The reign of the Banu Umayya is rarely discussed in Muslim gatherings. Sunni lecturers can give a passing reference to this era that spanned almost a hundred years. Shia talk about this, although only in the context of what they did to the Ahl-e-Bait, the progeny of Prophet Muhammad PBUH and Hazrat Ali bin Abi Taalib. The machinations and nefarious deeds of the Umayyads were much greater than that and spanned almost all of Asia. Today I am going to write about that.

Sunnis do hold Yazid bin Muawiya in a bad light. As in, they consider him a villain. And a villain he was. But they consider Muawiyya a companion of the Holy Prophet PBUH and revere him as a scribe of the divine revelation that is the Holy Quran. If you read Sunni literature such as Taareekh ibne Kaseer, or Khillafat aur Malookiyat, Muaawiyya’s bad deeds are mentioned, but the salutation Hazrat is prefixed to his name. One wonders how such a Machiavellian person earns so much respect in Islam. Sunnis normally don’t discuss the many acts of this person in which he opposed Hazrat Ali RA. The latter even sacked him from the governorship of Syria, and he (the former) refused to obey his command. Nahj-ul-Balaagha, a compilation of sermons, letters, and other essays by Hazrat Ali RA is full of incidents in which he addressed Muaawiya in a way that will make you think that he was not a good person at all. Besides, there are so many other incidents that are listed in historical accounts that will make anybody think that he was not a noble person at all. For instance, consider the assassination of Maalik-e-Ashtar. He was poisoned on his way to Egypt, when he was sent there as a governor by Hazrat Ali. The way he was poisoned is a masterpiece in crime stories of any human era. If you want to learn how crime works, read this person’s life.

My purpose today is not to discuss Muaawiya, although books can be written about him. I want to talk about the rest of the almost dozen Umayyad caliphs, too. And I want to argue why criticizing them is extremely necessary in today’s day and age. Shias do talk about Umayyads. But they consider them bad only because of what they did to the Ahl-e-Bait. Yes, they literally killed generations of Imam Ali RA. But their crimes were more than that. And this is something the whole world, including Muslims and non-Muslims should know.

We are still in the month of Muharram. This is a month of mourning in Islam. This month, Hazrat Imam Hussain RA was martyred in Karbala. The battle of Karbala is the genocide of the family of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH. If you spare precious time out of your life and listen to the events that led to the battle, the geopolitical situation of its time, and the account of this battle itself, you will realize that this is the biggest genocide in the history of mankind. It will make you so sombre and so sad that you will literally need a lot of time to come out of the grief. How a person upon a person in the camp of Imam Hussain RA was brutally murdered. How the arms of Hazrat Abbas RA were cut off. How Hazrat Ali Asghar RA, the youngest son of Hazrat Imam Hussain RA, was martyred by an arrow while he was in his arms. How Hazrat Ali Akbar RA was killed. How Shimar used to slap Bibi Sakeena RA on her cheeks. How she said farewell to Imam Hussain RA while he mounted his horse to go to the battlefield alone. How Imam Hussain RA asked Jawn (or John) bin Huwai, a Christian Freedman, on the night before the day of the battle to go home, and how he refused to do so, and how he embraced martyrdom on that day. How Imam Hussain fought like a lion. How he gathered corpses of his loved ones one by one. And how he was eventually martyred by the notorious cronies of Yazid. It is said that a group of Hussaini Brahmins of India witnessed the battle. When they saw the decapitation of the Imam, they slit their own throats open too. What is reported to happen after that is a miracle.

Yazid did not last for long and after a couple of Caliphs after him, Abdul Maalik bin Marwan became the so-called Caliph of the Muslims. In an earlier post, I wrote that Marwaan had tried to assassinate the Prophet Muhammad PBUH. The latter expelled him from Madina too. I also wrote in the past that Walid bin Abdul Maalik became the Caliph after him. I also wrote about the five events that happened in the year 712 that shaped the world in a way that influences us all in bad ways even today. I wrote about how he conquered Spain, India, and Central Asia this year. I also wrote that he martyred Hazrat Imam Zain ul Abideen RA, and that he built the Dome of the Rock over the second temple of Solomon. I argue that he shouldn’t have done that.

Walid was followed by Suleiman, and he was followed by Umar II. All Ummayads here except Umar II are largely considered corrupt, treacherous, and amoral by Muslim historians. Hisham is considered to have martyred both Hazrat Imam Baaqir and Hazrat Zaid. Both were sons of Hazrat Imam Zain ul Abideen. Hazrat Imam Jaffar As Saadiq RA is considered to have lived a difficult life under whatever remained of the Umayyad rule.

