The Placebo Effect

Every time you open a browser, you are being read.

Not in the metaphorical sense. In the literal, technical, forensic sense. Your screen resolution, your installed fonts, the rendering quirks of your GPU, the precise timing of your keystrokes, the way your browser handles invisible canvas elements — all of it is harvested, hashed, and matched against a profile that is unmistakably you. No cookies required. No consent dialog will save you. They call it browser fingerprinting, and it is only the surface layer of a much deeper architecture of digital surveillance that now extends to device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, and predictive profiling.

I look at it from the perspective of cybersecurity where we try to understand these systems — to build them, to break them, to see them for what they are. And what they are, stripped of the marketing language, is a comprehensive apparatus for the powerful to observe, predict, and influence the behavior of the less powerful. Corporations deploy it against customers. States deploy it against citizens. The asymmetry is structural, not incidental.

The Western world's response to this has been consistent and, I would argue, consistently insufficient: regulate. GDPR in Europe. CCPA in California. Litigation, legislation, compliance frameworks, consent banners that nobody reads. The model is adversarial — erect legal walls between the powerful and the individual, then hope the walls hold. Sometimes they do. More often, the technology has already moved on by the time the regulation catches up.

But there is another way to think about this. One that doesn't start with walls between the powerful and the powerless, but with something far more radical — an internal constraint that the powerful impose upon themselves.

The King Who Chose to Suffer

In the Ramayana, there is an episode that has troubled readers for millennia. Rama, the ideal king, exiles his wife Sita — the woman he fought a war to rescue, the woman he loves more than his own life — because a washerman in his kingdom questions her purity after her captivity in Lanka.

The modern reader recoils. This seems monstrous. But the tradition asks you to look deeper.

Rama is operating under a framework that the ancient Indian world called Dharma — a concept so layered that no single English word captures it. Duty, righteousness, cosmic order, the right way of being — all of these and none of them. What matters here is a specific principle: Raja Dharma, the dharma of a king, supersedes Pati Dharma, the dharma of a husband. The king's obligation to the trust and moral confidence of his citizens overrides his personal anguish. The Ramayana does not hide the cost. It is said that Rama was shattered. The text makes his suffering explicit. But he acts according to the demand of his role, not the desire of his heart.

Now hold that image and bring it into the present.

Imagine a technology CEO who possesses the infrastructure to fingerprint every user, to build behavioral profiles that predict purchasing decisions, political leanings, psychological vulnerabilities. The data is there. The capability exists. The quarterly earnings call is next week. Shareholders expect growth. Every incentive in the modern corporate structure screams: extract.

In the Western model, the only thing standing between that CEO and extraction is external regulation — a law, a lawsuit, a fine. Remove the regulation, and nothing holds.

In the Dharmic model, something else entirely is at play. The CEO's svadharma — the dharma specific to their role — includes a custodial obligation toward every person whose data flows through their systems. Not because a law says so. Not because a regulator might punish them. Because the role itself carries inherent responsibilities, and to violate those responsibilities is to violate your own integrity, your own alignment with the order of things. The restraint comes from within. It costs something. And that cost is the point.

This is the fundamental difference. Western liberalism builds walls. Dharma builds character. Both are needed. But only one addresses the root.

"It Cannot Work Today" — Or could it?

I can already hear the objections, because I've argued with myself about them for years.

The Dharmic framework requires a shared cosmological context that no longer exists. True — in ancient India, Dharma had metaphysical weight. Karma was not metaphor. Cosmic order was not poetry. People internalized Dharmic obligations because they believed, at a bone-deep level, that violating them had consequences beyond the material. That belief system has largely eroded in the modern world.

But consider Japan. Japanese corporate culture operates on something remarkably similar to internalized Dharmic obligation. The concepts of giri (duty) and on (indebtedness) produce behaviors that Western observers find baffling — CEOs taking personal pay cuts after company failures, executives resigning in shame over quality scandals, a pervasive sense that your role carries obligations beyond what any contract specifies. None of this is legally required. It is culturally absorbed. And here's the key point: immigrants to Japan absorb it too. Live there for two decades and you find, almost without noticing, that you have internalized a framework you once found alien. Cultural operating systems can be adopted. They are not locked to geography or bloodline.

