My reflections & tentative generalizations about male/female sex

[Disclaimer: It is quite likely that my limitations could have influenced these]

1.     Sex is not the big problem; parenthood is.

2.     Sex is unnecessarily hyped as much as it is unnecessarily tabooed.

3.     Relationships becoming sexual, whether marital or otherwise, are detrimental to the beauty of it. Beauty can be retained by limiting sex to events rather than allowing it to become the basis of relationships.

4.     Deeming sex as performance often makes it underperformance.

5.     Frequency of events & prolongation of intercourse have no lower limit that has to be crossed; as achievement & enjoyment are two different things.

6.     Self-dependence makes interdependence flexible enough to respect the freedom of the other.

7.     Foreplay &/or other-aided masturbation, are essential for satisfactory event which need not necessarily culminate into intercourse.

8.     Intercourse is more of a male-requirement & is ideally a return gift for inducing female (mainly clitoral) orgasm, via cuddling, caresses, etc & discovering her particular requirements.

9.     Fantasy can be an aid to the act even though it is learnt as a substitute for it.

10.    If fantasies are shared & mutually accepted qua fantasies, they cease  to produce unwarranted guilt.

11.   Fantasies help catharsis as well as beautification without actually executing them & in such way they do not always amount to ‘invitations to misconduct’.

     12.    In fantasy, arousal is inversely proportional to legitimacy.

13.   In act, contentment is directly proportional to mutuality of Response.

14.    Objectification can not be completely eliminated but mutuality can be maintained, turn by turn.

15.     Imposition/pain is always wrong except when a mock-one is requested by the other.

16.     Fixations can be avoided by limiting them to fantasy & sharing fantasy with the other & learning new ways of getting satisfied.

17.   Orientations can be changed, only by accepting them in the first place. This does not mean that they ought to be changed in so far as they are not encroaching upon freedom of the other.

18.   Female coyness is paradoxical. Its incident-violation is enjoyable to both while sustaining it for enrichment in the long run.

19.   Males are more visually oriented as compared to tactually oriented than females. Even in tactual-field they are driven more by motor feedback than sensory. This difference demands acceptance & understanding from both sides.

20.  If the sense of non-responsive co-operation by female puts off a male he is a good human being.

21.   For a sensitive male, intercourse with non-responsive female is nothing more than masturbation in wrong place.       

The wonder-world of Dixit Brand Swadeshi!!

If India must participate in the process of globalization, critically and in her own interests, the first thing to do is to get rid of Dixit Brand Swadeshi.

Late Shree Rajeev Dixit (unfortunate death by heart attack) had gathered huge popularity & had created his clout, owing to his mesmerizing oratory.

He had created a magic potion, a blend of exaggerations, blatant lies, contents that are full of hatred & vengeance towards the British in particular & the West in general, demeaning modernity in general, encouraging fascist dictatorship, alarming pieces of ‘information’, abusing Indian leaders in outrageous language, supporting the monopolist & bureaucratic interests, spreading superstitions & so on. But this magic potion seems to be intoxicating many a patriotic minds. We must critically examine which blunders he commits while doing so.

He spends a lot of energy & time to ‘prove’ that, the products he recommends to boycott, (just because of their brand-names sounding non-Indian without going into workers, customers & even investors being Indians), are poisonous, third-grade & impious. He flouts science in the flow of proving so.

At one point he calls Pepsi-Cola is a psychotropic intoxicant. Pepsi-Cola is such an erosive compound that if you keep a tooth in it for four days it dissolves completely! He terms citric acid as poison in the flow. Height of it is that according to him, CO₂ is a poisonous gas! It is OK for CO (carbon monoxide) but CO₂  (carbon dioxide) is an integral part of our metabolism; about half of our blood is saturated with it at any moment in time. Milk, a pious drink according to him, is also bound to produce CO₂ when it reacts with normal hydrochloric acid in our stomachs.

In Dixit’s wonder-world, two college students are reported to die because they had participated in a Pepsi drinking competition & consuming about 9 (250 cc) bottles. The doctor to whom they are referred to, reports that it is too late, too much CO₂ is found in their bodies. Dixit says that science tells us to get that gas out of our bodies but here we are having its intake via aerated drinks. (Anyway science does not prescribe but only explains.)  He forgets the difference between taking in respiratory system & in digestive system. Furthermore there are locally made aerated drinks in cottage industry of which he does not take a note.

I have an objection to this on moral grounds. If it is a question of saving my nation I should boycott anything foreign (as per his theory) even if it is an elixir of immortality. That should be the nationalist spirit. Why prove the things to be boycotted are anyway useless, bad or poisonous? There is nothing righteous about opting out from bad products.

Same story repeats itself in case of tea & coffee as well. The basic resistance is against the supposedly exploitative companies like Nestle or Lipton. One can boycott them on that ground. However, Dixit claims that a cup of coffee contains equal quantity of nicotine as a cigarette does!

What about the employment of the workers in the plantations? Dixit replies, “we will export 100% tea & coffee.” If westerners are sinners because they dump their nasty products in our country, are we not doing the same thing? Dixit has a scientific answer to this moral dilemma. According to him tea & coffee are essential to survive in cold climate. If I remember right, Europe did exist before the discoveries of tea & coffee. But in his wonder-world, they are essential to survive in Europe & causing immediate death in India!

All the medicines of foreign companies are pure poisons. He reports that 25 million Japanese children got handicapped due to Polio which was induced by consumption of Paracetemol (a benign pain killer & antipyretic which is available over the counter.) All know that polio is an infection & is brought under control by vaccination

Dixit’s prejudice against Pharmaceutical companies leads him into an absurdity. He claims that even when 2 mg is sufficient they put 300 mg so that more is sold! If I can give remedy in 2 mg of my molecule why should I waste it & overdose the patient. Dixit argues as if medicines are sold on per mg basis. In fact a 0.25 mg tablet can be costlier than another 1 gram tablet. Dose varies from chemical to chemical. While trying to prove profiteering he in fact proves loss making. Economically rational companies (as they generally are) would prefer to make 150 times more tablets in same quantity of the drug with binders & bases.

Colgate Company acquires the calcium phosphate required for their toothpastes from powder of bones of dead animals, as per Dixit. One may think of profiteering but no, it is for Christianization of Indians! He asks, how material from dead animals can remedy the foul smell of your mouth? This is simply a disagreeable association attached & no logical connection. He is silent over whether Promise Tooth pest by Balsaras (some Indian company) also promises to not use this source of material. Not concern for consumers but hatred of westerners is the main stay of his argument.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, paper required for 500 cigarettes destroys one tree. Even if you consider total weight including tobacco as coming from paper, this tree comes out to weigh only 1 kg, a bonsai! Furthermore this small tree emits oxygen worth of 1.5 million Rupees (current prices of 1997). He does not tell how much this oxygen weighs. What rate is applied? Is it the rate of oxygen cylinders used for critical patients?

All this wastage of trees is committed by ITC simply because it is a multinational. Charminar by Vazeer Sultan (a popular Indian brand) is not guilty.

There is a practice of rubbing a rough powder for cleaning teeth in India. Is it a better practice for teeth? No! Its purpose is to use acupressure technique beneficial for whole body even if only a fingertip is getting pressed. I remember that there are supposed to be varied pressure points defined for various ailments in that technique.

