Dear Mr. Jami: “ kheshtehe avval chon nahad maemar kaj…. Ta sorayya miravd divar kaj”
You as a good photographer and moviemaker know better than others that to capture the best image camera’s lens must be adjusted properly or else the result would be useless. My background is in electronic Test and Measurement devices and these equipments must be calibrated once or twice a year for accuracy, or else the measurement would be inaccurate and useless. Aramesh Dostdar and Ali Shariati’s lens are not adjusted properly and their mind is out of calibration. Both are the two extreme in the issue of religion. Shariati wanted to mix drinking water with motor oil so that the solution could have dual purpose, well the mixture of oil and water has no use, neither we can drink it nor use it in our engine. Dostdar approaches religion from opposite direction and claims that religiously oriented mind is unable to think. He has built a skyscraper on shaky and sandy foundation. His indiscriminate rejection of religion does not come from his critical thinking; it has its roots on his anger and rage. If we think ourselves as hammer all we can see is the nail. His anger has blocked his eyes so badly that he is unable even to see even the very obvious. “ Choon gharaz amad honar poushideh shod.”
First: Dostdar is aware that vast majority of the past great thinkers were religious. St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Faraday, Darwin, Newton, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Gustav Jung, Einstein, Spinoza, Heidegger, Schelling, Pascal, Nikola Tesla, Soren Kierkegaard, Samuel Johnson, Françoise Dolto--- the world best child psychologist, --- Abdus Salam--- the first Muslim Noble prize winner in particle physics--- Farabi, Ibn-Sina and you just name it thousands more, both from the past and present.
Second: As all high school students -- except Aramesh Dostdar--know, magic preceded religion and religion preceded philosophy and philosophy had paved the road to natural and physical sciences. If religion was not fertile how it paved the road to science?
Third: Logic and modern science have proven that any sentence starting with “ all” usually become false when they are reversed. Compare “ all dogs are animals.” with “ all animals are dogs.” but true sentences beginning with the word” some” can be switched around and remain true and false ones can remain false.” For example,” Some women are artists,”: some artists are women.” (both true); “ some dogs are mice, “ “ some mice are dogs” (both false). The statement such as “ all poisons are dangerous” is wrong because there is at least two poisons ---nitric oxide and glutamate--- which acts a neurotransmitter in our brain which without is there were no communication between neurons.
Totalizing and all encompassing coarse propositions are belongs to the past and does not have any place in more these days fine-tuned thinking. Who ever have tried to make universal statement ended up regretting, some of the greatest minds have made some very childish claims that just are laughable.
I am not going to talk about religion, but have Aramesh Dostdar asked himself why so called scientific Marxism --- the product of one of the best mind of all human history--- did not even last for a century under the brightest mind of Soviet people but the religion had survived millenniums with their apparent internal contradictions.
The simple answer is that, world is much more complicated than to be brought under control and scientifically explained. Even the entire scientists of the past and present have any answer to the story in the following link. At age two this boy draws a cello and writes its name and when he was taken to a music store, he sets dawn and plays it as if he was trained before. The full story is in:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/60minutes/main657713.shtml
As Vladimir Nabokov had said “ What can be controlled is never completely real, what is real can never be completely controlled.”
Religion had survived in spite of all its contradictions because it is fluid and there is a historical truth in it. Among other things, religion is a response to primal anxiety and who does not want to be free of anxiety. Should not we ask why Lenin’s books were checked out only a couple times in thirty years from libraries in Romania and why Old and New testaments, Koran, Tao Te Chin, I ching and Upanishads and other hundreds of ancient spiritual books are sells in millions?
Aramesh Dostdar is ignorant of religion. In his two books “ derakhshesh-hayeh- tireh” and “ molahezateh falsafi dar din ve elm” have ignored all the past intellectual achievements and we should not be surprised if he claims that he is the only true “ thinker “ and “ intellectual” of all history. His delusion has no end. He just forgets the truth that “ if we see the horizon a little further, because we are standing on the shoulders of past giants.”
According to Aramesh Dostdar’s theory, we should dig Newton’s grave and beat him up for not discovering quantum physics or we should find and beat the DOS developer for not having developed Windows XP thirty year ago. Aramesh Dostdar lacks what is called “ Historical Fairness” Heidegger says, “ what does Being mean? And his answer is “ What is given to thinking to think”
Dostdar and Shariati both misunderstood religion. Religion is the vertical relation between a person and his/her deep belief. Dostdar have tried miserably to get rid of this relation and Shariati with his semi Marxist, semi Sarterian interpretation of religion had tried to apply this vertical relation to horizontal relation in society. People's relation between themselves and with the government must be horizontal. A decent society organizes itself horizontally and threats every body equally. The concept of God and religion is deeply rooted in human unconscious and must be respected. As Goethe had said” man of culture also has religion but the ones with no culture better to have religion.” Religion – as anything else – can be abused in the hand of hypocrites and tyrants—which we all aware of it---
Both Dostdar and Shariati share a common disease and that is they are both nostalgic for the past. Both are looking backward to find an answer for their entangled mind. Shariati’s “ baz ghasht be khishtan” is nothing but a childish yearning for the “ old good days”, as if in the past there were a place like a heaven and this bustard Westerners have taken it away from us. Dostdar is also looking for the lost paradise in the past and he tries to find this paradise before arrival of Islam. —These are just my speculation and most probably I am right. In the following article there is a trace of it.
http://www.iran-azad.de/PUuS/Puzesh.htm.
