The Bucket List

Two terminally ill men (Jack Nicholson & Morgan Freeman) decide to pen down and then realize their dreams before they 'kick the bucket' in The Bucket List. Just saw it. Nice movie. Pushed me to finally start writing this list ... my own bucket list!

Well, I'll keep updating my bucket list with every new dream that I have. Of course I'll refrain as much as possible from writing about really personal goals ... since they are really personal goals and would make bad reading. Many of my dreams will be doable, many of them too fantastic to be achievable, but then that's fine isn't it? ... after all its a list of wishes and not a list of deliverables! So here they are and not in any particular order:)

1. Travel to Space
2. Visit all the New Wonders of the World: Chichen Itza, Christ the Redeemer, Colosseum, Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, Petra, Great Pyramid of Giza, Taj Mahal (check).
3. Watch an opera in Europe and at the Sydney Opera House
4. Act in a Broadway production
5. Go Skydiving! (atleast tandem)
6. Snowboarding, Sandboarding, Skiing
7. Play the Guitar
8. Understand Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
9. Get a tattoo (will probably get it on my arms, need to work out a cool design though)
10. Parasailing (check)
11. Drive (or atleast sit) in a Formula 1 car
12. Drive a Lamborghini (ooooh! i love this car)

More later...

Does God Exist?

I get quite peeved [though not visibly!] when some people [including some of my friends] claim that they are atheists because they are men/women of science. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against atheism. It's a matter of personal opinion. I can't change it, nor do I wish to, simply because there is no reason for me to believe that I am right and the atheists are wrong. I get peeved, however, by people who use science as an excuse to dismiss God and become the "Look I am so cool, I am an atheist!" type. Usually this conversion to atheism is accompanied by a wave of pomposity and condescension...almost as if any person trained in science should logically cease to believe in the existence of God. In fact throughout history there has always been a staunch demarcation drawn between science and religion. Science needs empirical evidence to prove or disprove the existence of God. Religious perceptions of God do not allow empirical observations of the 'omnipresent being'. Hence science and theology remain, till this day, at loggerheads and can't seem to coexist in peace.

So what point am I trying to make here? Simply this. This distinction between science and religion is, in my mind, dubious and manufactured. This is because my perception of God does not violate the principles of science nor the convictions of theology. What is this perception? Here goes ...

I believe that God is not an omnipresent being ... what i really mean is that God is not a being at all. IT (God) is energy, cosmic energy, the entire cosmos itself (note: not HE/SHE but IT). God is everything this Universe is made up of. The sum of every single thing - from living beings to inanimate objects to every single molecule or atom or string (sorry i am a little geeky and also a little touchy about String Theory:)) makes up God. In short, God is the Universe itself. Pause for a second and imagine God as you see HIM/HER. Most of the time when we pray we probably think of an idol (or a messiah) with a face and nose and eyes. We perhaps forget that they are merely a symbolic representation of God, they were really made up only to help us pray - don't you think that it would be a little too presumptuous to imagine that God assumes humanly shape and features? I think God is formless, shapeless and everything that we know of and don't know of, everything in the Universe and everything beyond it if there is anything beyond ...

So how does this perception tie up Science and Religion? This is how:

By assuming that God is not a being but the entire Universe and its energy we immediately make God empirical. Everything that we see around us is by definition tangible, right? Since what we see around us is a part of the cosmos, it is, by our new definition, a part of God itself and hence science has to agree that since a part of God is observable and tangible God definitely exists! On the religious side of things, defining God to be the entire expanse of the Universe makes God by definition omnipresent (theologists happy?:)). Statements made in religion like "We are all a part of God etc." now make sense because we are all clearly a part of our Universe, aren't we?

So I think that science and religion need not be, after all, as contradictory to each other as they are made out to be. If you think about it defining GOD = COSMOS & COSMIC ENERGY is nothing sinister at all. It makes perfect sense. God is supposed to be all powerful, all containing right? Well, the cosmos, the cosmic energy is all powerful and contains everything animate and inanimate in it...