In Dixit’s wonder-world, drinking water from a refrigerator is a sure cause of constipation & according to him Europeans can not pass motion for four days at a stretch. In spite of this, according to him, the real need of refrigerators is not in hot countries like India but it is rather more in the cold countries. Reason is again very exotic. Women in India are great home-makers for they roast hot Chapatis whenever needed, which European women are not. Second, Europe is devoid of fresh green vegetables because it does not have as fertile land as India.

According to Dixit, westerners intentionally sent Kalvinator Company to India only after they discovered that chlorofluorocarbons cause erosion of Ozone layer causing more exposure to ultra violate radiations, which in turn causes cancer. Kalvinator in India has been there since long before this discovery was made. It is as if there are nationalistic zones of ozone! A fridge in India would cause a hole on India & fridge in Pakistan would cause it for Pakistan.

In Dixit’s world India had refrigeration technique 500 year ago (No pumps, no compressors, but Yes refrigeration was achieved). India rejected it because she knew the harms caused by this technique & also its redundancy. Why she developed it in the first place if she knew everything?

A small plant of Tulasi is situated in front of many houses in India & women do, sort of, worship it. Dixit finds great scientific temper of Indian women on this basis for, according to him, this plant does not simply stop at photosynthesis like all other plants but it carries out Electrolysis of water into Hydrogen & Oxygen & Indian women, of course know all this. He puts special emphasis on that they ‘water’ this plant.

Fantastic Statistics with un-crosschecked Mathematics

Audiences are generally lazy in cross-checking calculations. This is especially so when they gather in order to get enchanted. Dixit must have had surety of this. So he bombards statistics. Even if we ignore the question of authenticity of such statistics, we can find internal contradictions in the arguments based on his statistics.

He says that Pepsi earns 2.4 billion rupees profit. This money, according to him is sufficient for solving drinking water problem in Indian villages. He also says that there are 200 thousand such villages. By simple division ‘money’ available for each village would be Rs.12,000/-. Leaving aside permanent solution to the drinking water issue, this money is not even sufficient for rent of ‘tankers’ that go & supply water to these villages. The main point is that, by not drinking Pepsi, how the saving made out of this can be diverted towards village water supply?

As people buy Pepsi the price has a large component of excise & sales tax. There is at least a theoretical possibility of governments spending this revenue for such villages. Boycotting Pepsi would stop the profit of Pepsi. But at the same time wages of (Indian) workers working in various stages, right from bottle making to restaurants will also stop. This factor is completely ignored by Dixit.

Dixit himself says that production cost of Pepsi bottle is 70 paise only while profit going to Pepsi is Rs.7/-. (He commits a slip of tongue by saying ‘Hundred times’ while it is 10 times even as per his figures).

Now, let us cross-check. With Rs.7 per bottle to earn 2.4 billion, how many bottles would be sold in a year? The number comes to be about 3.4 million. Out of Indian Population, only middle & higher class section would be buying Pepsi, which was about 1.7 million when he was speaking. So it seems, only two bottles are sold per potential consumer, including the versions like Miranda, 7Up etc, in a year.

This is ridiculous. This anomaly arises because Dixit ignores excise, sales tax, & whole chain of backward linkages in the production of Pepsi in India. If his costing were true, Parle would have competed out Coca-Cola rather than merging into it.

According to Dixit’s information, out of total fabric sold in India only 1% is Khaadi (hand spun & hand woven fabric) and still about 1.5 million workers are employed in it. So by simple ratio-proportion he claims that if 100% fabric is Khaadi, it would employ 150 million workers. At the time when he was delivering these lectures, India’s employable age group size was only 300 million. Thus half of the employment goes in garments alone. That means half of aggregate wage income goes to fabric sector. This implies that every worker would have to spend half of his income in purchasing fabric! Would this be affordable? Furthermore Khaadi industry is sustained by government subsidy which is not taken into account. “More labor intensive commodities are cheaper”, is a myth.

If tractors etc. are removed from agriculture & it is also made more labor intensive, apparently it will seem to increase employment. Question is

wherefrom the wages will come? Working itself is not an employment. Somebody affording your work is employment. Dixit completely ignores the wage affordability side of employment problem.

According to Dixit, 60% of goods transport in India is carried by bullock-carts. (?). He suggests that if ball-bearings are used in bullock-carts the share of bullock carts in Indian goods transport would rise to 80%. This would result in getting rid of ‘oil pool deficit’. Dixit forgets to note that efficiency of bullock-carts is restricted due to friction between paws of bullocks & land. Ball bearing can not eliminate that. 80% transport at the speed of bullock-carts will hamper the economic activity almost to a stand-still. Wherefrom the ball-bearings come if not from multinationals like SKF? As the original assumption of 60% is drastically wrong the further argument dose not matter anyway.

Same statistics used in opposing directions

According to Dixit, the share of India in world export was 33% in year1850. He praises Indian industry for the fact of having large share in world export & goes on blaming post independence governments for bringing it down to 0.01% (actually this figure is much more but too less than China). Here he treats lowering of exports as regress.

He goes on to say later that, as of now 4000 multinationals are plundering 4000 fold more than what a single East India company was doing. If export is only 0.01% what is being plundered? As the export in colonial era was forced & not voluntary, how come Indian goods then were getting prices good enough to make 33% share in world export in money terms? As export is voluntary after Independence, still exporters are getting so meager prices to be plundered 4000 times with only 0.01% share in export?

He is indecisive about whether export is a sign of glory or sign of misery & changes his position as per convenience of the charge that he wants blame on at that point of his lectures. Wherefrom he got this data of 33% in 1850, is beyond my imagination.

Surprisingly the same anomaly appears in a Leftist booklet by Abhyankar-Bedekar-Barhme with less exaggeration. According to these leftist thinkers, the share of India in world export was 4.5% in 1838 & has come down to 0.5% in 1990. If export is the root of exploitation why don’t you rejoice that it has dwindled? If export is sign of glory why don’t you support export promotion policy like China, rather than supporting self-dependant-Swadeshi?

The similarity between Hindu-fundamentalist booklets & leftist booklets is a political miracle, arising out of economic ignorance.

Dixit commits another anomaly about capital inflow as well. He says that advanced countries receive $725 billion external capital while developing countries receive only $500 billion. He completely ignores capital trade amongst & within rich countries. Thereby he implies as if all inflow of capital in rich countries is coming from poor countries! How come, poor countries become capital exporting at this high rate while their share in trade itself is so meager?  ‘Received’ in rich countries is fallaciously interpreted as ‘sent from poor countries’.

Dixit goes further to make a more astonishing statement. Rich countries are suffering by recession & hence they want more & more capital from outside! Recession implies a need of vent for surplus & not inflow. In fact they are flooded with capital & are seeking investment opportunities outside. Dixit is simply not ready to come out of the logic of colonial era.

Self-refuting arguments & information

He says India’s rate of saving is good at 24% of national income. (This is nearly a true statement, for a change.) Inflow of foreign capital is negligible as compared to Indian investment. If this is so what are you worrying about? He reaches a height of self-refuting when he says that multinationals bring only 5% of their capital from abroad & they get the remainder from Indian investors! Aren’t they mainly Indian & not foreign in such case? In fact the demand of Indian lobby is not to let the foreign share increase more than 50% so that control remains in Indian hands. Dixit’s appeal to Indian investors is that they should not invest in multinational & boycott them investment-wise. So by implication let more & more control go in foreign hands!

