Touch of Atheism: Am I a Loser?!
Timeline of 22 Years
Md. Anisul Islam (Anistein Babu)
The Honorable Professor Richard Dawkins, the legend, the man of science and rationalism and the maximum updated version of Darwin of twenty first century, please take my gracious love and respect. I am speaking to you. I am from Bangladesh, my name is Md. Anisul Islam; my family members call me ‘Babu’ and my friends and others members call me ‘Anis’. There is story about my name; I am coming about that later on. I am going to write and make it audio clips to you sharing almost everything about me. I wish I could make you visualize the cognitive world of my brain. The reason of my sharing is to hope to have your compassion; so that I can feel that I am not cursed rather I am right and rational. I don’t want this writing or audio clip to be made public as long as I am here in my country Bangladesh, because I am going to say something about my religious stance and about myself that may hurt my parent, relatives, friends, nears and dears. I don’t want them to be hurt by my words, but I am sorry to say that the neuron-wiring of their brain or philosophically speaking, their minds are incapable to make positive sense on my words; moreover, it will get my life at the risk of being killed by worst arrogant Islamic fundamentalist; which is very common phenomenon in our country.
About Seven and half years ago I was in a horrible social and psychological problem; I attempted to commit suicide for several times, but I didn’t. I prayed to my half dead God, I felt He had heard me. Now again I feel I need a God I need an Allah; but problems is that sadly or proudly, reading more and more books has killed my God completely. Since my God is completely dead, so I at least deserve you Professor Dawkins to hear me! I don’t mean you are my God; I would like to mean that you could be more kind and compassionate than the God I know about. It seems I am in too frustration and depression; yes, maybe I am in, it basically depends how I view myself –‘experiencing self’ or ‘remembering self’. Sam Harris has explained about ‘experiencing self’ and ‘remembering self’ very well in his book “The moral landscape". I am quoting from his book- “If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment—by giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state—you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information “the experiencing self” and the second “the remembering self". And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two “selves" often disagree.
According to Kahneman, the correlation in well-being between these two ‘selves’ is around 0.5. This is essentially the same correlation observed between identical twins or between a person and himself decade later. It would seem, therefore, that about half the information about a person’s happiness is still left on the table whichever ‘self’ we consult. What are we to make of a ‘remembering self’ who claims to have a wonderful life, while his ‘experiencing self’ suffers continuous marital stress, health complaints, and career anxiety? And what of a person whose ‘remembering self’ claims to be deeply dissatisfied—having failed to reach his most important goals—but whose moment-to-moment state of happiness is quite high? Kahneman seems to think that there is no way to reconcile disparities of this sort. If true, this would appear to present a problem for any science of morality.
It seems clear, however, that the—‘remembering self’ is simply the ‘experiencing self’ in one of its modes. Imagine, for instance, that you are going about your day quite happily, experiencing one moment of contentment after the next, when you run into an old rival from school. Looking like the very incarnation of success, he asks what you have made of yourself in the intervening decades. At this point, your ‘remembering self’ steps forward and, feeling great chagrin, admits “not so much". Let us say that this encounter pitches you into crisis of self-doubt that causes you to make some drastic decisions, affecting both your family and career. All of these moments are part of the fabric of your experience, however, whether recollected or not. Conscious memories and self-evaluations are themselves experiences that lay the foundation for future experiences. Making a conscious assessment of your life, career, or marriage feels a certain way in the present and leads to subsequent thoughts and behaviors. These changes will also feel a certain way and have further implications for your future. But none of these events occur outside the continuum of your experience in the present moment."
I think I have read a relatively good numbers of books and articles about science and religion, mainly on Evolution and Religion, Astrophysics, Cosmology and psychology. I would like to mention some of those books that have made a great impact on me—‘The God Delusion’, ‘The Selfish Gene’, ‘The Blind Watch Maker’ ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ ‘The Extended Phenotype’ and ‘The greatest show on the Earth’ —by Professor Richard Dawkins; ‘The End of Faith’ and ‘The Moral Landscape’—by Sam Harris; ‘The God is not Great’—by Christopher Hitchens; ‘Breaking the Spell’ and ‘The Brainchildren’—by Daniel Dennett; ‘How the Mind works’, ‘The Blank Slate’, ‘The Language Instinct’ and ‘The stuff of thought—by Steven Pinker; ‘Vision’, ‘Hyperspace’ and ‘Physics of Impossible’ by Professor Michio Kaku; ‘Contact’, ‘Pale Blue Dot’, ‘Billions and Billions’, ‘The Cosmic Connection’, ‘The Dragons of Eden’ and ‘The Demon Hunted World’—by Carl Sagan; ‘A Brief History of Time’ and ‘The Grand Design’—by Professor Stephen Hawkins and ‘The Origin of Species’—by Charles Darwin. I have downloaded the free pdf books or audio copies of these books from internet; I wish I could read all the books that have been used as references in writing those books. I don’t mean that I have understood all the things written on those books, since my English vocabulary and scientific knowledge is not that much rich; but I can proudly say that I have understood the core message of those books very well.
I have watched all most all the lectures and interviews from the YouTube channel of Big Think, which provides contemporary lecture on science and education—conducted by highly intellectual persons. I would like to mention that I have downloaded so many numbers of interviews, lectures and debates of Professor Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Professor Lawrence Krauss, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Professor Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawkins, and Carl Sagan from YouTube; I just can’t say it enough that how much I love YouTube.
Now I would like to quote some lines from the preface of the book ‘The God Delusion’ that has encouraged me a lot to write about me to you—(I didn’t know I could.
I suspect - well, I am sure - that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’ religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness - raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages.)
(My fourth consciousness-raiser is atheist pride. Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind. There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word ‘atheist’ has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label.)
About two and half years ago, I planned to write about myself to one of my Facebook friend David Gamble, but I did not complete it and he even does not know about that. Here I am presenting how I started to write him.
Dear David Gamble,
Take my love and respect; I am happy to have you as my online friend. All credit goes to science and technology for giving me the opportunity to share myself with you. I am a somewhat regular reader of your website skeptical-science. I have read an article over there that Cambridge University is collecting coincidence events of people’s life and they will work on that scientifically. I am not writing any coincidence of life rather I am writing about the experience of my life. I don’t know whether you will have time to read this long letter/article/story or whatever it is.
I don’t know what I will do after completing this writing if I don’t have the response as I wish. Incidence > Coincidence > Experience of life have made me an atheist/agnostic/skeptic from a Muslim family and this situation is getting me to commit suicide! You might think that what a stupid and nonsense thinking. I am not a stupid or nonsense, if I were then I would have committed suicide long before. I am struggling hard to give meaning to my meaningless life. I can’t accept that I am just bullshit to this world. Don’t think that I want to commit suicide just because of that I don’t believe in God, there is no after life, there is no significance of life. I know very well that life is something very special to explore. But what if; you can’t cope up with your surroundings and environment:
My parents are ashamed of giving me the birth.
My friends do not like me, since I am an atheist so I can’t be worth enough to be a good friend.
Life is going through in such a worst situation mentally and financially that can’t be expressed in words.