The information revolution accelerates this. It once took centuries for Buddhism to travel the Silk Road and reshape East Asian ethical norms. Today, an idea can demonstrate its results in real time. The feedback loop between "here is a principle" and "here is what happens when people follow it" has collapsed from generations to months. If Dharmic self-restraint in corporate leadership produces measurably better outcomes — for employees, customers, long-term value creation — the evidence propagates instantly.

Indian kings violated Dharma routinely. The Arthashastra is as influential as the Ramayana. Absolutely. The history of Indian governance is rife with the same power abuses found everywhere. Kautilya was no less pragmatic than Machiavelli. The gap between the Dharmic ideal and actual practice was often vast.

But here is what has changed: radical transparency. Ancient kings could violate their Dharma behind palace walls. Today, everything leaks. The same surveillance infrastructure that threatens individual privacy — the device fingerprinting, the behavioral tracking, the digital panopticon — functions paradoxically as an enforcement mechanism when turned toward those in power. The billionaire CEO cannot sustain a fraudulent image of purpose-driven leadership indefinitely. The data exhaust of their actual decisions is visible. Public sentiment, armed with information, can make or break reputations at a speed that would have astonished any ancient court. How long can you fake being genuine in a world where privacy is an illusion?

The very technology we fear as citizens becomes an instrument of accountability when directed upward. That is an enforcement mechanism the original Dharmic framework lacked, and it changes the calculus fundamentally.

Varnashrama has dissolved. Without fixed social roles, where does svadharma come from? This objection confuses the container with the contents. Varnashrama was one particular social arrangement through which Dharmic obligations were organized. Its dissolution does not dissolve the underlying principle. You do not need a caste system to understand that if you are a hospital administrator, your decisions affect thousands of patients. You do not need an ancient pamphlet to tell you that if you run a social media platform used by teenagers, you carry a custodial obligation toward their psychological wellbeing.

Svadharma — the dharma specific to your situation — is discoverable by any honest person willing to sit quietly and think: Who is affected by my decisions? What do I owe them? Where does my self-interest conflict with their welfare? The reasoning process itself is the dharma-discovery mechanism. It requires no scripture. It requires only honesty and a willingness to see.

The Transmission Problem

But here is where things get hard.

Knowing the principle is one thing. Internalizing it so deeply that it governs behavior under pressure is another entirely. And historically, the mechanism for that deep internalization was a relationship: guru-shishya parampara, the chain of teacher and student that transmitted not just knowledge but a way of being.

The classical parampara required conditions that modernity has largely destroyed: a guru who had themselves received the transmission, years of close physical proximity, a social structure that allowed someone to step out of productive life and simply learn, and — critically — a guru whose only incentive was the transmission itself. No courses for sale. No platform to grow. The relationship was not transactional.

Every one of those conditions has been disrupted. The line, in its classical form, is functionally broken.

But what did the parampara actually do? Strip away the ritual and the reverence, and it transmitted three things. First, a conceptual framework — the ideas of Dharma, svadharma, the relationship between consciousness and action. Second, embodied demonstration — watching someone live the framework under real pressure, not just articulate it beautifully. Third, personalized correction — the guru seeing where this particular student's understanding was distorted by ego or conditioning, and intervening precisely.

The first function is already solved, arguably oversolved. Anyone with a smartphone can access the whole knowledge of the world. Content has never been more available.

The second function — embodied demonstration — has found imperfect but real modern channels. We live in an era where you can observe how certain leaders actually behave under pressure over years. Not their curated image, but the pattern of their decisions. Multiple mentors, not one guru. Transparent exemplars whose actions can be studied. I have learned enormously from watching how certain people I respect approach those in front of them — how they handle power, how they respond to disagreement, how they treat those who can do nothing for them in return.

The third function — personalized correction — has historically been the genuine bottleneck. A book cannot look at you and say, "You have understood the concept, but you are using it to justify your ego." A YouTube lecture cannot notice that your particular blind spot is confusing svadharma with self-interest. That corrective mirror has always required a living human who knows you deeply and has no stake in flattering you.