Dixit tries to portray the accumulation of capital of various companies since their entry, as something drastic. For example Bata started at 7 million and has now reached 1150 million. But rate of growth per year is Nth root of the ratio. Bata achieved this in 66 years. The rate of growth per year comes out to be 8% only. In all these years there was considerably high rate of inflation which offsets this rate in real terms. Rate of inflation is patently absent in all such comparisons. Fortunately he declares years of entry & the year in which the grown value is noted for each company. All these spans were before the 1992 economic reforms declaration to which he is offering fervent resistance. Thus such data remain irrelevant to the issue at hand.

On the other hand he believes that applying high rates of taxation is harmful to nation. He claims that British imposed 127% tax rate on Indians & that is how Indian trade vanished. (from where 27% over and above the income are supposed to come?) He also alleges that post independence governments were guilty of imposing 97.5% tax rate.

This was only once & on the very high slab when Morarji Desai was finance minister & obviously failed. Morarji Desai was also a staunch Swadeshi man. Then how did he behave with Indian industry like British? To the contrary, Chidambaram who was finance minister while Dixit was delivering his speeches, brought a ‘low rate high recovery’ tax regime successfully, but Dixit calls him traitor no1 of India.

Height of shouting big numbers

According to Dixit, a single one-day-cricket-match wastes 2.5 billion Rupees of the ‘nation’. Without going into figures we must at least remember that expenditure by someone is always income to some others.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, 70% of the children getting born in Europe are orphans & abandoned! Any viewer of TV  witnesses 72000 rapes in twelve years. That comes out to be 6000 per year & 16.4 per day. If one is sitting before TV for 5 hours a day, he is compelled to watch a rape after every 18 minutes.

In the wonder-world of Dixit, there were 10,000 steel plants in India & were producing 9 million tons of steel, while today, owing to poor western technology the mega-steel-plants are producing only 7.2 million tons.

In 1835, only in Madras Presidency there were 1500 thousand colleges of Surgery. All produced M.S. level surgeons. Then he divulges that all of these were in fact barbers & Indian social order did not keep them deprived of knowledge, so they could achieve this feat.

In Harshad Mehta scandal the Nation lost 600 billion Rupees. (In fact some speculators lost in the game to other speculators & had nothing to do with economic fundamentals)

When Manmohan Singh became finance minister for the first time, inflation rose threefold in one month!

In Dixit’s world anything can happen. His claim is that when the British were sending vessels to carry the plundered goods from India, they had to bring them back empty. A ship is not stable if it is empty. In order to add counterweight to the empty ships, British used to fill them with ‘made in England’ salt. Gandhi had to launch his Salt-Satyagrha because Indian salt market got flooded with salt.

In fact it takes long seashores & hot sun to make salt. But he counts Britain as salt-surplus nation to this extent. Everybody knows that the British imposed a tax on making salt in India & that triggered the salt movement by Gandhi. This counter-weight theory of salt is one of the most ridiculous things that Dixit has blurted out.

World as big conspiracy  

Indeed there are conflicts of interests between developed & developing countries on the matter of international trade. Dixit simply denies the possibility of resolution of such conflicts mainly because he does not deem British as selfish, but deems them as perverse or sadistic. They seem to have an intrinsic pleasure in somehow ruining India without any consideration of what British stand to gain.

For example, they would have stolen a good technique found in India & benefited from it. Here they simply destroy the good techniques without using them. It is believed that India had technique of making rust-free steel exemplified in a famous age old pillar.

British, as per Dixit, imposed a law for banning the aboriginals in India to use iron ore & destroyed the technique (but did not steal it).

Another example of this sadistic attitude is that India had spinning & weaving technique of such a splendor that long & broad sheets of fine fabric could be smoothly passed through a finger-ring with almost no effort. British cut the thumbs of artisans to put an end to this technique but did not appropriate it for their benefit.

The techniques claimed to be practiced in ancient India are so mysterious that they can not be resurrected. Generally when a society achieves a technique it becomes generalized & impersonalized. The so called smoke of gold era had no method of documentation or publicly used practice. It is impossible to believe that you had air-crafts without a single mention of its fuel.

In their ruthless pursuit of destroying India, the British bought in Democracy which is necessarily corrupt according to Dixit. British consulted astrologists to decide the most inauspicious date for the handover.

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy was not negligence due to profiteering but was a weapon test by American military & the chemical weapon so proved was used against Iraq, confirmed news by Dixit’s intelligence bureau.

He calls European civilization as demonic & adds that adultery is not a sin in Christianity, in spite of a clear mention in the famous Ten Commandments. He time & again attacks Christianity because he believes that purpose of imperialism was not economic but that of a crusade. Under British rule the incidence of Christianization was so low that his theory does not hold good. But he keeps on repeating that impoverishing India was to facilitate the missionaries.

TV channels only for sabotaging moral character

One of his boycotts is boycott on TV (all channels). At first glance it would be taken as opposition to consumerism which is supposedly induced due to Globalization. But that is not the main point.

The main logic of his anti-TV stand is “They (multinationals) know that land of India is capable of producing Vivekanandas. Even if one emerges he will drive us away”. (Vivekananda was not such a parochial nationalist. His main contribution was to introduce missionary zeal in Hindus) How to stop the generation of Vivekanandas? By inducing sexual arousal in the youth and thereby destroying their moral character!

Dixit is so vexed about sexuality that he attributes only purpose to all channels, the one of spreading eroticism. While appealing to people that they ought to boycott TV he claims that an English boy of age 11 became a father due to supposedly free sex in England. He goes on to say that France has jammed US channels by using satellites to protect French youth from US eroticism. He praises General De Gaul for banning TV, cinema & restaurants while he was ‘building his nation’. I wonder how French can be so conservative about this issue.

He appeals to burn the issues of Time of India. You may think that its policy might be pro-globalization. But, no, every issue of Times of India contains at least one picture of half nude girl, according to Dixit. This is a blatant lie.

At another place he claims that in US 2.7 million Americans are engaged in anti-India conspiracy. (The very idea of conspiracy put far stringent restriction on number of participant as I understand the word ‘conspiracy’.) These 2.7 million are secluded in Pentagon & are being brainwashed to think of India as something evil. They are deprived for the opportunity to watch TV so that no different opinions may seep in. Well, it seems there are some things on TV other than eroticism too!

He asks the audience, if a boy can become Gandhi by seeing Harishchandra (a mythological king who lost all his belongings including clothes on his & Queen’s body to fulfill a promise given to a sage in his dream). What your children will become if they watch TV serials?

In the whole series of Dixit’s lectures, Gandhi’s only thought that “parliament is a sterile prostitute.” is quoted. Dixit concedes that even if he comes to power he can do hardly anything because democracy is intrinsically doomed. His praise of De Gaul, Hitler, Zirnavosky etc is clearly encouraging authoritarianism. He explicitly says few people who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the nation can only bring about a revolution by extra-constitutional way.

