SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Question: If you refuse the existence of God like Krishna, Rama, etc then what about the evidences of Ayodhya, Dwarka, Ram-setu joining India and Shrilanka?
Answer: Yes, it is true that the King Rama, King Krishna and their kingdoms existed in history. Just like King Shivaji. Using carbon dating technique and other methods we also have calculated the time when they existed. But they were humans just like the King Shivaji was.

Question: If Rama, Krishna existed in history what about the miracles or magic they did?
Answer: This question will immediately pop up in our mind when we see proof of the existence of Rama, Krishna. But lets see an example of King Shivaji. We all clearly know that King Shivaji was there, the history of his entire kingdom, his war are true. But then what about the sword he had? Was it given by the Goddess? Surely not. We have proof that the sword was imported from the Spain.
We also see some myths associated with him like Shivaji had the power to appear and disappear anywhere. And that is why he suddenly appeared in Lal Mahal, attacked Shahisa Khan and miraculously disappeared from there. and The Goddess gave Shivaji the boon to fight and kill the Afzal Khan.
But we should understand that these myths benefited Shivaji only as other kings got scared of Shivaji and his magic. So may be Shivaji or his followers themselves started to spread such myths. Or it may be due to dominance of superstitions, false beliefs at that time.
The history of Shivaji is just of 400 years ago and still we see many myths attached to it. From that we can clearly imagine how many such myths would be attached to the history which is many centuries ago.

Question: Is it possible to live without religion or without believing in God or superpower?
Answer: Many people have God and religion as their mental or philosophical support in life. Or they consider and unknowingly get dependant on that. But to live without religion, you don’t need to be atheist. You just need to be like a kid or new born who has no religion, no God. Similarly what you do is to think, solve or face the situation. And it should be kept in mind that as bad time comes, it goes too. Nothing is going to last forever.
And if you have bad habit or addiction of smoking you will need to smoke but if you are not addicted you can live without it. Similar is the case about religion.
If the father dies suddenly, the naughty, dependant son soon gets mature in his childhood only. So it is upto us- to get dependant or not.

Question: What is the problem in being theist? Or in being religious?
Answer: There is no problem in being follower of any ideology. Problem comes when we follow any ideology blindly. And believing on religion is totally blind. In other words you cannot have faith in religion unless you blindly follow it. At the moment you start viewing religion in a logical, scientific perspective; you will no longer have faith in religion. Still you can believe in some superpower while having scientific perspective as Newton and Einstein did.
Being blind follower or being religious leads to mental, social exploitation in some or the other way. It becomes the obstacle of progress. Actually if we go deep in any of the problems in India we will find religion and God being the culprits. Social, economical inequality, caste and religion based discrimination, caste based hierarchy, lack of fraternity in different religions leading to riots and intra sub caste arranged marriages and much more is just due to the concept of religion.

Question: What does it mean to be an atheist? Should we refuse all traditions, festivals that are related to religion or God? What about our culture which is intimately connected with the religion and God?
Answer: Being atheist means thinking logically, questioning, seeing and analyzing things in a scientific perspective and refusing the existence of imaginary things that fail to pass the tests. God or such things fail to pass the tests to be existed and hence we have no reason to believe on it. But as our customs are attached to the concepts of God and miraculous things; question arises whether to refuse all those traditions and customs along with the concept of God?
It should be understood that it is not only in India that customs, culture and traditions are attached to the imaginary God or supernatural things;it is present in human history in any civilization. Whether it is Greek, Chinese, Indian, American, Australian or Adiwasi civilization; they all have their different cultures, customs and religious beliefs in supernatural things.
We actually don’t need to refuse all those traditions and customs while refusing the concept of God.
Let’s take an example of Hindu festival- Holi
Story behind Holi- Holika was a demon and she had a boon that she cannot be burnt in fire. She sat on fire with a child named Pralhad with the intension to kill him. But she got burnt and Pralhad didn’t.
We know that there cannot be such humans who are fireproof. But the story gives us moral that we should avoid bad intensions, bad habits and so celebrate it by promising not to do bad things, promising that we will burn all the bad and evil things in Holi - the fire.
So even if the story is not real, we can have the festival to celebrate victory of good on the bad.
Talking about the culture, we and every human civilization has its own culture. And it is there since we started forming colonies. And from time to time many things were added and many things were forgotten to be the part of present culture. Our manner of clothing, language, art, etc forms the part of our culture. And we see in history that every such part of culture has gone through many changes. Our clothing, language has changed. And so our culture too goes through many changes according to time and social beliefs. Do people from cities wear dhoti so as to preserve their culture? Do they speak Sanskrit? Do they use vessals made up of mud? Obviously the answer is no!
In simple words, culture is like continuously flowing water in the river. We cannot prevent our culture from being modified and being changed from time to time. It has to change to be compatible with time.

Question: What about all those Ramayana, Mahabharata stories that we used to tell our children which teaches those moral values? Or we should not tell those stories to children?
Answer: The stories full of magic and miracles we tell our children from Ramayana and Mahabharata are not the history. Or these stories are distorted history. And definitely these stories do teach many morals and good things to us. Just like the stories of Panchatantra. We know animals dont speak, think and behave as they are described in Panchatantra stories. And we just take morals from these stories without believing that they are real. Similar we can do about the stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Question: Is atheism a threat to our culture?
Answer: As described above, there cannot be any threat to the culture. Or culture cannot be prevented from being changed. So instead of saying that ‘atheism is a threat to their religious culture’ it can be said that ‘atheism itself can be the next culture.’

Question: Is it ok to forget about our culture? Or we should conserve it?
Answer: History cannot be forgotten or erased and so is the culture. And there is no need to conserve the culture, rather you cannot conserve it.
In other words, if you try to stop the flow of the river of culture by building dams over it, that dams will eventually break but the forward flow of the river cannot be stopped.

Question: Should we refuse religion as a whole or keep some good part of it?
Answer: To live as a human being you don’t need religion. And you can have morals without being religious. So basically there is absolutely no need of any religion.
We can refuse any religion but can’t erase it from history. Stories of Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bible will remain as it is (as stories of Panchatantra do).

Question: From where should we start to discuss about atheist ideas-from our family or the society?
Answer: Many times I faced the comment from people that you start spreading your atheist ideas from your family, first convince them and then only tell the society. But I don’t think any logic in the comment. I mean, starting from family or society will not make any difference. And family is also the part of society. I think the comment is absurd.