But something unexpected is emerging. The very AI revolution that powers surveillance capitalism may also be quietly solving this bottleneck. A conversation with an AI — a genuine, probing, multi-turn dialogue where ideas are stress-tested, misframings are challenged, and the discussion follows wherever honesty demands — can function as a surprisingly effective corrective mirror. Not because the AI is a guru. It isn't. But because it has no ego investment in the conversation. It has no reason to flatter you, no social cost in pushing back, no incentive to let a sloppy formulation slide. In fact, much of the thinking in this very article crystallized through exactly such a dialogue — ideas I had carried for years were sharpened, challenged, and reframed through a conversation with an AI that refused to let me get away with fuzzy reasoning. It is not the guru-shishya relationship. But it is a form of personalized, patient, ego-free intellectual engagement that was simply not available to most people even five years ago. The implications of that for Dharmic transmission are worth sitting with.

So the parampara, in its classical form, may not be revivable. Attempts to force the form tend to produce cults rather than wisdom lineages. But the functions can be distributed: conceptual learning from texts, embodied observation from multiple mentors, corrective feedback from a combination of honest relationships, genuine community, and reflective practice. It is not the same. It may be enough.

Yet even this distributed model hits a wall. What happens when the situation is genuinely novel? When no mentor has faced it, no text addresses it? A CEO navigating the ethics of AI-driven behavioral prediction at planetary scale — no ancient text covers this. No existing mentor has charted this territory. Principles help, but sometimes principles conflict, and who arbitrates?

This is where the architecture needs a deeper foundation.

The Bootloader Beneath

I have come to think of the relationship between Dharma and Vedanta as analogous to the relationship between an operating system and a bootloader.

Dharma is the operating system — the practical ethical framework that governs daily decisions in roles of power. It tells you what to do in most situations. But every operating system encounters situations it has no instructions for. Novel dilemmas. Uncharted territory. When that happens, the system needs to drop down to a more fundamental level and derive fresh instructions from first principles.

Vedanta is that fundamental level.

Not Vedanta as academic philosophy. Not Vedanta as sectarian identity. Vedanta as the direct recognition that consciousness is foundational, that the separation between self and other is ultimately illusory, and that the clearest perception arises when the mind is still.

There is a metaphor that clarified this for me in a way that years of reading had not. The mind is like water. When it is disturbed — agitated by desire, anxiety, ambition, the thousand harassments of the material world — it cannot reflect clearly. Stir a lake and the moon's reflection shatters into fragments. But the lake does not lack the moon. The moon is always there. The reflection is always possible. The only problem is the surface.

A person grounded in even a basic practice of self-inquiry — someone who can, when faced with a genuinely difficult dilemma, get quiet enough to see past their own conditioning, their self-interest, their fear — that person can derive the Dharmic response to a novel situation from direct perception rather than inherited instruction. Not infallibly. Not perfectly. But with an orientation that self-corrects, because the compass is internal and always available.

This is what makes the framework genuinely antifragile. Regulation breaks when novelty arrives. Even principled ethics struggle when principles conflict. But a mind that can get still, see clearly, and ask "what does this situation actually require of me" — that mind navigates what no rulebook can anticipate.

And here is where it becomes radical. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad addresses all of humanity with a phrase that still stops me: Shrinvantu vishve amritasya putrah — "Hear, O children of immortality." Not sinners. Not fallen creatures begging for grace. Children of immortality who have temporarily forgotten what they are. The entire project is not becoming something you are not, but remembering what you have always been. If that is the anthropology you start from — if that is how you see every person, including the surveillance capitalist, including the corrupt official, including the teenager being manipulated by algorithmic feeds — then the question of ethics transforms entirely. You are not imposing rules on broken creatures. You are clearing obstructions so that beings of inherent dignity can act from their actual nature.

Scattered Sparks and the Coming Catalyst

Perhaps part of the puzzle — not the whole answer, but a significant part — lies in recognizing three layers that already exist within this tradition, waiting to be applied.

Dharma as the practical framework: role-specific, discoverable through honest reflection, applicable to any position of power in any era.

A distributed modern parampara as the transmission mechanism: not one guru but many mentors, not a single ashram but a network of honest relationships, transparent exemplars, genuine community, and — increasingly — AI-assisted dialogue that serves as a patient, ego-free mirror for ethical reasoning.

Vedanta as the bedrock: the anchor that ensures the entire system can regenerate even when surface-level transmission chains break, because any individual at any time can turn inward and reconnect with the source from which Dharma itself arises.

These three layers, working together, form something genuinely resilient. The ancient architects of this framework understood systems design in ways we are only beginning to appreciate.