All others are Meer Jafars (Meer Jafar was a traitor who made Lord Clive victorious)

According to Dixit multi-party system is divisive to the society. In his own home, mother says vote X while father says vote Y (Which is a healthy sign for me). “If I cannot hold my home together, how can I keep nation together?” He asks.

According to him the Constitution of India is nothing but a copy of “Government of India Rules” by British. Gigantic efforts by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar & whole constitutive assembly are bluntly negated. Nehru & Patel were so hungry of power that they accepted every British system in the haste of takeover.

In fact, it took seven long years to finalize the constitution on 26^Th January 1950. One can have difference of opinion about policies but Dixit simply calls all national leaders as traitors. For him Nehru was a womanizer & Lord Mountbatten used his wife to bring Nehru to his terms.

   

Madhavrao Scindiya was a minister in the Congress government. Dixit had every right to criticize the minister on merit. Dixit furthers an idea of rotten-bloodline to demean Scindiya. He claims that Madhavrao Scindiya is descendent of Scindiyas who defected from the revolutionary Queen of Zanshi at the time of 1857 uprising.

This is not historically true in the first place. But even by assuming so, how can the blood-line be blamed? Once you enter into blood-line theory you are not far away from Aryan-blood etc.

Manmohan Singh is an intellectual prostitute. Chindambaram must be stoned at sight. Such are the abuses blurted out by Dixit.

Many of the lectures in this set of cassettes are delivered before Jain audience. “You are the most religious among Hindus. Once you are spoiled it is very easy to spoil Hindus. If you accept minority status you will be beggars like Muslims & Christians”

How this is relevant to globalization? Products of multinationals invariably contain some non-vegetarian item or the other. Hence Jain community is endangered.

Dixit tells us that Gorbachev was pro-globalization & therefore Soviet Union collapsed! For this he translates Glasnost (transparency) as globalization! He declares that Yeltsin is Swadehi-wala & is trying to revive Russia in that way!

More fables  

He leaves no fantasy unused while proving British as perverse & Indian leaders as fools. Another victim of his is Raja Ram Mohan Roy (the modernist social reformer who brought Sati Ban). He describes a dialogue between Roy who was convincing villagers to learn English.

Villager: “What is the use of learning English?”

Roy: “So that you can wear a neck-tie.”

Villager: “What is the use of wearing a neck-tie?”

Roy: “Weather is cold in England. They often suffer from colds. Neck-tie is handy for wiping the mucus dripping out of your nose.”

Villager: “But there is no cold weather in India.”

Roy: “-----” Has no answer & goes back defeated.

As per Dixit, Roy was supposedly an Agent of the British. The shrewd British employed such a stupid agent, is simply amazing.

Another emphasis of Dixit is that children should go to non-English medium schools. This is OK. But he translates Convent as Orphanage & says that sending your child in Convent is making him/her orphan.

Dixit explains why Americans are telling us to control population. This is in order to keep our natural resources unused & hence available for plundering. This implies that we must increase population to finish off our resources, no matter what misery of life we may have to suffer. He prefers to let fellow countrymen suffer but not let America benefit, if at all.

Dixit never looks at systemic drawbacks. His only diagnosis is that there are traitors. Siraj Uddoula who was Nawab of Bengal was very simple & innocent person. (At many places he says that Muslims were innocent but British spoiled everything). His chief of army was Meer Jafar who ordered 18000 soldiers to surrender before 300 soldiers of Lord Clive because he was sold out to Lord Clive.

Had Meer Jafar such an absolute authority of the Army why he did not topple Siraj Uddoula in the first place & waited for Cile to arrive? But treachery is the only diagnosis available in Dixit’s repertory.  

  

British could achieve Industrial revolution because they plundered India. India was being plundered by lot many aggressors like say, Mehmood of Gazani. Why any other plunderers could not achieve Industrial revolution? Dixit has no inkling about what it takes to achieve Industrial revolution.

All the technology transfer by multinationals is nothing but potato chips (not computer chips). Dixit reports that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi wept aloud in parliament because westerners did not give him the technology of cryogenic engine! Thank God he does not say that “thus the name cryogenic!”.

For him all the misery of India started with the first step of a European, Vasco de Gama, as if all the rulers up to that time & non European rulers after that were not at all exploitative.

There is only one point over which I completely agree with him. He says that higher technical education does not increase your reasoning power. He is an M.Tech from IIT Kanpur. With such strong evidence it is proved beyond doubt that education has noting to with reasoning power.     

Verbs as Domain Indicators

We do use many verbs while speaking or thinking or writing. We have a commonsense feel about their natures. However if we consciously practice classification of verbs in terms of the kinds of acts they involve, we may get a philosophical insight about human actions.

Observe the following groups of verbs. Does grouping them together make sense?

1.     Want, believe, feel, excite, hope, fear, like, dislike, assume, project, attend, perceive, conceive, understand, interpret, wish, pray, get convinced, be perplexed about, doubt, suspect, expect, respect, honor, prefer, ignore, forget, remember, justify, tend to, recognize, plan, hate, judge, value, appreciate, deplore, adore, look for, fantasize, conceit, ought to, take an attitude, turn attention to, imply

2.     grab, hold, release, reach for, make, join, dig, cut, tie, lift, throw, melt, mould, weld, fit, assemble, brew, distill, dye, bleach,

3.     persuade, convince, appeal, argue, demonstrate, show, request, demand, claim, offer, negotiate, conciliate, promise, trust, suspect, encourage, justify, criticize, understand, sympathize, praise, blame

4.     threaten, allure, deceive, coalesce, conspire, attack, defend,      

mislead, bait, entrap, harass, coerce, compel, torture, kill, enforce, fight, mute, suppress & so on.

This grouping is in accordance with domains requiring different methodology in human sciences & also in social practice.

Mental acts are continuously occurring, whether they culminate in bodily movements or not, like noticing something or turning the arrow of attention from one focus to another.  The acts which express themselves outside the mind of the incumbent are of three types. One is interactive with other agents & other is bringing about changes in material objects & the next is treating humans as if they were material objects.

These kinds differ in terms of truths they can contain & means of validating such truths.

They enjoy advantages & suffer disadvantages in terms of containing the truths & of validating the truths. Therefore philosophical analysis requires discernment of acts on these lines. Verbs represent the acts & therefore a typology of verbs becomes relevant. We shall see the groups of verbs which are typically employed for the three kinds of acts. 

Want, believe, feel, excite……of group 1 are the verbs enjoying the ‘First-Person Privilege’  

“Othello believed that Desdemona loved Casio” is true irrespective of whether Desdemona did love Casio or not. “Desdemona did not love Casio” is true irrespective of whether she could build trust in Othello or not.  “Iago wanted to ruin Othello” is also true irrespective of whether Iago successfully convinced Othello about Desdemona’s infidelity or not. But he somehow did & tragedy follows. Truths about purely mental acts are independent of the truth of their contents.

Verifications of the truths of purely mental acts, however, are not available to external observer. Other’s consciousness is in a sense insulated from one’s own consciousness. Of course we have the ability of understanding other by way of putting one self in others’ shoes. But knowledge of others’ minds remains inferential.

