February 9FROM THE WORLD OF RELIGION
Ancient Gods are like friends of our childhood days: we may remember them
vaguely, but they are no longer as close or dear or worthy of attention to
us, as the friends of our later years. So it is, for example, with Apollo of
ancient Greece. There was a time when he was worshiped and venerated, not
just in Greece, but also in Rome at one time. Today, however, he is largely
only a name in archived mythology: no longer a life-giving force to a
civilization, as he once was.
In a Homeric hymn Apollo is invoked as the son of Zeus and Leto, born under
a palm tree in Delos where Helios, the sun-god, was the primary deity.
Artemis was his sister. He imbibed the immortalizing ambrosia, and grew to
manhood right away. He killed the awesome Python when still very young.
By ancient accounts, he was born on the 7th day of the Greek month of
Thargelion, but people of later eras fixed 9 February as the Feast of
Apollo. We read in the Odyssey that when Odysseus was gone for a whole
decade and thought to be dead, his queen Penelope was wooed by many suitors=
.
Penelope, little interested in any of them, organized an archery contest on
the Feast Day of Apollo, for Apollo was a fine archer too.
He was a versatile god: he would strum the strings of the lyre as easily as
he would wield the string of the bow. When the gods had a banquet he would
play his lyre. Indeed, he was very jealous of his instrument. When Marsyas
claimed to play the flute better, he was flayed by Apollo. Like Krishna in
Hindu lore, Apollo protected the cattle. He was athletic, and the first
winner of the first Olympic Games. He was a singer and poet as well, yet
warlike no less. And he is also known to have sent plague and pestilence to
the people.
Emperor Augustus of Rome, who regarded himself as a prot=C7g=C7 of Apollo, had
temples built for him. Games were instituted in his honor. I remember seeing
a seven foot high statue of Apollo in a museum in Rome, and found it hard to believe this was the image of a god. But as sculpture, it was impressive,
with flowing marble cloth gracefully draped around the neck and hanging over
the part of the arm that still was there, and more modest in its exposure
than the one in Greece. Later I read that this statue, known as Apollo
Belvedere, was much admired by Goethe as a supreme example of Greek ideal
of beauty. The poet Swinburne described Apollo as "with hair and harpstring
of gold, a bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold."
We may not know exactly how the Feast of Apollo may have been observed in
those distant days. Some have suggested it could not have been much
different in essence from such days that are observed in our own times:
visit to the temple of Apollo with little gifts, selling of memorabilia by
merchants around the temple, special foods and drinks, singing, dancing and
performing on the lyre, etc. For, in spite of all the differences with
varying forms,names and legends, in matters of religion we are all very much
alike. Of course we all have the same number of chromosomes and similar
genes, but even culturally speaking, we are not all that different. Just as
our physical hunger prompts us to make food, and that food is in form and
taste and variety different from region to region and culture to culture,
this is true in our religious expressions as well. For they too spring from
another kind of hunger: the yearning to connect in some way with that which
seems to be beyond and elusive, yet very near to our deepest core.
FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
Back in the mid-18th century La Mettrie wrote a book entitled: "L'homme
machine" (Man-machine). The thesis of the book was that human beings are
essentially machines: the brain secretes thought the same way as the liver
secretes bile.
In the twentieth century, armed with considerably more scientific knowledge,
and basing himself on his own ground-breaking research, another French
scientist-thinker came to very much the same conclusion: "The cell is a
machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine." His name was Jacques Monod (born: 9 February 1905).
It is well known that genes control pretty much everything that the human
body does. Thus they also regulate the metabolism of cells. Monod's work
revealed that this happens when genes direct the biosynthesis of enzymes.
Monod and his colleague Jacob Loeb proposed that aside from the DNA there
is, what they called, a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). The base
sequence of mRNA is complementary to the DNA's base sequence. The mRNA
carries information encoded in the base sequence to ribosomes where
protein synthesis occurs. There the base sequence of the mRNA gets
translated into the amino acid of the protein-accelerating enzyme. Monod
also put into evidence the feedback mechanism which regulates the production
of proteins. He introduced the term operons to describe gene complexes.
Monod worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris to which, like quite a few
others before him, he brought glory with a Nobel Prize. He worked under
rather strenuous conditions, for which he criticized his government. He
declined lucrative offers from the United States, preferring to work in his
own native France.
Like most people who work at the most fundamental levels of living
organisms, Monod was convinced that an organism is nothing more than an
extraordinarily complex biochemical lab where millions of chemical reactions
are continuously taking place to keep the whole unit in working condition.
In his framework, he simply couldn't take seriously traditional religious
doctrines on life, afterlife, god or creation. In a very widely read book
called "Le hasard et la necessite" (1970) [Chance and Necessity] he
presented with great clarity and persuasiveness the philosophical view by
which there is no purpose or meaning in life as a phenomenon. He simply
could not subscribe to the notion that ethics and morality can be derived
from our understanding of the world. While repudiating traditional religion,
he also showed the futility of trying to connect science and religion.
Indeed he had no respect for all the talk about God, Cosmos in the
religious sense, mysticism, and the like. He forcefully expounded the thesis
that, whether we like it or not, we are just chance occurrences in an
otherwise lifeless universe which, by the way, ignores us as less than
nothing. As he put it, "Chance alone is the source of all novelty, all
creation in the biosphere." He referred to this doctrine of no intent or
purpose as the "postulate of objectivity."
Declaring that "the ancient covenant is in pieces", he added:"Man at last
knows that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which
he emerged only by chance."
It followed from this recognition, said Monod, that there simply is no such
thing as human destiny, no heaven or hell. We have to act and behave as if
heaven is here below and there is no hell.
He was aware, like most thoughtful people, that in many ways humankind has
reached the brink, and that unless we act quickly, our species is doomed to
perish very soon.
V. V. Raman
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