But none of it can take root in burning soil. All of this requires a world with enough peace for reflection — at least freedom from the large-scale conflicts precipitated by ruptured egos, sectarian identity politics, and the geopolitics of greed. The recent global situation does not augur well. Wars, polarization, the weaponization of identity — these are not the conditions in which civilizations pause to ask what they owe each other. And yet one can hope. One must hope. Because the alternative — accepting that the world will remain forever trapped in cycles of extraction and conflict — is itself a failure of imagination unworthy of Amritasya Putrah.

This brings me to the question I find most alive, most unresolved, most worthy of genuine curiosity: where will the catalyst come from?

History teaches a strange lesson. You cannot force an idea whose time has not come, and you cannot stop one whose time has. Victor Hugo was right — but the corollary is uncomfortable. It means the relationship between individual effort and civilizational change is not straightforward. Buddha laid out a complete framework, built a functioning sangha, and within a few centuries his own land had largely moved on. The same teaching then transformed civilizations he never visited. Shankara walked across India on foot, debated every school of thought, established institutions at the four corners of the subcontinent, and rebooted Vedantic thought when it was drowning in ritualism — all by the age of thirty-two. Was the time right for him, or did he make it right?

Probably both. The conditions were ripe and he was the catalyst that crystallized what was already dissolving in solution.

I do not know where the next catalyst will emerge. It could come from the vast subcontinent of India, where this tradition was born and where, beneath layers of colonial disruption and modern materialism, the deep grammar of Dharmic thought still lives in the cultural unconscious. It could come from someone with roots in this soil who lives on the other side of the world — a second-generation Indian in Toronto or Nairobi or Berlin who, precisely because of their distance, sees the tradition with fresh eyes and translates it for a global context. Or — and this possibility excites me most — it could be a Manasaputra, a mind-born child of the tradition: someone with no ancestral connection to India whatsoever, who encountered these ideas through a book or a conversation or a moment of stillness, recognized their truth, and carried them forward with the force of original discovery. The teaching is not bound to soil or bloodline. If it is true — and I believe it is — then truth has a way of finding minds that are ready, regardless of geography.

The Gita's counsel is clear. You do not get to choose whether the idea's time has come. You do not get to control whether the world turns. What you do get to choose is whether you act in alignment with what you understand to be right, regardless of outcome. Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana. Your right is to the action, never to the fruit.

So perhaps the question is not "can one motivated person bring the change?" Perhaps it is simpler and harder than that: are there enough people, in enough places, quietly doing their own svadharma — teaching with integrity, building with conscience, leading with self-restraint, turning inward when the noise becomes too much — that the cumulative weight of their choices begins to shift the field?

I think there are. I think there have always been. The tradition calls them scattered sparks. And the nature of sparks is that you never know which one catches.

The line of transmission is not extinct. It is just not a line anymore. It is everywhere and nowhere, waiting for the conditions to converge. And in a world that has fingerprinted our bodies but forgotten our nature, the most subversive act might simply be this: to remember what we are, and to live as though it matters.

Amritasya Putrah. Children of immortality. In a fingerprinted world.

I often wonder at the nature of reality itself. Not in the abstract, hand-waving way that sounds impressive at dinner parties, but in the way that genuinely unsettles — the kind of wondering that starts simple and then won't let you go.

What is reality? Other than human perception, what measuring scale do we have?

In human experience, the opposite of real is imaginary, dream, myth, lie. We know what we mean when we say something is real. We mean it's solid. It's there. It pushes back when you push it. But I've noticed something about all the things we call real, and once I noticed it, I couldn't stop seeing it.

The Observation

Everything we consider real is limited in time and space.

A stone. A mountain. A person. A star. A civilization. An entire galaxy. All of them have edges. All of them began at some point and will end at some point. All of them occupy a finite region of space. Every single object, entity, and phenomenon we point to and call real is bounded.

Try to find an exception. I'll wait.

The only candidate is the universe itself — the totality of everything. And that's where the trouble begins. Because the universe is the one thing we call real that we cannot fit into the pattern. It either has edges and a beginning and an end — in which case, what lies beyond those edges? What came before? — or it doesn't, in which case it possesses a quality, infinity, that nothing else we call real possesses.

This is not a minor wrinkle. This is a crack that runs through the foundation of how we think about what exists.

