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[1] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Jun 6, 2005 9:13pm Subject: Demand Immediate Rehabilitation for the Evicted Hutment Dwellers in Mumbai : Demo on Tuesday at Churchgate suklasen Dear Friends, We??re all aware that in about one and a half month of coming to power, on the basis of a number of promises including regularising the Mumbai slums built till 2000, the DF government of Maharshtra, in early December ?? at the peak of the winter season, launched the most brutal and massive demolition drive till date. As expected, the uprooted poor fought back, after the initial daze. A large section of the citizenry solidarised. The pitch of the protests rose so high that even the Congress president had to intervene. Consequently the demolitions have now halted after bulldozing 91000 hutments. But the chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh is determined not to provide any succour to these affected people by providing them any relief, let alone immediate shelter at the sites from where they were evicted, as he has been categorically advised by the Congress president. On the other hand, he has chosen to deceive people once again by going to the Mumbai High Court, with a proposal for ???rehabilitation??, of those hutment dwellers who came to occupy their dwelling sites between 1995 and 2000, for its permission. On the one hand, it was totally unnecessary to go to the court. It is for the ministry and the legislature to act in this regard. Evidently the motive is to invite the court to put obstacles and shirk off his own responsibility. On the other, the ???rehabilitation?? programme is actually a great fraud and in fact a programme for eviction, as it envisages rehabilitating people evicted, and to be evicted, from Mumbai in Kalyan and beyond ?? far from the places where they were/are earning their livelihood. So even if the court agrees to this proposal, on ???humanitarian?? grounds, that would lead to another spell of massive eviction. On 8th, the Bombay High court is going to hear the case. On 7th , Tuesday, at 16-30 hrs. a protest demonstration would be held at Churchgate, near the 85 bus stop to voice the protests of the affected, and the common citizenry, and also to demand immediate shelter for the evicted before the onset of the fast approaching monsoon. It is being organised by the Awas Adhikar Sanyukta Kriti Samiti to draw wider attention to the desperate plight of lakhs of poor working to build and maintain the megapolis and the role of the State as the destroyer of the lives of its own citizens. All right thinking people are invited to join! Shweta Damle Sukla Sen -------------------------------- [2] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Jun 6, 2005 8:08pm Subject: Just give me that old-time atheism! - Salman Rushdie May 23, 2005. 01:00 AM Just give me that old-time atheism! Salman Rushdie Toronto Star "Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or na????vely pro-science," says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol. Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, "19th-century" atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which "values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art." Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as "a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false." Evans' position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America ???¬??? and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of "intelligent design" ???¬??? at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion. A staunch evolutionist himself, he is nevertheless highly critical of such modern giants as Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson. Evans' "Atheism Lite," which seeks to negotiate a truce between religious and irreligious world views, is easily demolished. Such a truce would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal ???¬??? if the world's religions agreed to value the atheist position and to concede its ethical basis, if they respected the discoveries and achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals life's multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called "revealed" texts. No such reciprocal arrangement exists, however, nor is there the slightest chance that such an accommodation could ever be reached. It is among the truths believed to be self-evident by the followers of all religions that godlessness is equivalent to amorality and that ethics requires the underpinning presence of some sort of ultimate arbiter, some sort of supernatural absolute, without which secularism, humanism, relativism, hedonism, liberalism and all manner of permissive improprieties will inevitably seduce the unbeliever down immoral ways. To those of us who are perfectly prepared to indulge in the above vices but still believe ourselves to be ethical beings, the godlessness-equals-morality position is pretty hard to swallow. Nor does the current behaviour of organized religion breed confidence in the Evans/Ruse laissez-faire attitude. Education everywhere is seriously imperiled by religious attacks. In recent years, Hindu nationalists in India attempted to rewrite the nation's history books to support their anti-Muslim ideology, an effort thwarted only by the electoral victory of a secularist coalition led by the Congress party. Meanwhile, Muslim voices the world over are claiming that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Islam. And in America, the battle over the teaching of intelligent design in U.S. schools is reaching crunch time, as the American Civil Liberties Union prepares to take on intelligent-design proponents in a Pennsylvania court. It seems inconceivable that better behaviour on the part of the world's great scientists, of the sort that Ruse would prefer, would persuade these forces to back down. Intelligent design, an idea designed backward so as to force the antique idea of a Creator upon the beauty of creation, is so thoroughly rooted in pseudoscience, so full of false logic, so easy to attack that a little rudeness seems called for. Its advocates argue, for example, that the sheer complexity and perfection of cellular/molecular structures is inexplicable by gradual evolution. However, the multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do evolve together, gradually expanding and adapting ???¬??? and, as Dawkins showed in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, natural selection is active at every step of this process. But, as well as scientific arguments, there are others that are more, well, novelistic. What about bad design, for example? Was it really so intelligent to come up with the birth canal or the prostate gland? Then, there's the moral argument against an intelligent designer who cursed his creations with cancer and AIDS. Is the intelligent designer also amorally cruel? To see religion as "a kind of art," as Evans rather sweetly proposes, is possible only when the religion is dead or when, like the Church of England, it has become a set of polite rituals. The old Greek religion lives on as mythology, the old Norse religion has left us the Norse myths and, yes, now we can read them as literature. The Bible contains much great literature, too, but the literalist voices of Christianity grow ever louder, and one doubts that they would welcome Evans' child's storybook approach. Meanwhile religions continue to attack their own artists: Hindu artists' paintings are attacked by Hindu mobs, Sikh playwrights are threatened by Sikh violence and Muslim novelists and filmmakers are menaced by Islamic fanatics with a vigorous unawareness of any kinship. If religion were a private matter, one could more easily respect its believers' right to seek its comforts and nourishments. But religion today is big public business, using efficient political organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return. As Evans and Ruse would do well to recognize, atheists such as Dawkins, Miller and Wilson are neither immature nor culpable for taking on such religionists. They are doing a vital and necessary thing. Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and many other books. Salman Rushdie ---------------------------------------------------- INDIA THINKERS NET quote In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution: Thomas Jefferson ----------------------------------------------------- |
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| << June05, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]About the Sharia court campaign in India |
June07, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]Some Pakistan news >> |
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