Noted biologist and an atheist Richard Dawkins has peddled fake news that topics on periodic table were removed from school textbooks in India based on the misleading title of the science journal ‘Nature’.
The fact of the matter is that the periodic table topic has been moved to class 11 rather than class 9 as part of NCERT’s syllabus rationalization.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions in education, prompting the NCERT to carry out a syllabus rationalization exercise from December 2021 to June 2022. Accordingly NCERT has been deleting overlapping and repeating syllabus for different classes of students in order to reduce the work load of students post COVID. Following rationalization, the periodic table topic was moved to class 11 rather than class 9.
However, quoting the misleading article from ‘Nature’, Richard Dawkins not just targeted the Narendra Modi government but also took to abusing Hinduism by comparing it with Islam.
I must begin by quoting Carl Sagan, the great scientist, who says: “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.”
And you say so, Mr Richard? A rationalist doesn’t concludes without observing subject at his own. You have got it all wrong based on a “belief” that “Hinduism = Islam” and you have become a believer.
The truth is below that the periodic table is moved to class 11 curriculum while evolution to class 12 and neither is erased.
The concern rightly should be that evolution is something which must be kept at lower grade. Government didn’t erase it but placed it at wrong level. That apart how naive it is compare Hinduism with Islam when truth is diverse traditions like Buddhism, Jainism, and other Hindu schools existed together which is evident from one of the largest university India gave to world, Nalanda.
When west was gagging freedom of expression we were epitome of same. Islam and Christianity crossed swords against each other while in Indic systems did Shastrarth.
Do you have any idea that “Charvakas” sang anti theistic songs within temple premises and no one brought violence upon them? Take some time to read this.
West in the rob of Christianity ravaged wherever they went. Age of exploration was very ugly, whether it was Vasco or Columbus, they all slaughtered in mass, raped and so on.
In name of colonisation, Christianity destroyed ecosystems so bad and today’s climate change is result of that.
Have you cared to look at what colonialists did to our forests? How they killed the all indigenous practices that was deemed idolatry actually hit the environment.
The truth is very well reflected by below words of Eduardo Galeano as below in Mundo: “Cuatro frases que hacen crecer la nariz de Pinocho” (English Translation): “The invading civilization[s] confused ecology with idolatry. Communion with nature was a sin worthy of punishment (…) Nature was a fierce beast that had to be tamed and punished so that it could work as a machine, placed at our service for ever and ever. Nature, which was eternal, owed us slavery.” Read this piece.
It was only Hindu civilisation that didn’t go on kiling people to spread or to destroy environment. It flourished through soft power and that’s the reason why Voltaire whom every secular liberal likes to talk of had to say: “I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, — astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry…But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe.”
But for Islam (by talking of Muhammad) he says: “But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.”
Hope this makes it clear.
(Aabhas Maldahiyar is an author and a columnist for The Print, Firstpost, Swarajya and Organiser.)
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