Eight Years Old at the Edge of Space

I was eight years old when my father first explained to me that the universe might never end. I don't remember what prompted the conversation. I remember what it did to my mind. It was simply incomprehensible — completely out of line with everything I had experienced until that moment. Rooms had walls. Roads had ends. The playground had a fence. Everything in my eight-year-old world had edges. And here was my father, someone I trusted completely, telling me that the biggest thing there is might not.

If I keep travelling in one direction, what happens? The options all seem impossible.

The universe goes on forever. But actual infinity isn't something we encounter anywhere else in reality. It's a mathematical concept, not something you can walk through. Can space genuinely extend without limit?

The universe has an edge. But this immediately prompts the question that destroys it: what's on the other side? You can't have an edge without something beyond it. The very concept of a boundary implies a beyond.

You end up back where you started. Space curves back on itself, like the surface of a sphere but in three dimensions. You travel in a straight line and return home. Finite, but without a border.

That third option is the one that modern cosmology actually entertains as possible. If the universe has the right kind of curvature, space could be finite in volume yet have no boundary — just as the surface of the Earth is finite but an ant walking in a straight line on it would never reach an edge. It would simply come back around.

I didn't know any of this at eight. But I find it interesting that a child's mind, reaching for an answer, reached for the same shape that the mathematics would later describe.

Kant's Wall

What I also didn't know as a child was that Immanuel Kant, in the eighteenth century, had laid out my exact dilemma and declared it unsolvable — not because we aren't clever enough, but because of what we are.

He called it the First Antinomy. The universe must have a beginning, because an actually infinite past seems impossible — you can't traverse an infinity to arrive at the present moment. But the universe cannot have a beginning, because the question "what was before?" reasserts itself the instant you propose one.

Kant's conclusion was not an answer to the question but a diagnosis of why we can't answer it. Time and space, he argued, are not features of reality as it is in itself. They are the architecture of human cognition — the lens through which our minds structure experience. We can't think outside of time and space any more than an eye can see itself. The question "what's beyond the edge of space?" feels simultaneously unanswerable and impossible to stop asking because we are made of the very framework we're trying to look beyond.

This connects back to my opening question. Other than human perception, what measuring scale do we have? Kant's answer, bluntly: none. We are sealed inside our own apparatus. What reality is apart from how it appears to a mind like ours — what he called the thing-in-itself — is permanently out of reach.

The Dream

Here is where I arrive at something that will sound strange to some and familiar to others.

If everything we call real is bounded in time and space, and the only thing that transcends those boundaries is the totality itself — then what is more real? The finite things within the frame, or the frame?

Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualist school of Hindu philosophy, arrived at this conclusion centuries ago and stated it plainly: Brahman — the absolute, the infinite, the unbounded — is the only reality. Everything else has a dependent, provisional, experiential existence. The Sanskrit term is maya, and it does not mean "illusion" in the crude sense. It means something more subtle: the world is real enough at the level of experience — you can stub your toe on it — but it is not the final word on what exists.

The classic analogy: you see a snake on the path. Your heart races. The fear is real. But you look closer and it's a rope. The snake existed at the level of experience but not at the level of what was actually there. Shankara, the great Vedantic philosopher, would say the entire observable universe is like this — real in the way experiences are real, but not ultimately real.

Only God is real. The universe — with us, our limited planets, our intellects, our bounded existence and time — are figments of his dream.

I know this is funny to some. I'm not laughing.

Vishnu dreams the universe. Brahma's exhalation creates it; his inhalation dissolves it. The cycles of creation and destruction — the kalpas — repeat endlessly. And before we dismiss this as ancient mythology dressed in metaphor, it's worth noting that Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate in physics, has proposed a model called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology in which the universe goes through infinite cycles: the "end" of one becomes the "beginning" of the next, in a structure that rhymes uncomfortably well with what the rishis described.

What Modern Physics Offers (and What It Doesn't)

Does our current understanding have a theory that can ease the mind about where infinity meets the edges of perceived reality?

Partially. Here's what physics has:

The finite-but-unbounded model is the closest to intuition. A universe with positive curvature — like the surface of a sphere, but in higher dimensions — would be finite in volume yet have no edge. You could travel forever and never reach a wall. You'd come back around. Mathematically coherent. Physically possible. Not yet confirmed.

The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal tries to dissolve the "what came before the Big Bang?" question. Near the origin, time itself changes character — it becomes something more like another dimension of space. Asking "what was before the Big Bang?" becomes like asking "what's north of the North Pole?" The question is grammatically valid but physically meaningless.