So all in all, this nefarious reign of Umayyads lasted more or less a hundred years, starting with the governorship of Syria of Muawiyya in the 640s and ending with the overtake of Abbasids in 750 AD. The huge landmasses they confiscated in the name of Islam would provide them ample free wealth to build palaces in Damascus. Islam as a religion is not about this.

Do you know that Umayyads even tried to conquer China? Prophet Muhammad PBUH never recommended that. Instead, there is a Hadith in which he says that seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China. So China is taken in high esteem here. But its conquest was never foretold or recommended.

Similarly, Prophet Muhammad PBUH never talked about the conquest of Spain. Nor does the Holy Quran mention Spain even once. On the contrary, there are Hadith of Prophet Muhammad PBUH is which he says to leave the Ethiopians on their own. Or to leave the Turks on their own, meaning not to invade them. Muslims never invaded Ethiopia in respect for hosting the first batch of immigrants of Islam.

I urge everyone to read the Ashtiname of Prophet Muhammad PBUH which is a covenant of him to the Muslims for Christians. According to this, it is a sin to hurt a Christian or to confiscate their property or Churches. Modern scholarship has also extended this to Jews and Hindus, and I like this. I posted it in a comment on social media the other day, and a person commented that this is not an authentic document. I argue that it may as well not be authentic, but how is it authentic to inavde other countries? There is no mention of invasion in the Quran or the Hadith altogether.

Imam Hussian’s sister-in-law Mehrbaanu was married to an Indian King Chandragupta. The Imam was happy to migrate to India and the Indians were happy to assimilate him. However, Yazid’s cronies did not let him go. Later they invaded India only for the crime that she had given sanctuary to Bibi Ruqayya Bin-e-Ali. How tragic this is.

A large number of Muslims miss the Islamic rule in Spain. An argument is that Muslims were ruthlessly removed from Spain, and something to an extent of a genocide was done to them. My argument is that what were Muslims doing there for 780 years in the first place? Spain was a Christian country, and its inhabitants, the Spanish people, eventually took it back from them. What is bad about that? Similarly, in my previous post, I wrote that India has been a host to numerous invasions by warriors in the name of Islam for so many centuries.

Why do I write all of this, and why do I emphasize that Muslims should learn to disown and condemn the acts of the Umayyads? Muslims take pride in the glorious past of Islam as an enterprise that spanned large land masses. However, there is a number of problems with this. First of all, this is not nice to conquer other peoples countries unless there are gross human rights violations there. Secondly, even if there was evidence of human rights violations in Spain or India, a major problem is that the Umayyads did not have the legal or divine mandate to fix these issues. They were themselves guilty of human rights violations and murder against the family of Prophet Muhammad PBUH.

Muslims argue that past Muslims brought civilization and cultural development to these countries. The argument here is that these places were not deserted. Spain was privy of civilization before that, and it was a thriving country. If Muslims meant any good to them, they could help these countries by donating them grain, just like what the Ottomans did during the famine in Ireland. Even if a country has to be occupied, wouldn’t it be nice to return the country to its inhabitants when the internal threat has been removed?

Today, Spain is one of the few countries that stands at the forefront of diplomacy to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to thank Spain for this and apologize to them for having occupied their country for so long? Same for Indians, we could extend some respect to them for being an immigrant-friendly country for so long.

Why is it important to criticize these aspects of the Umayyads in our day and age? I believe that it is extremely important for a number of reasons. Firstly, Prophet Muhammad PBUH was a guide for all humanity. By martyring his whole family generation after generation, the Umayyads highjacked the religion of Islam. Moreover, they institutionalized Islam just like the Roman Empire did with Christianity to control human beings. They did things apart from debauchery that are extremely opposed to the teachings of Islam. For instance, Islam would be against building huge palaces as much of the teachings of Islam, just like Christianity, are focused on the afterlife, and not on this worldly life on planet earth.

It is also very important to criticize the Umayyads because what is mostly being practiced today in the Muslim world is a shadow of that image. Much of the political practices in Pakistan and Arab countries are a reflection of that. Bribery is rampant in our countries. Prophet Muhammad PUBH said that both the taker and the giver of bribery belong to hell. Muawiya, however, used to bribe people to gain their favors. Nepotism is rampant in our culture. Arabs have huge piles of money. But their indulgence in debauchery just reminds us of the Umayyads. Moreover, the Indians just hate the ordinary Muslims as undesirable intruders.

