Under God: Shukla and Chopra: The Great Yoga Debate - David Waters
On April 18, On Faith panelist Aseem Shukla wrote an essay on yoga’s American popularity and Hindu heritage. On April 23, On Faith panelist Deepak Chopra responded. And the debate was on. The impromptu debate has drawn hundreds of comments from readers and generated a great deal of discussion in the wider Hindu community. Here, due to popular demand, is the Shukla-Chopra debate in one blog post. Aseem Shukla, April 18: The theft of yoga: Nearly 20 million people in the United States gather together routinely, fold their hands and utter the Hindu greeting of Namaste — the Divine in me bows to the same Divine in you. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, agnostics and atheists they may be, but they partake in the spiritual heritage of a faith tradition with a vigor often unmatched by even among the two-and-a half-million Hindu Americans here. Yet the reality is very different. Why is yoga severed in America’s collective consciousness from Hinduism? But be forewarned. Although Prof.
New estimate for alien Earths: 2 billion in our galaxy alone
Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based in data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those worlds. "This means there are a lot of Earth analogs out there — two billion in the Milky Way galaxy," researcher Joseph Catanzarite, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com. Related at SPACE.com:
Our country has no (official) name
Is it India, Bharat or Hindustan? Even the Home Ministry doesn't seem to know, reveals RTI query IS our country officially called India, Bharat or Hindustan? RTI activist Manoranjan Roy realised this when he filed a query with the Union Home Ministry seeking to clear his doubts on the subject and was told that they had 'no information on the subject'. "In English, the country is called India; it is referred to as Bharat in Hindi and in Urdu as Hindustan. The reply (copy with MiD DAY), however, shocked Roy and he now plans to move court. However, here the government doesn't even know the official name of the country. Language tooIn the same query, Roy also sought to know the national language of the country, to which the information officer replied that there was no mention of national languages in the Constitution. RTI activist Manoranjan Roy Roy was told that, according to Article 343 of the Indian Constitution, Hindi is the official language of the country.
Brief Answers to Cosmic Questions
Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? Evolution of the Universe Did the Universe expand from a point? More about the Big Bang When they say "the universe is expanding," what exactly is expanding? Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? If you could suddenly freeze time everywhere in the universe, and magically survey all of creation, you would find galaxies extending out far beyond what we can see today. Does the term "universe" refer to space, or to the matter in it, or to both? Today, the situation is reversed. Discovering the properties of space remains one of the deepest and most important problems in modern science. Evolution of the Universe Did the Universe expand from a point? More about the Big Bang
Why you should read the Vedas, and why the religious will never understand them | neoIndian - Confessions of a newly returned Indian
The most intriguing thing about the Vedas is their relative unpopularity among the religious; Google offers three times as many search results for “why you should read the Gita” as it does for “why you should read the Vedas”. And if you ask the religious (approach as gingerly as a cat approaching a flock of birds) for advice on reading the Vedas, they will basically tell you why you shouldn’t read the Vedas. The religious will tell you that you need to be spiritually advanced before you can learn anything from the Vedas. They will tell you that even if you spent a lifetime learning Sanskrit, you wouldn’t know it well enough to understand the Vedas, and most English translations of the Vedas have a sinister political agenda. Besides, they say, the real wisdom of the Vedas is hidden (ironic for a text that is supposed to be “revealed wisdom”); without a “real” guru you can’t possibly crack the code. (Thought experiment: A thousand years from now, the Vedas will be a thousand years older.