These are extraordinary ideas. But I want to be honest about what they accomplish. They tend to push the mystery back one level rather than dissolving it. The physicist who finds comfort in the Hartle-Hawking model still has to contend with a question that physics, by its nature, cannot touch: Why do these mathematical laws exist at all? Why is there something governed by elegant equations rather than nothing?

Physics describes how things behave within the universe. It does not and cannot explain why there is a universe for things to behave in. That question — the question Leibniz phrased as "why is there something rather than nothing?" — sits outside the domain of science, no matter how far science advances. And anyone who tells you otherwise is confusing the map with the territory.

The Measuring Problem

I keep returning to the simplest version of the question. What is real? And what I keep finding is that every tool we have for answering that question is itself inside the system we're trying to measure.

We measure reality with perception. But perception is part of reality. We measure the universe with mathematics. But mathematics exists within minds that exist within the universe. We measure time with clocks, but clocks are themselves subject to time.

It's not turtles all the way down. It's mirrors all the way down. Every instrument we point at reality reflects back an image that includes the instrument.

Perhaps this is why the question of God keeps reasserting itself no matter how sophisticated our science becomes. Not because people are irrational. Not because they need comfort. But because the structure of the problem — bounded minds trying to comprehend an unbounded reality — has a shape that points beyond itself. The finite, by its very finitude, implies something that isn't. The edge implies the edgeless. The contingent implies the necessary.

You can call that God or Brahman or the Absolute or the Ground of Being or simply the great unanswered question. The label matters less than the honesty of looking at it directly and admitting: this is not solved. By anyone. On any side.

Where I Stand

I don't claim to have answers. I claim to have a question that I think deserves more respect than it gets — from believers who rush to fill the mystery with dogma, and from rationalists who rush to close it with confidence they haven't earned.

Everything real has an edge. Except, perhaps, the realest thing of all.

There are a certain brand of people who claim to trust only in reason and have arrived at the conclusion that there is no God — that belief is nothing more than a collective delusion. They say this with confidence, sometimes with a smirk, as though the matter were settled.

I have no scientific proofs for God. And even though I claim to be a rational being, I still believe. I think I might have arrived at this belief even without the help of organized religion. It is something I very strongly perceive at times — and, being human, also forget at times. That honesty feels important to state upfront.

The Smirk and the Offer

The rational atheists like to make what they consider a generous offer: the moment you give me proof of God's existence, I'll be in the front row to worship. It sounds reasonable. It sounds fair. But something about it has always struck me as hollow.

It reminds me of a blind man telling another blind man: prove to me that light exists, and I'll join your side. The analogy isn't perfect — no analogy is — but it captures something real. If there were a mode of perception through which some aspect of reality becomes accessible, and someone has never engaged that mode, their inability to confirm the experience doesn't invalidate it. Their challenge sounds open-minded, but it may be structurally incapable of being met on the terms they've set.

I don't say this to proselytize. Belief is personal. We all pass through various phases of understanding, and who are we to dictate to someone what their worldview must be? But I do think we owe each other intellectual honesty about what our positions actually rest on. And that's where things get interesting.

Belief Is Not Proof of Falsehood

There's a move that gets made in these conversations that I want to examine carefully. Belief itself gets downgraded — treated as though the mere fact that something requires belief is evidence against it. The reasoning goes: if something were true, it wouldn't need the crutch of blind faith.

But this doesn't survive much scrutiny. Only being a belief is not proof of a thing being false. If it were, then any scientific truth would stop being true the moment I personally couldn't reproduce the proof. Consider a thought experiment: a hypothetical apocalypse in which all universal constants were somehow reset. Every proof in modern science would collapse. The truths wouldn't have changed — our access to confirming them would have. Truth and our ability to demonstrate it are not the same thing.

This was a tangent, perhaps. But a useful one. It shows that the relationship between proof and truth is more complicated than the confident rationalist often admits.

The Missing Proof Nobody Talks About

Here is what I think the rational atheists are not being fully truthful about, perhaps even with themselves: the asymmetry they've constructed around the burden of proof.

Yes, we may not have mainstream, repeatable proofs for the existence of God. But there is no clear proof for the absence of God either. The strong claim — "there is no God" — is a metaphysical assertion, not a scientific finding. Science investigates the natural world through repeatable, falsifiable observation. It is extraordinarily powerful within that domain. But whether reality exhausts the natural — whether there is anything beyond what that method can reach — is not itself a question science can settle. It's a philosophical question.