The post One Hundred Years of Turpitude first appeared on Psyops Prime.]]> https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/one-hundred-years-of-turpitude/feed/ 0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2560 https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/journey-to-jerusalem-conquest-upon-conquest/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=journey-to-jerusalem-conquest-upon-conquest https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/journey-to-jerusalem-conquest-upon-conquest/#respond Tue, 29 Apr 2025 16:14:34 +0000 https://psyopsprime.com/?p=2536 My last Journey to Jerusalem article was partly focused on reflecting on events surrounding the year 712 AD and the conquest of SIndh by the

My last Journey to Jerusalem article was partly focused on reflecting on events surrounding the year 712 AD and the conquest of SIndh by the Arabs. Before that, I also wrote about why the Dome of Rock is a misplaced monument and that it should not have been built. I have been thinking about this article for a long time, but I could not write it due to certain obligations. My theme is to write about the conquest of India by Muslim invaders over the past thirteen hundred years. This is a critical topic that I believe must be understood by Muslims, Indians, and the rest of the world too. The reason is that most of the things are misunderstood by most human communities, and that confusion can be misleading.

By the way, Arabs invaded India only once. As I wrote earlier, this happened in 712 AD. I also wrote that Walid bin Abdul Malik ordered this invasion to persecute the fleeing daughter of Imam Ali bin Abi Taalib (RA). This is extremely important to understand. Most Muslims consider Sindh as the door of Islam to India, as Islam arrived here through this invasion. However, the truth is that Walid belonged to a murderous clan that was against the family of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) himself. Rest of the story can be found in my previous article.

After this eighth century attack of Arabs on India from the Arabian sea till the end of the tenth century, there was a lull of Muslim attacks. By the beginning of the eleventh century, the famous battle of Peshawar happened between Indians and Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. An interesting aspect about this person is that he is a very controversial person in Pakistan. Many consider him as a hero. However, among the highly educated echelons of Pakistan, he is considered as a plunderer. When I was a child I read about some literature about him in which he was taken in a very high esteem. In my point of view the truth of the established history is that his father was provoked by the Maharaja Jayapala of North India who had started becoming insecure of the growing power of Sabuktigin in Ghazni. By preemptively attacking him the Raja literally stirred the hornet’s nest so much so that the severity of the retaliatory invasions led him to commit suicide. On a personal level, I only consider this man to be a justifiable conqueror of India. After all, this was the protocol of medieval times; you provoke someone and then it really depends if you can sustain the retaliation or not. I think that this is a timeless law of nature. Sabuktigin was a slave who had elevated to the status of a ruler. He was of Turkic origin.

After this came the turn of the Ghauris, who are much despised in India to this day. Ghauris originated from somewhere in Persia. They were literally nomadic people who had converted to Islam at some stage. Initially, they advanced to Ghazni and sacked the Ghaznavi sultanate. They torched Kabul and the city literally burned for seven days and seven nights. Later on they marched to Delhi, conquered it and made it their capital. I personally find it very problematic to defend this invasion. Delhi sulatane was formed at this time. This was followed by the slave dynasty’s rule in northern India. Mostly these rulers were of either Persian or Turkic origins.

Later on came the era of two very famous expansionist imperialists. One of them was Genghis Khan. He remains a famous person to this day. I read an article on geopolitics a few years ago in which it was stated that one in every eighth person in Asia happens to be his descendant. His name needs no mention. And his barbarity needs no advertisement. His reputation has always remained two steps ahead of him to this day. He belonged to Mangolia.

The second was Tamerlane. He is also a very famous warrior. He was was Turkicized Mongol who also descended from an extremely ferocious general of Genghis Khan. Legend has it that he was a memorizer of the Holy Quran too. From an early age he had a personal ambition to conquer the world. He plundered Asia multiple times from the East to the West of Asia. In the East he clashed with the Delhi Sultanate and in the West with the Ottoman empire. He was driven by an ambition to conquer the world. After him the Delhi sultanate was restored in India. His cruelty, barbarity, and brutality were second only to Genghis Khan.

Then came the famous king Babur who set the stage for the Mughal empire in India. He was a descendant of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan from his father’s and mother’s sides, respectively. He was surely a Mongol, and hence the name Mughal. In the name of God he clashed with Ibrahim Lodhi, the last Sultan of the Delhi Sultanate. As a matter of fact, he mustered support from Gujjars, a scheduled caste of the Indian subcontinent, of Sohawa (a town now in Northern Punjab in Pakistan). He made a fiery religious speech to them before he attacked Delhi. It is needless to mention that Ibrahim was already a Muslim.

Babur’s son Humayun became the king after the demise of his father. He was later overthrown by Sher Shah Suri in the name of God. And eventually, Sher Shah was overthrown by Akbar in the name of God, too. Akbar lived to become one of the greatest emperors in human history. He ruled India for over fifty years. Among the many good things he did for India, he did so many bad things too, including introducing a new religion which was a mixture of Hinduism and Islam. It is highly forbidden in Islam to make innovations in the religion of God. However, Akbar was largely inspired by his desire to rule. After Akbar, his son Jehangir came to the throne. He was followed by his son Shahjehan, who is also the founder of the famous Taj Mahal.

