"I am amused by the false pride Dr. Roy has in "unparalleled" ancient Indian literary wealth."
Who is talking about pride of literary wealth of those mythological books here? I am not, even though I could, because most of those books are considered as epic Mohakabbyas. That's not my point here. You are also mixing up things out of context.
Let's make it clear to you all - I am only taking about 'ideas' embedded in those books, not their scientific validity of anything.
Once we assume those books as mythological stories, there is no point looking for science behind those fictional stories, but we cannot rule out the possibility that some of those 'ideas' may have inspired scientific developments in the later era. That's what I am talking about.
You must know - Indus Valley civilization started 3000 B.C., which makes it more than 5000 years old civilization. Some of the Hymns of Rig Ved were written more than 3500 years ago. If you want to compare literatures, compare literatures in the rest of the world at that time.
Jiten Roy From: "Subimal Chakrabarty subimal@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2014 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Use and misuse of science in religions
I am amused by the false pride Dr. Roy has in "unparalleled" ancient Indian literary wealth. I don't know what he thinks about ancient Chinese, Greek, Persian, and Roman literary wealth. We should have strong belief in the power and indispensability of scientific process and methodology for the progress of science and hence of civilization. Fictions are fictions. They can be based on wild imagination and can be termed as fairy tales. Homer's epics are probably older than the Indian epics. Like the Indian epics the Greek epics are also full of wild imaginations.
Having said this I need to emphasize that I will never set aside these books as rubbish and not worth reading. They contain many eternal truths besides the literary beauty. I enjoy them.
Sent from my iPhone
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 9, 2014, at 9:02 PM, Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona] <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Dr. Bain, the problem with your comments, most of the time, is that you think out of context.Here, you are judging Vedic stories against modern science fiction stories. Vedic stories were at least a few thousand years old. How much scientific sophistication do you expect from the people in that era? Did you give a thought where rest of the world was when Vedic stories were written?When you read something from a thousand year old books, you need to think with reference to that era. Just trashing them without careful consideration, you will do injustice to those books.Do you know how Ganesh got his elephant head? If you do, you can compare that to the modern day face-transplant. Many Vedic stories deal with space-travel and space-warfare. If I remember correctly, Megnad used to fight from behind the cloud. Have you thought about how did those fictional ideas came to them in those days? Now, compare the standard of the Vedic people with that of the people in the rest of the world in those days. Only then, you will realize how sophisticated they were.You found some falsifications in my comments. What are those false statements? If you tell them, may be I can correct myself.Jiten Roy
From: "Sukhamaya Bain subain1@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, November 9, 2014 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Use and misuse of science in religions
Here are my comments on the quoted comments (below) by Dr. Jiten Roy.
I see too much of conjecture, exaggeration, imagination and falsification in Dr. Roy's comments. With the same kinds of practice, religious people of other shades have been making the claims that all kinds of knowledge can be found in their religious books. The way I see them, the stories in the Hindu scriptures are like poor quality science fictions, based upon imagination. Compared to those, many of the modern science fictions are based upon a good deal of methodical thoughts, and upon technologies that actually have been proven to work. That is why a lot of real science and technology have their roots in science fictions.
BTW: As for Modi/BJP being a threat to secularism, people need to realize that Modi/BJP is not like the fools/fanatics that throw stones at the devil after praying to their God. Even with their oxymoron of Hindutwa, they are a lot more rational people than those who believe in the dogmatic religions.
Sukhamaya Bain
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From:
"Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]"
<mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To:
"mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com"
<mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent:
Saturday, 8 November 2014, 22:37
..........................."Indian civilization, in the Vedic era, was much advanced than any other in the world. Descriptions of inter-galactic movement through space-ship, warfare with the most advanced weapons (airplanes, rockets, missiles, etc.), in-depth knowledge of astronomy, and astrology are all in the scriptural books, which depicted the advancements of knowledge in those days."...............................................
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Posted by: Jiten Roy <jnrsr53@yahoo.com>
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