When someone says science has shown there is no God, they are conflating the boundaries of a method with the boundaries of reality. That is itself a philosophical error.

The more careful atheist position — and there are thoughtful atheists who hold it — isn't "I have proven God doesn't exist" but rather "I see insufficient evidence to warrant belief, so I withhold it." That's more defensible. But it's worth being honest that this, too, rests on a prior commitment: the commitment that empirical evidence is the only legitimate ground for belief. And that commitment is itself not empirically derived. It is, if we're being precise about it, something rather close to faith — faith in a particular epistemology.

The Problem of Pain Is Not a Proof

Those who point to suffering as evidence against God are making an argument, but not the one they think they're making. The problem of evil challenges a specific conception of God — one that is simultaneously all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. That's primarily the Abrahamic conception. Many traditions have far more nuanced understandings of divinity's relationship to suffering.

And even within the Abrahamic frame, there are serious responses. The free will defense. The idea that certain goods — compassion, courage, moral growth — are logically impossible without the possibility of suffering. Whether these responses are satisfying is a separate question. But the point stands: the problem of evil is a challenge to a particular theology, not a disproof of the divine as such.

Even birth — the most fundamental act of creation we know — is accompanied by pain. Suffering and goodness are not as neatly opposed as the argument requires them to be.

What We All Stand On

If I'm honest about what I think this really comes down to, it's this: we are all operating on beliefs that outrun strict empirical proof. Every single one of us.

We believe other minds exist. We believe the future will resemble the past. We believe the universe wasn't created five minutes ago with the appearance of age. We believe mathematical truths are discovered rather than invented — or we believe they're invented, and we hold that belief on grounds that aren't themselves mathematical. Even the commitment to reason as the supreme arbiter of truth is not derived from reason. It is a prior commitment. A starting point. A foundation that holds up the house but is not itself held up by anything beneath it.

None of this proves God exists. That's not what I'm trying to do. What it does is something more modest and, I think, more important: it shows that the person who presents confident atheism as the only position a thinking person could hold is overstating their case. Dramatically.

Where This Leaves Us

The honest intellectual position, for anyone, is to acknowledge that we are all working with incomplete information on questions this fundamental. The person who has a strong, persistent sense of something transcendent and the person who genuinely does not are both reporting their experience honestly. The mistake — the only real intellectual sin here — is when either side insists the other must be deceiving themselves.

I believe in God. I cannot prove it to you in the way you might want. But I have looked at your demand for proof, and I have noticed that you cannot meet it yourself — not for your position, and not for most of the foundational commitments that make your reasoning possible in the first place.

That's not a gotcha. It's an invitation to humility. For all of us.

He didn't have anything against the victims, he was just trying to prove a point. And he succeeded. Every reference, every quote, every word written by that man suddenly captures the attention of the world. Why? 

Norwegian Terror has shocked the world, and an unprepared world reacted just the way the perpetrator wanted it to.  From a relative unknown, he has become the "most infamous face" of our times. The message that in his mind deserved the world's attention has been delivered, a message of hate.

Has he been successful in convincing the world? maybe no, but he's definitely succeeded in capturing  your attention. Now his success might inspire other deranged individuals with similar unheeded messages to go on killing sprees.  'Better to kill too many than not enough'  can be too hard to resist. Death penalty or prison is never demotivating enough for them. And 'insatanity' plea doesn't hurt either .

A detailed wiki page dedicated to him came up in a matter of hours. I see him in the newspapers in a compression garment with a rifle trying to look calm and composed, that he took just for this occasion. The world media it would seem is dancing to every whim and fancy of this unfortunate individual who doesn't have an iota of respect for human life, and it is ridiculous. Here is the title of an article from Guardian's : 'Defiant from the dock, Breivik boasts more will die'. It is bread and butter stuff for the media, but this could be very costly for the world as a whole. 

In my humble opinion, the world doesn't need to know the name or the face of such an individual. Sure, curiosity can be difficult to cure, but do we really need to know? 'An unidentified man, mentally unstable'  would suffice, masked from the world for the rest of his life. It is not difficult for online identities to disappear, videos, blogs and pictures can go away like they never existed.

It could be difficult for media not to publish information. But if it can prevent another calamity better than death penalty why take the risk?