Conceding this epistemological disadvantage of purely mental acts, we must not overlook another big advantage, the purely mental acts offer. Everybody has access to the laboratory of his/her own mind. We all can directly see the inter-relations of various inner acts & to our pleasant surprise; we can confirm that they actually do have deductively ensured relations with each other.

General statements like, ‘hope always has a ring of fear around it (that it may not come true)’, are as convincing as eidetic (contemplative) demonstrations in say, geometry. ‘Proving that one loves disturbs the love as it originally was.’ is another statement which anybody can verify in her minds laboratory. ‘Any two persons having a common and non-sharable object of preference will stand in competition with other’ is another generalization we can safely make on the basis of meanings of ‘object of preference’ ‘non-sharable’ etc. deductively.

Husserlian Phenomenology was a great attempt at eidetic demonstrations of essences seen directly in one’s own mind. Even before that Spinoza had tried to prove ethical theorems by way of deductive connections amongst emotional vectors.

At the other end of the spectrum there are verbs which represent bodily interventions in the external world. grab, hold, release……group 2, & all sorts of operations that we are capable of doing upon a thing ,will come in this category. Behaviorism entirely dwells upon observable bodily changes. Issue of verification is very clear (though not always available) about these verbs. This is good for science & technology. However although the act is grounded in material reality, the meaning attached to it by the actor can hardly be neglected. ‘Motive’ is crucial part of any charge-sheet about materially provable crimes. If physical labor is not seen in context of intention of actors, it will obscure all issues regarding the form of labor, content of labor & intent of labor. There is a parable about this. Three workers were doing the same activity of cutting stones. A bystander asks each one “What are you doing”. One answers, “Can’t you see? Cutting stones.” Second answers, “Earning my daily bread.” Third one answers, “Building a temple”. There are issues of alienation & conflicting interests at workplace. Sociology of work can not afford to ignore the meaning attached by the actor & merely describe the physical act.

Third category namely verbs about others involve communicative actions. Such typical verbs are, persuade, convince, appeal……group 3. The process of genuine communication may go through initial misunderstandings. The very important verb in communicative category is ‘to interpret’. Art of progressive interpretation is called hermeneutics. Especially when the original interlocutor is absent or lost in the antiquity, the responsibility of interpreter increases & so increases the variety of possible interpretations. There is Hermeneutics of trust & hermeneutics of doubt.

Habermass has defined the rationality of communication as, “Each communicator must be ready to give proofs of, intelligibility of terms, factual correctness, logical coherence, normative consonance & authenticity of purpose”. (His Book: Theory of Communicative Action).

When genuine communication fails, or is not intended in the first place, we come to manipulative & coercive side of human interaction. Here the free agent-hood of the other is denied & humans are seen as objects to be manipulated or used. Typical verbs will be threaten, allure, deceive…of the group 4.

The above categories of verbs may overlap in some cases & be questionable in some others. However, if we have a philosophical understanding about types verbs, we are more likely to take the issue in right domain.                

     

Responsibilitarianism

                    All Ethics presupposes that actors ought to own up the responsibility 

of their actions. The term Responsibilitarianism may sound as a tautology. Unfortunately due to various philosophies & anti-philosophies that have emerged in the course of the on-going enlightenment project, have deviated from the project & have tried to render the project as impossible & in some cases even unwarranted. Rebellions against the very notion of Reason in human sciences on one hand & emergence of reductionist determinism out of the exact sciences on the other have tried to undercut the notion of ‘voluntary agent becoming more & more rational’, by either denying agent-hood or by denying the very possibility of becoming rational. These currents in thought are accompanied by all pervasive welfare State bestowing rights after rights without bothering about the duty-side of any right. Such rights which are not supported from Duty-side tend to become hollow & add to the discontent rather than alleviating it. Re=emergence of religions & communalisms have further harmed the possibility of rational conduct. Aggressive religions are more explicit in making the harm. But non-aggressive ones spread escapism as they preach dissolution of the ego & render agent-hood as illusory.

 We are undergoing a crisis of Responsibility Deficit which tends to cascade with Authoritarianism. With all this, putting Responsibility at the center of Ethics & political philosophy does not at all sound tautological but the very need of the juncture in history.

The Idea of Human-Good

Any political philosophy worth the name can not escape from giving a paradigm-judgment regarding Human-Nature & Human-Good. Responsibilitarianism does not shy away from its universal-rational commitment & does not accept any sort of cultural relativism, as if the individual’s self-responsible choice were a matter of personal taste. It recognizes neither the ‘total pleasure maximization’ nor its ‘equal distribution’ as Human-Good.

Humans have no automatic instinctive capacity to make proper decisions to survive & thrive. They have to think, make conscious decisions, opt for some within available alternatives & own up the consequences. It is Human actions that can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as decisions are reached via conscious deliberation. Humans perceive themselves as agents or doers of their action. Their self-appraisals render the sense of responsibility to them.

Each human individual is unique & fortuitous & has to endeavor to improve her lot again & again at each situation she falls into. Responsibilitarianism recognizes faculty of  reason & quest of rationality but also accepts fallibility, imperfection & susceptibility to temptations on the part of humans. Responsibilitarianism envisions Human-Good in every individual rising as much she can towards Autonomy, Responsibility & Maturity. It proposes to encourage the abiders of responsibility & to discourage the evaders of individual responsibility as well as the invaders of individual rights.

Why coercive power is needed at all

Responsibilitarianism cherishes rule of law & despises the arbitrary whims of the rulers. It recognizes no discriminatory privileges or servitudes & seeks proper law that is universally applicable to all, i.e. Isonomy (& not any quantity distributive equality). General principle is that every authority must be redeemed by accomplishment of the responsibility implied in it & that every responsibility must be enabled by the authority required for it. Deficit of responsibility & surplus of authority generates the demand for coercive power.

The supply of coercive power, on the other hand, comes basically from the relation between the victor & the vanquished that is established at the culmination of wars. Warfare, albeit irrupting intermittently, is kept seething in the form of envy & hatred amongst parochial ‘collective identities’ needed by the minds that do not have true self-esteem.

We will keep aside the ‘supply side’ of coercive power & concentrate upon how Responsibilitarianism seeks to minimize the demand of coercive power generated by the ‘Responsibility Deficit’.

Responsibility towards oneself

Responsibilitarianism countenances three basic categories of Responsibilities & corresponding Authorities (or Rights). Each human individual owes a responsibility towards herself & an authority over herself. It is the responsibility to accept one’s lot, (wasting least energy in grudging & blaming) & to improve upon it. This means using one’s opportunities & capabilities in such a way as to enhance them & not to diminish them, while dealing with threats in such a way as not to multiply them. This is only a prudent rationality. (Moral rationality comes in the remaining two categories.)

The corresponding authority is the personal freedom to employ one’s mind, body & legitimate ‘property’ towards one’s own ends. One’s ends could be altruistic as well but they ought not to be imposed by others.

 The responsibility towards self is optional, in the sense that others (or the State) can not properly compel you, to take care of yourself, if you do not do so on your own. There are so many ‘Self-Harming Vices’ in humans. These include avoidance, indolence, addictions, aversions, obsessions, idiosyncrasies, dogmas & even sheer stupidity, only to name a few. Acting under their spell is to do injustice to oneself. No doubt there exists a lot of injustice from (& to) others to be fought socially & constructively. However, by carrying a ‘victim complex’ OR a ‘guilt complex’ only adds to the self harming vices.

