Tomichan Matheikal's blog

2016 is bidding adieu having gifted us ‘post-truth’ as the word of the year, thanks to the Oxford Dictionaries.  Is the concept new, however?  Haven’t emotions and personal beliefs been more influential in shaping our ‘truths’ than objective facts throughout history?  Otherwise, why did religions and their gods continue to wield such power over us perennially?  Nationalism, Jihadism, Trumpism, Modiism, and a whole range of isms would not have succeeded as they did if objective facts held sway over shaping of public opinions. ‘Post-truth’ is just a euphemism for falsehood, deception, chicanery and all the lies that have dominated politics and human affairs from time immemorial.  There’s nothing new about it except that it’s a new word.  Only the word is new, not the concept, not the implications. Throughout history political leaders used various tricks to deceive their people.  We have words like Machiavellian and Goebbelsian which came from real people who used inhuman

Let alone acts of violence, every trace of evil is proof that mankind is still an unfinished product.  It is as if the evolution got stuck somewhere.  We have a highly evolved brain compared to the other animals.  But most human beings do not use the brain for promoting goodness, not even the welfare of our own species.  On the contrary, we compete with one another and are highly detrimental to our own species, to others as well as the planet.  The amount of money, energy and resources employed in destructive activities such as war and terrorism is much more than what is devoted to constructive and mutually helpful purposes.  In the process we also inflict much damage on the planet which sustains us.  Which other species is so self-destructive?  Yet we claim to have a sophisticated brain. Who is an evolved human being? An intellectual understanding of life and the world which instils compassion towards other creatures should ideally be the first and foremost character

Recently I saw a Christian catechism book which described Albert Einstein as a firm believer in God.  Nothing is farther from the truth. In his biography Einstein clearly states that his “deep religiousness” came to “an abrupt end” at the age of twelve when he realised that established authorities like the state and religions were deceiving people with “lies”.  As an adolescent Einstein developed a “mistrust of every kind of authority” because he could see through the falsehood that upheld the authorities.  Yet Einstein was religious in the sense that he saw sanctity in the universe.  “I believe in Spinoza’s* God,” declared Einstein, “who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind.”  Answering a scientist who questioned Einstein’s reported religious faith, Einstein wrote, “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so fa