Professor Salman Akhtar calls these childish yearnings “ Someday” and “ If only” fantasies. Instead of looking into the past for using it as a springboard they want to go there and seek sanctuary.
In my previous comment, I said that both Dostdar and Shariati are the same, because there are at the extreme side of the same spectrum. It is well known fact that two extremes always turn to their opposites. Drug addicts, alcoholics, and gamblers quit their bad habits after hitting the bottom, the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” Kharabi chon cheh az had boghzarad aabad migardad” is the testament of this idea. It was Heraclitus which first pointed it out this ‘ phase shift” An extreme of happiness often turns into sadness and extreme of liberty often turns into tyranny. Hegel’s dialectic is all about this subtle phenomenon. A decadent society will reach its peaks before turning to a renaissance society.
Living matters tend to organize and operate in a rather quiescent point; any extreme tends to generate its opposite. Extreme air pressure differences cause spinning tornadoes and global weather patterns that disappear once the barometric pressure are equalized. According a Swedish psychologist schizophrenia originates in an abnormal family configuration, characterized by immaturity in the parents, especially in the mother, who either rejects her child or is unable to think of it as separate from herself--- again we see how two extremes opposites yields to the same result. I can go on giving thousands of such examples. In child raising, too much restrictive discipline or lack of discipline would have the same result. At least we all have seen some spoiled children in our life. The extreme attitude of both armed groups--- Mojahedin and Cherikh hayeh Fadaei-- in Iran introduced all these execution into the society. They forced the government to execute the prisoner and then the same weapons were turned against themselves. For more accurate information, read the second part of this article.
http://akhbar.gooya.com/society/archives/016558.php
A couple days ago, I was reading “ Nietzsche, A philosophical Biography” by Rudiger Safranski. I could not believe what this ardent atheist had said on power of religion. It says” In Nietzsche’s view, christianly represented an absolutely brilliant attempt to accomplish this aim. It offered the “ underprivileged” three advantages. First, it granted man an “ absolute value, in contrast to man’s smallness and coincidental statues in the flux of becoming and passing on.” Second, suffering and evil were rendered tolerable once they had “ meaning” Finally, the belief in creation made people regard the world as infused with spirit and therefore recognizable and valuable. Christianity thereby prevented people who were disadvantaged by nature from “ hating themselves as people and taking sides against life.” The Christian doctrines subdued the cruelty of nature, roused people to life and kept those whom might other vice have despairing clinging to hope. In a word, it sheltered “ the underprivileged from nihilism.”
Yes these are from Nietzsche. A society based on Mr. Aramesh Dostdar would be nothing less that the Stalinist regime of Soviet Union, which even did not spare its best physicists, people such as Lev Landau—the Noble laureate and was said the have the best mind along with Einstein--- and it’s best air craft designer Andrei Tupolev. It forced the one of the best geneticist Nikoli Vavilov to parish in Siberia and Timofeff to immigrate to Germany to become the leading German geneticist.
Yes the result of this Aramesh Dostdar so called “ deterministic scientific “ thinking would ended up to this kind of hell. If human abhor uncertainty, they also abhor too much certainty. There is no novelty, no innovation in too much certainty certainty.
This rather long comment is coming to its end and I found no better than the following quotes from an on line books titled “ `Conversation with Great Thinkers at www.LJHAMMOND.com in chapter “ Education”. It says, “ Classics aren’t written by scholars. Not even one classic is a hundred was written by an academic. Classics contain personality and pathos and suffering and anger and humor, all of which scholarly books lack. Classics are written with passion, and arouse in those who read them. Scholarly books are dry, cold and impersonal, and don’t arouse passion in those who read them. Classics have life and vitality; cut them and blood will come out. Scholarly books are lifeless; cut them and dust will come out,”
When you cut Aramesh Dostdar’s books not only dust but also cockroaches would come out. His books are extremely depressive and boring.
To make this long story short, Shariati by converting Islam to a political ideology poisoned thousands of fresh minds, which most of them became the active member of the suppressive apparatus and architect of the 60’s mass execution of political prisoner. Some of his student and follower were ended up in Rajavi’e Mojadedineh Saddam Hussein and some in “ Mojahedineh Inghelabeh Islami” which blood still is dripping from their hands. And we already have seen the application of Aramesh Dostdar’s idea in both communist and fascist regimes. After all both these totalitarian regimes were based on so called “ scientifically” structured society and both came out of the positivism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
PS: My attitude toward religion is more close to Spinoza.