 To counter these vices, of course there are self-enhancing virtues of which humans are endowed with, nurtured into & can imbibe them by practicing volitionally. Self-Enhancers not only do justice to their selves but in turn become capable of doing justice (or something more than justice) to others as well.

Conditional responsibility towards particular others

The second basic category of responsibilities & authorities comprises of the conditional ones towards particular others with whom one engages in voluntary contracts (tacit or express).

 These contracts ought to be truly voluntary, i.e. not made by forces of ‘aggressions’ (non-aggression will be coming under third category.). These contracts ought not to be undefined or ambiguous. One ought not to have accepted responsibilities of which one is not truly capable of shouldering. One ought not cheat or falter away in the midst of carrying through the contract. Even in case of unintended failures, it should be clear as to who is to bear their brunt. Contracts should not be one-sided i.e. authorities & responsibilities should be finite & mutually redeeming.

Some faulty contracts are bound to be there & some breaches of the good ones are also bound to occur. Disputes are bound to arise. Arrangements of resolving disputes & giving verdicts of compliances & compensations must be made. However if some party to a dispute simply refuses to honor verdict then the dispute may enter in the area of crime. It is dealt with in the third category.

Unconditional responsibility towards all others

In this category, every human individual owes an unconditional responsibility towards every other human individual. Seeing the finite & little capacity of single individual, it is clear that this responsibility can not be one of positively supplying something but that of refraining from something.

Here we come to the ‘no aggression’ principle. Not to aggress upon others (except in utter self-defense or minimally invasive prevention) is the most revered principle of Responsibilitarianism. The word freedom is used in many senses. We can talk of ‘inner freedom’ whence one can overcome one’s unruly passions. We can talk of ‘freedom to do things’ in the sense of acquiring a capacity or strength or facility to do things. Such other nuances of the word freedom are also important for Human-Good. Political philosophy, however, must focus upon the freedom from others’ wills being imposed on the individual, by force. All ‘softer’ versions of threat, if investigated by asking the question, “What if I defy?” & take it to its logical conclusion; we discover again & again that the ultimate kernel is physical threat. Power, in the final analysis is violent. Extortion is the basic form of all misappropriations, all injustice.

Thus every human individual has a universal responsibility of not aggressing upon other & has universal authority of not being aggressed by others. The moral right to self-defense (not a right to retribution) is most vulnerable because the individual is always in ultimate minority. Any two individuals allying/coalescing for extorting their common singular victim are enough, let alone ‘all’ (about 6.5 billion). A lynch hunting mob is worst possible threat to individual’s right.

 Second, when anyone acts in self defense, there is always a chance of over-retaliation, i.e. a reverse aggression. Therefore we all need some agency that can protect us from aggression. That is the main moral basis of State. From Responsibilitarian point of view, State-coercion is justified only insofar as it is needed to prevent citizen to citizen coercion.

The Vicious circle

Although we have distinguished the three pairs of responsibilities & authorities, in personal, civil & political arenas, these by no means can remain unaffected by each other. Looking from the ‘demand side’ of coercive power the Responsibility-Deficit occurs in all the three categories as there are evaders & invaders. The vicious circle can be traced right from the responsibility deficit in Self-Responsibility. As individuals fall short in the responsibility to themselves (due to self-harming vices & lack of self-enhancing virtues), their capability of shouldering responsibility to others, diminishes. This leads to failures in responsibilities not only towards themselves but also towards others.

At the same time ‘the others’ do have their authorities as bestowed on them by laws & contracts. Thus the responsibility deficit enters the second sphere. This increases unresolved disputes, breaches of contracts & dishonored verdicts. This process inevitably leads to a situation in which somebody’s rights are encroached. Any authority either has to be redeemed by fulfillment of the corresponding responsibility, so that such authority will retain its ‘voluntary’ basis; OR the authority will have to be coercively imposed on somebody or the other. To the extent authorities become sustainable by coercion, the ‘power’ is required.  The non-violent character of ‘voluntary’ contracts is lost. Crimes breakout & they have to be repressed. Demand for State power increases.

The state power, instead of stopping crimes & implementing verdicts, starts imposing ‘redistribution’ of goods to the self-irresponsible, as well as those who are irresponsible to others, By way of offering bail-outs. The State thereby falsely redeems their responsibilities by bestowing undeserved remittances & grants. For this the State starts extorting the responsible because, qua state, it does not produce any good.

This path of appeasement may earn more popularity but in fact aggravates the problem of responsibility deficit as it rewards the irresponsible & punishes the responsible. Thus the State supposedly the lone protector from all extorters becomes the greatest extorter & the vicious circle continues towards totalitarianism.

Philosophical Blunders of Egalitarianism

What legitimizes the State for neglecting its proper function & usurping proper functions of civil society? The answer lies in the idea of justice of egalitarians who treat the ‘distribution pattern’ as just or unjust without bothering to see whether the incumbents on various point on the distribution ‘curve’ deserve the position or not!

Egalitarians simply assume that all misery is necessarily caused by injustice done by others & all wellbeing is necessarily caused by doing injustice to others. The truth of the matter can be expressed in following equations a) misery = misfortune + self-harming + mutual antagonism + injustice by others & b) Wellbeing = good fortune + self enhancing + mutual complementarity + injustice to others. 

Egalitarians deem any good fortune as if it were snatched away by the fortunate from the unfortunate. Fortuity is neither just nor unjust for it is not a human action at all. (It must be always remembered that fortuity is pertaining to all aspects of life & varies so much from aspect to aspect, in case of same individual, that it is impossible to fix general ranks or to classify individuals as plus/minus on its ‘axis’. Furthermore instead of ranking individuals on the fortuity axis, more often groups are ranked & internal differentiation within groups as well as overlaps amongst groups are overlooked.  )

 If the good fortunes are not ‘deserved as such’ by the fortunate, it does not imply that they are, therefore, deserved by ‘others’ either. The unfortunate deserve compassion but not a right of ‘justice’ to forcefully snatch away the fortunes from the fortunate.

 Politicians, bureaucrats, all the middlemen of ‘redistribution’ who indulge in ‘rent seeking’ for themselves &/or indulge in wastage of the resources to be ‘redistributed’

Indeed, on humanitarian grounds, the fortunate should be generous, compassionate & forgiving to the unfortunate. Responsibilitarianism of course upholds the supererogatory virtues without forgetting that they must flow voluntarily. Responsibilitarianism opposes convicting the fortunate for the crime of being fortunate & extorting them indiscriminately.

This is as far as fortuity goes. But blaming self-enhancers for the self-earned misery of the self-harmers, (or blaming those who achieve mutual complementarity for the self earned misery of those who indulge in mutual antagonism) is a perversion of justice. This idea of equality is nothing but, “Envy draped in a robe of compassion & usurping the chair of justice.”

Paternalism & Demagoguery

Indeed human individuals can fall prey to misjudgments & temptations but they can & do learn from their mistakes & also get expert advice. The State whose proper function is judicial & if necessary, that of enforcement, if called for by citizens qua aggrieved parties, starts deciding on its own as to what is good for its ‘subjects’ & force them to well behave. State invents victimless crimes & bans (which it can not actually implement  but diverts the ‘crime’ in the domain of underworld) them. Such parental stance is called paternalism.

