Overpopulation in India

I would like to take the liberty of writing something about an issue whose presence is a general knowledge in India, but people choose to live in denial of the its consequences and prefer to raise no voice against it.





Our country is the 2nd most populous country in the entire world, and is well on it's way to become the most populated by 2025. I firmly believe that this isn't something to be proud of. Even then, some political parties in our country choose to encourage families to produce more children so that the population of a particular religion remains high.



That graph is not a lie. India will have the lion's share of that population by the end of 2050.
If we specifically talk about India, the main reason for the increased birth is

• Poverty: It makes people living in that condition believe that the increased number of children in their houses would mean more people to earn money for them in future.
• Lack of proper awareness: People are not aware about the dire conditions, or they choose to live in denial of the existence if the immediate threat to their world because of population explosion.
• Illiteracy: It goes hand in hand with poverty.
• Our 'Culture': India has an age old norm of believing that sons are the bread earners of the family and hence, couples in past chose to produce children till a male child was born. Many chose to go further and continue producing even after that happened. This is slowly changing in urban India, but it still is widely prevalent in rural parts of the country.

The basic consequences of rise in population as everyone  faces today is

• Unemployment: Providing employment to a population as huge as India's is no easy feat. Many Indians remain jobless because of this very reason.
•  Provision of basic needs like food, housing, healthcare and education cannot keep up with the ever increasing population of the country.
• Land areas, water resources and forests are over exploited leading to their ultimate scarcity.

Well, I guess you can imagine what would happen if the growth of population is not brought under control. If the situation remains unchecked, the gap between the demand and supply of basic life necessities will keep increasing and the day is not far away when even the ethical people in our societies would have to resort to criminal acts just to keep themselves and their family alive. In short, the result is chaos. If the rates remain unchecked, I believe we will see this chaos with our very own eyes within next 50 years. Sounds terrible, right?
China (the only competitor we have) has taken very drastic measures to control their numbers so that they do not face such a situation. On the other hand, we are obsessed with the issues that should be least of our concerns in 21st century.
With mass murder out of the picture, the only solution to this problem is not just decreasing the rate of increase in population, but bringing that to negative as soon as possible. I believe we should have a policy similar to the one-child policy that other countries follow to avoid the upcoming catastrophe. In other words, families should not produce more than one child per family. For those of who thought, "Two child per family is pretty reasonable too", or anything similar to that, let me tell you that it is not reasonable enough. Doing simple math would tell you that anything more than one child per family would not result in a decrease in population. We should try to solve the problem and not postpone it. Unless India implements this one-child concept and revolutionize it, it will become impossible for us to live peacefully in future.
It is my personal opinion, but I would rather stay childless for lifetime than bring a soul into this world only for him/her to see the disaster our world would be facing in very near future.

PS: For half the people who don't understand sarcasm, the reference to mass murder was a joke.
PPS: Don't be ashamed of buying and using contraceptives. It is fine, really!

Science vs. Religion

What would it take for the world to understand that everything they have been taught about the existence of religion and one or more supreme being(s) since childhood is a lie? I'm referring to the imaginary entity as supreme being(s) because this article is supposed to be an attack on each and every entity of such kind. So if you are a religious fanatic, you can stop reading here. But if you have an open mind to try and understand the reality of this world, you certainly should go ahead and read the entire article.

Science and religion, if they were beings, would not stand the sight of one another. They can never coexist. Science is based on proposal of a hypothesis and a set of experiments that would prove or disprove it, following its acceptance or rejection. Religion on the other hand is based on having faith in the power of supreme being(s) who created the world we see around and would ultimately pass judgment according to all our actions in our lives. Let us try to bring science and religion a little close to each other and try to prove the existence of supreme being(s). The idea stabs itself at heart. If you don't believe me, think about this: Science dictates that an entity can only be created by another entity who is more sophisticated in design than the entity being created. I believe both the theists and the atheists will agree to that point. Supreme being(s), if they exist, are of an extremely complex design as they are creator(s) of this universe which itself is very complex natured. Without even going into the argument of the source of supreme being(s), we have a very important fact to realize. The tasks that a complex being of that nature would perform would be of a level beyond our scope of imagination, and not petty like listen to prayers, bless marriages, punishing the sins, sending famines for lack of faith, favour our side in the war, disapprove of our sex lives, etc., in an extremely minute fraction of his creation. Please understand that I provide this argument on a purely logical basis and not faith oriented or imaginative basis.

That being said, I would like to point out a couple of baseless point that theists put forward when someone tells them that the supreme being(s) they worship don't exist. They say that we cannot disprove their existence; hence they are not wrong in following them. Some of them question that if the supreme being(s) do not exist, who created us and the world around us?
For the theists falling under the first category, it would be better if they know that there are a lot of things we cannot disprove. You cannot disprove the existence of an invisible pink unicorn that follows me wherever I go. Neither can you disprove the existence of a miniature tea kettle revolving in an orbit around planet Saturn. If I claim existence of an alien aircraft with protruding tentacles like that of an octopus, it will be my job to prove that I am right, and not the your job to prove that I am wrong. I hope you get my point now.

For the second point, i.e. the people who say that the world around us is very complex to be created by accident and thus, there must be supreme being(s) who created everything, I would like to mention that we go back to the point mentioned in the second paragraph. Whenever I ask them about the origin of this supreme being(s), the reply that I often hear is that they are absolute and need not be created. Hence, being(s) of more complex nature than the universe itself can exist without them questioning the creator of that supreme being(s), but universe, a much less complex structure cannot exist without someone creating it. In language of science, you cannot solve a complex problem by postulating an agent that is even more complex in nature and thereby compounding the problem instead of solving it. Please correct me if I am wrong there. Religion is a creation of human mind alone. We never see a plant or an animal worship someone. If someday we come in contact with a race alien to planet Earth, would they be following one of the Earth's religions? I seriously doubt it.

I believe that science is corrosive to religion as it threatens its very existence by proving theories which are not acceptable by the religion. But that is not the end of the story. Religion itself is corrosive to science as it teaches people to be satisfied by the trivial supernatural wrong explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. But people choose to live in denial and have faith in their religion or supreme being(s). They believe they will be rewarded ultimately for this faith and all the good deeds they do when the time for judgment comes. I believe that if you do good deeds only because you fear the judgment of your supreme being(s), and not out of goodness of your heart, then something is seriously wrong with you.

In words of late Carl Sagan, "How is it that hardly and major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant.'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no. My god is a little god and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed my modern science might be able to draw reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

Religions are the biggest lie in the history of humanity. Let us stop the hypocrisy and quit being so damn respectful towards them.

Inspired from Richard Dawkin’s idea of Militant Atheism