Sunday, December 28, 2014

Quick notes: Evangelical startups, Super-intellect...

  • Mohandas Pai on hyper-growth evangelism: "I have noticed over 30% of taxi drivers have converted over the last 5 years. Some 9-12% of undivided AP has been converted".
    (They do all this silently, unlike the VHP folks who make loud noises after converting 20 people.)


  • Intrusion: Chinese hit back against a foreign intrusion: Christmas.


  • Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God: Astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

    Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

    Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

    Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

3 comments:

Sujeev said...

In addition to other steps to check Christian conversion activit, we can do ourselves a favour by pressuring the Indian Government to postpone the December vacation by two weeks beginning next year to January, so that going forward the Christmas long Break in India becomes the Sankranthi mid-winter vacation. Christmas day should be made Restricted Holiday for Christians only. Several advantages to this move - Will erode power & prestige of Christian Clergy, identify crypto-christians,make Sankranthi a bigger festival than it is now. No reason why a holiday meant for British era christian colonial administrators should continue any longer.

Brownian Motion said...

I think there's a method behind the apparent madness of the VHP and other Hindu outfits. They're making a noise about the conversions they carry out to make it very difficult for the "secular" parties in Parliament to refuse to pass a anti-conversion bill. The BJP clearly wants to bring such a bill but the secular parties don't because they want the churches and muslims to freely lure the poor into christianity and islam. If a national anti-conversion bill is passed it will make it very difficult to lure the poor into the semitic religions. The VHP cannot hope to compete on money hence the need for the bill and the noise.

Sujeev said...

Another reason is that dispersed Indian families are finding it increasingly difficult to get together again for Sankranthi so soon after Christmas break. Does it not make sense then that turning Christmas break into Sankranthi break will associate the good times of mid winter with Sankranthi rather than Christmas in the minds of all Indians thus giving a leg up for Hindu Dharma over Christianity & Islam in India?