Demagoguery is the misuse of the majority principle of democracy. The majority principle is for attaining maximum possible consent to the election of personnel for holding offices or such other decisions where principles of civil rights are not flouted. Any true democracy ought to be a liberal state & not totalitarianism. If majority principle is interpreted as that a majority has a right to forgo democracy itself, then it is not properly democratic. The rights of liberty must be above the popular opinion at a point in time. This is often called as constitutionalism.

Demagogues are the politicians who try to win over masses by offering them ‘free gifts’. Outright impossible promises are at least better in one sense. These are not to be implemented in any case. But there are promises that can be implemented by taxing others &/or flouting ‘fiscal discipline’. Unjust & ‘positive’ rights (i.e. rights of getting supplies or quotas or share in power) are instituted. Irregularities are ‘regularized’. Demagogues create ‘favor/loyalty’ relations with voters & vote banks. Democracy becomes a method of sharing maximum spoils with maximum people where demagogues make politics an office of profit. In the name of democratizing the market, democracy is marketized.

Collectivism:

Treating any set of individuals as a bearer of a common subject-hood is resorting to collectivism. Only single individual is a proper bearer of subject-hood. It is an individual who switches over to ‘mob mentality’ by misusing the anonymity of being one of a crowd. Mob is set of individuals bearing ‘mob-mentality’.

 Class, caste, gender, language, region, race, nationality or whatever variable that is used to define a set can be misused for resorting to collectivism. It obscures the differentiation & power relations within the set. This suits the vested interest of the powerful individuals within the set.

 Even a proper organization consciously formed by individuals & operating as a singular legal entity does not bear a common subject-hood. Finally it is the individuals that are held responsible, as per their roles, for whatever happens within or ‘to’ that organization. The organization proper (role specific) & the set of individuals engaged in that organization (irrespective of the roles) construed as a ‘collective’, are two different things. Bosses of a firm appeal to their subordinates, “We are one family”, in order to suppress discontent within the organization (as if family were less oppressive than a firm).

 Collective identity lures individuals to believe that whatever happens to any ‘member’ of the collective has happened to ‘them’. They unnecessarily take pride, shame or resentment coming in equal share & multiply the ‘case’ into the ‘case of all’. Within a collective there emerges an evil complementarity between evaders of self-responsibility with the paternalistic invaders of others’ responsibility.

 Collective always needs some external threat or enemy. Collectives project their ‘favorite’ enemy upon each other & convert the false claim of enmity into a self fulfilling prophecy. Collectivism is a tool for political manipulators on one hand & a psychological security cover for the evaders & the mediocre on the other. Advocates of collectivism often give a big cry that One’s individuality itself is socially constructed (hence not real in itself) & deny any self-making of individuality. Even if this claim is, for the sake of argument, held true, it can be answered that ‘the collectivist individuality’ that tries to refuse individuality is also a socially constructed fiction.

Collectivists often make a charge that the individualists treat individuals as atomistic & social organization as a heap of potatoes. Truth is exactly the opposite. Individualists seek to formulate the social ‘molecules’ in terms of actual bonds of ‘role-ions’. It is the collectivists who put a set of individuals into ‘bags’ of collective entities, all (supposedly) equal within the bag, like potatoes.

Collectivists seem to revere solidarity & sense of belonging. No individualist has recommended loneliness. Individualists want to build authentic mutuality & togetherness from within the minds of individuals & not an imposed allegiance or ownership by others. If one does not overcome the fear of loneliness one can not taste the bliss of solitude & it the bliss of solitude that one can hope for authentic togetherness.

Whatever may be the process of social decision making, it can not be other than some structure of connections between severally occurring decisions, in singular minds. Collective mind is a figure of speech at the best & monster of tyranny at the worst.

Responsibilitarianism is a continuing ideological battle, again & again re-awakening the sprit of Enlightenment. Dare to think! Throw away the self-earned-tutelage (Svayam-Arjit-Aashritataa).        

                       

Why not Pantheism rather than Atheism?

Spontaneous Optimism is Faith. Compelled Faith is degrading to humans and blasphemous to God.

No Optimist can supply sufficient evidence to support his position that, on the whole, future of Mankind is bright. (Counter-evidence is more conspicuous.) But all meaningful endeavors are meaningful under this presupposition. Statement of optimism could be, total Existence (matter-energy, consciousnesses, imaginations, contemplations are all included in ‘Existence’.) has an inherent net propensity of perpetually (may be with a few setbacks) moving towards the ‘Better’. (Does this lead to Ultimate perfection or the process would continue asymptotically? My position is in favor of asymptote.)  

Obviously, the ideas of ‘Good’ are certainly not concurrent. But I think they are somewhat convergent. As if it were, vector of the direction of Good for each of us will have some deviation from each other but not more than 90⁰ and certainly not diametrically opposite. (This may also be a part of my optimism.) Peace, Harmony, Justice, Health, Authentic Communication, Joy of Art, Complementarity with non-human Nature are a few items which will occur in almost everyone’s list. May be more convergence with richer lists will also be one implication of the propensity.

No doubt some individuals can sustain their optimism without involving the notion of God. Atheism is a valid philosophical choice. However Atheism is not the only valid choice. You don’t have to prove ‘objective existence’ of your dialogue-partner who enriches your mental and overall life. Ardent Atheists are completely missing the point when they make issue of God into a problem in validity of knowledge. 

God is not a proposed fact at all. He is the complementary pole of a particular set of attitudes towards life. Of course there are multiple notions of God and multiple attitudes invoked by them. Some of such attitudes are deplorable but some are commendable too. Critique of attitudes lies in the value-realm and has nothing to do with objectively provable existence of any entity. As Gabriel Marcel has suggested it is sufficient for God to exist only in ‘second person’ in inner dialogue. Atheists are sealing the dialogue with all Theists indiscriminately and unnecessarily confining themselves in ideological isolation which is detrimental to the laudable causes which some Atheists are pursuing.

Let us focus upon what makes Theism problematic, especially so for liberal perspective. We must identify those features of Theism which ought to be negated for Human Good. Amongst the Vices associated with Theism Divisiveness, Antagonism and Authoritarianism are strong ones and inaction, fatalism and escapism are the softer ones. It must be made clear as to which components in the notion of God are responsible for generating these vices. Before directly expounding Pan-Theism let us focus on the roots of vices associated with Non-Pan-Theisms. Let us call Non-Pan-Theisms as ‘Divisive-Theisms’ for reasons we will see immediately.

Divisive-Theisms divide Existence into Theos and Non-Theos, Divine and Mundane, Sacred and Profane, Chosen ones and Non-Chosen ones and of course, the Fidel and the Infidel. God has to be one! But his messengers are many. Each messenger’s version of God, God’s commands, as well as Name of God varies. There are significant mismatches between these. But one thing is common in Divisive-Theisms is that they demand unconditional allegiance by the followers. Still worse, the message also contains Laws for running society/ Government in ‘this world.’ In case of almost all Divisive-Theisms the commands of God also contain sanctions of Rewards and Punishments, in this world/this birth as well as threats and allurements about other worlds and/Or other births. God in Divisive-Theisms no more remains innocent dialogue partner of Gabriel Marcel but becomes sovereign dictator. Humans are basically sinners deserving to be tamed by God and his representatives. What comes to human lot are fear and guilt, to be ‘overcome’ by wars and tortures/ordeals! No wonder why many a Humanists become Atheists.

