a sentient human
and a creature from the swamp!

This is my decree to my soldiers of the future,
Refrain from raising my giant lifeless structures!
Use the funds to build schools and hospitals instead,
Providing free/affordable education and healthcare.

Keep me alive in your heart, not in dead statues,
each one taller and more extravagant than the other,
Just so self-absorbed snobs could take the perfect selfie,
to declare an empty alliance with humanitarian behavior.

If you must have symbollic momentos of me around,
Keep them personal, humble and utterly non-extravagant.
Always remember, I am honored with your acts of love,
not with your thousand feet statues and chants unsapient.

It’s a sad state of affairs, when virtues
gather moss upon the monuments of hypocrisy.
Break your trance of totem poles,
be the freedom you are meant to be!

What is the point of you? What is your worth? And by worth I am not talking about your financial value, I am talking about something much more significant than that. So, I ask again – what is your worth? And you won’t find the answer in any scripture or church – you won’t find it even in this book. Because no external power can give you the answer to something so incredibly existential in nature.

If you want to know your worth, ask yourself, what are you without your bank account. The worth of a person lies in character. The same goes for a nation and the same goes for a world. Therefore, a nation’s worth lies not in the value of its currency, but in the character of its people. And it all begins with the individual – it all begins with you. Your character holds not just the worth of your own life, but that of the lives of your people as well. So, feel like it’s the feeling of your society and act like it’s the action of your society.

But mark you, here I do not mean, feeling and acting like the society, rather, I am asking you to feel, think and act as an original, brave and conscientious human being, so that you become the very emblem of humanhood in front of others, for them to draw their life’s inspiration from. Doing what the society wants, makes you a second hand human – wanting the society to do what you want, makes you a narcissistic bigot – but being an embodiment of humanhood without any expectation from others, is what makes you a sentient human.