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utility lands, block roads and cause inconvenience creating traffic jams and delaying even ambulance carrying serious patients and fire brigades needed quickly to extinguish fires. Religion should be for benefit of those who practice as well as for others. But it is not so and is more often harmful to practitioner and others. This is irrational and superstitious.
The widely prevailing belief in one almighty omniscient, omnipotent super power god as creater, controller and destroyer of universe and all its life forms and other substances is also not logical. If the so called god is good and kind then he should not have created such an imperfect and miserable world suffering from famines, droughts, floods, storms, earth quakes, wars, epidemics etc. If nothing happens without his will then no body does any thing wrong and terrorists also kill as desired by God. Lord Krishna has himself refuted the entity of such a God (Gita 5/14). Likewise the entity of soul as such has not been substantiated scientifically so far and the debate is continuing since ages. Most of the religions propagate fear of hell and reward of heaven and this may have also necessitated the concept of soul. It may be that man may have invented the concept of soul because of his obsession to be eternal or for his fear of death. Scientifically every life form, every person lives eternally through his genes in all future generations and mutations as genes continue to store and manifest all about a person. The recent phenomenal developments in neurosciences and genetics pose a serious challenge to the concept of soul. The phenomenon of reincarnation i.e. rebirth and memory of previous birth by some is cited as proof of soul as an entity. Professor Banerjee who headed the Department of Parapsychology in University of Rajasthan, in sixties of previous century, collected over 1000 cases of memory of rebirth in various societies including Muslims who do not subscribe to rebirth. All these were found false and concocted and Banerjee was disgracefully thrown out of the University. Similarly experiments were earlier done by Universities in US and were proved false. According to recent scientific studies by the teem led by Maarten beters of Maastricht University in Netherland have found that reincarnation belief is linked to memory errors and some have propensity to make such mistake and cling to implausible reincarnation claims. Such persons when undergo hypnosis and are repeatedy asked to talk about the idea of past life, it eventually gets converted into a full-blown false memory. Another evidence cited about soul is OBE (Out of body experience) which has also been proved to be because of illusory function of brain and can be induced experimentally by electric current delivered to the angular gyrus of brain's temporal-parietal junction, responsible for integrating visual information and sense of spatial location (Dr. Olaf Blanks, Neurologist, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland). Likewise pleasure and pain and such experiences are chemical reactions in brain. All sensory perceptions reach nerve centres that are specific for a particularly sensory. modality and hence the particular perception. There is no other center for consciousness. All that is attributed to soul can be explained by functioning of brain and genes. It is for the spiritualists to evolve answers to the challenges of
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