But still, the larger optimism which I mentioned earlier is captured by Divisive-Theisms because the God is unconditionally beneficent at least in the long run. God has rule-making power and also he can break his rules if he wishes to bestow his Grace upon the worshiper he finds more lovable. He has an unlimited forgiving nature and can respond to Prayers favorably unless it is the case of infidelity.

The Divisive-Theisms suffer from many logical flaws but a few of them are really devastating to their arguments. Omnipotence is a self-contradiction. Whatever you may be in a position to do you can not do otherwise simultaneously. God will need infinite number of universes to actualize his omnipotence! But ‘we’ are trapped in only one of them which need not be the best of them. Then comes the ultimate dilemma that how Omni-beneficence, Omnipotence and actual Suffering of creatures can all go together?

 Whether I believe in his existence or not, I would give up claim of omnipotence rather than the claim of beneficence. If God is good but not omnipotent he still remains worship-worthy. But if he is omnipotent and still makes his subjects suffer then he doesn’t remain worship-worthy. For me, His worship-worthiness is more important than his less than ‘Omni’-potence or non existence altogether. This is because 95% of my co-travelers on planet earth are dependant on his beneficence and not omnipotence. For worshipers it is the beneficence that keeps their optimism alive. The agents of God emphasize Omnipotence so that they can keep worshipers on ‘the right path.’

By mentioning 95%, I do not at all want to indicate that what majority thinks is right. Question is not right or wrong but the overwhelming fact that many of them are trapped in some or the other Divisive-Theism and you can not merely declare the trap as imagined, and then intellectually prove it and they will be liberated. Due to Atheists’ adherence to making the issue an issue of fact (true or false) is counter-productive. Theists’ emotional reaction to this is evasive or invasive but not communicative. An insurmountable schism has been built. This schism has insulated the dialogue between theists and atheists. The insulation ought to be removed in theological idiom as it is stuck on that side. Scientific idiom goes skew. The dialogue neither brings about convergence nor cordiality. Skew debates are repetitive as they do not find a common plane to cut each other.

Turning back to the ultimate dilemma that how Omni-beneficence, Omnipotence and actual Suffering of creatures can all go together? I repeat that forgoing worship-worthiness is out of question. Even the Divisive-Theisms covertly give up Omnipotence. The very fact that we can sin against his will is sufficient to prove that He is not omnipotent. Whether our sins are limited to those committed in ‘this’ life or accumulated through many earlier birth-lives is a secondary matter. Even if his subjects have earned their suffering, how could he let them do so?

Furthermore omnipotence is cascaded with Perfection which is more of a contradiction. Most of the Theisms also believe that God is an already perfect entity and hence they allow no room for him to become more and more near-perfect. Finally they have to answer that his functioning is beyond our cognitive ability or the evil and suffering that appears to us is a complete illusion, going to the extent that world is a hallucination suffered by God! In such case where is the basis for the optimism with which we started the discussion? Optimism about improvement of this world is replaced by optimism to permanently escape from this world and permanently joining the blissful abode.  

Now let us see how Pantheism is different and more amenable to reason and more accommodative than Divisive-Theisms. According to Pantheism there is nothing outside God. God doesn’t have an ‘outside’. As substance of all substances, he is pervading everything and as an emergent property of all emergent properties (divinity), He is encompassing everything. All dimensions like space time, substance, attribute, composite/component, concept and items subsumed under etc. are inside God. Of course the empirical events occurring in the dimensions are included as well.

Nothing is profane. Sacredness may not be equally distributed. There can be higher and lower degrees of sacredness but no room for the profane inside God. In Atheism the very category sacred/profane is discarded so nothing is sacred. But note that ‘everything is sacred’ is a positive note which is needed by worshipers. The main difference is that in pantheism there is unconditional inclusion of everybody inside God, irrespective of what he/she believes in or does not believe in. Nobody is worth eliminating on theological grounds. There is no devil and none is his agent. A pantheist crusade is inconceivable.

How evil does get accommodated in the Pantheist version of God? God has not achieved perfection. He has to evolve along with evolving matter-energy into life, pre-programmed creatures to self-programmable creatures, savage human to civilized human, unjust civilization to just civilization and so on. All his modicums (we are the most crucial of them at least for his project-Earth) are always at different stages of his evolution. By same token, all humans have not yet sufficiently learnt the art of doing thing in a good way and hence they have to do it in evil way. As long as evil has a function in life and it is not successfully replaced by good, evil will exist. 

But evil has no positive self-existence. It is a lack of good rather than something opposite of it. If and as we learn how to solve our problems without resorting to evil, God’s self perfection process is manifested through us. It is us, who can add into the Glory of God and Grace of God. Glory to the extent we materially progress and Grace to the extent we morally and spiritually upgrade ourselves. God is neither going to punish nor going to reward for simple reason that he does not want to fool himself. Keeping people manageable by threats and allurements is our society’s way of dealing. He can not be satisfied with inauthentic allegiance. He will deem his project successful only, if and when, it really is. Not a false show of it. His dream is that humans become good out of their own intrinsic value-judgment. Managers of societies can cheat worshipers in the name of God but nobody can cheat God. He is witnessing everything that goes on in our minds. We can trick ourselves but not Him. 

 He is undergoing our sufferings and enjoying our happiness as he is our Soul. But he inspires and suggests too. Whenever we find that we excel unbelievably, face agony courageously, help others without any consideration of return, we can be sure that it is manifestation of his Becoming.  In Pantheist version God ceases to be a goal to be achieved, Master to be pleased, Immortal Joy to get merged into. Pursuit is not for Advaita (Non-Dichotomy) for it is already there. It is upliftment that is to be achieved. If we do our part God will respond by unfolding new wonders. Saying by a human that I want to reach to God, it is as stupid as a cell in our body wanting to reach a body. It is already well-placed in it. isn’t it?  

Atheism does not divide people as Divisive-Theisms do. But Atheism lacks any transcendent appeal for uniting. Pantheism unites all of us to help each other in learning, pertaining to the stage one has reached. Earth may not be his only project. As he became matter-energy to be other than consciousness, he is evolving the other way round. He has got infinite patience. What he certainly does not want to do is imposition. We are free to contribute in his project but he will not reject us if we don’t. He is an appeal. He is the Hope. In our moments of intrinsic joy it is he who smiles. In our honest and sincere endeavor, it is Him who buttresses. Each one of us is His unique modicum of His universal essence. His essence is not full and final. It is Becoming.

The main point is that Pantheists can communicate with Divisive-Theists in theological idiom and bring about a change of heart. Atheists have made themselves irrelevant by taking the issue into an Epistemological diversion where the issue does not belong to.

Who are the main thinkers of Pantheism? On which points, do they converge and diverge? What are the technical terms? How the Issue of fortuity is handled? What in us continues after death and why? Are a few of many questions that need to be answered but this was an attempt to show that there can be a third way.