Shahjehan’s son Aurangzeb incarcerated his father and had his elder brother Dara Shikoh assassinated. Daara was the heir apparent to the throne. Aurangzeb ruled India for another fifty years too. But by the end of his tenure, the Mughal empire was already in decline. There were a few more Mughal kings and then the British took over India and colonized it for around ninety years. This brought an end to the conquests of Muslims in India.

Reading this tale of plunder and murders, one should wonder that what was wrong with each of the murdered kings (who were also Muslim) that the murderer killed him or put him in the jail in the name of God. What were their differences that they could not decide through dialogue or diplomacy? And why should they have fought with each other due to personal differences, as a Muslim person is not supposed to live a life for personal goals and ambitions but as a duty to God. I am leaving the Hindu inhabitants of India aside for a moment. I am talking about the nature of conflicts between the Muslim warriors only.

This is a well-known story of the conquests of Muslim warriors in India. They were killing each other in the name of God. And they were doing these excursions in somebody else’s country. This is what the normal Muslims do not understand. This is what they must appreciate. And this is why I have written this article.

No matter what the beliefs of Indian people, and no matter how inhumane or inhygienic their rituals, the truth is that India is the country of the Indian people. Moreover, India is not mentioned anywhere in the Holy Quran, let alone its conquests. India was also a friendly country towards emigrants. Once upon a time, Jews and Christians had migrated to India. Later on, persecuted Muslims, especially from the progeny of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his household, had moved to India. Normally, it was people fleeing from their hostile origins who would come to India. Imam Hussain was considering moving to India. Imam Hussain was married to a Persian princess whose sister was married to an a prince of an Indian state. Indians were happy to host Imam Hussain (RA).

Moreover, Islam was already becoming comfortable in India due to the advent of Sufi saints. As early as the eleventh century, famous Sufi saints had started settling in India. Sufis would come alone to India, without any armies or armaments. They would start living in India like common people. Their conduct and behavior was sufficient to motivate Indians to convert to Islam. Around half a million Rajputs are considered to have converted to Islam due to the peaceful company of Hazrat Baha ud Din Zakariya (RA). Khawaja Ghulam Mohi ud Din Chishti (RA) settled in Ajmer, that was the traditional house of Rajputs, the foremost warrior class of India.

The message of the sufis was always love of God and the love of humanity. There is a central concept in Islam that a person owes two types of rights. One is the rights of God. The other type is the rights of human beings. It is said that God can forgive the rights of Himself, but not of human beings. And the rights of human beings revolve around care and compassion, not subjugation and murder.

Conquests were not only not required, they were quite evil. They have had a very negative effect on the Indian psyche. It does not matter that India is a racist society, or that all Indian people are not equal, or that it was already an occupation of Indo-Aryan over Dalits. These are widespread notions that can be found in common chit chat to academic literature. But it does not matter. The real ingredient required to mold human hearts is love. With love humans can be molded to good. Subjugation was a bad idea.

The post Journey to Jerusalem: Conquest Upon Conquest first appeared on Psyops Prime.]]> https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/journey-to-jerusalem-conquest-upon-conquest/feed/ 0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2536 https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/essence-of-epistemology/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=essence-of-epistemology https://psyopsprime.com/consciousness/essence-of-epistemology/#respond Thu, 15 Jun 2023 22:55:14 +0000 http://psyopsprime.com/?p=2216 One of my ex-colleagues remarked on Facebook today about the limits of language models in terms of their ability to acquire knowledge. Out of a

The post Essence of Epistemology first appeared on Psyops Prime.]]> One of my ex-colleagues remarked on Facebook today about the limits of language models in terms of their ability to acquire knowledge. Out of a random thought, I commented on it that the language models indeed do not have any knowledge at all. In my opinion, they are just probabilistic models that churn out next word phrases in a sequence by following a particular probability distribution. I further remarked whether we as humans really knew anything as well. Are we also probabilistic models that are trying to produce words (as we speak or write) based on what we have learned over our lifetimes? I further commented that Marvin Minsky would have asked us such a question. Indeed, it was the habit of Professor Minsky to take aback a curious interrogator with such stunning questions in response. A typical scenario could be that an attendant asked Professor Minsky, could machines ever be able to become conscious? In response to that Professor Minsky asked, are you conscious? How do you know that you are conscious? These are very stunning questions that can baffle the most intelligent student for a moment.

Anyhow, to this, my colleague replied that Professor Minsky would indeed be able to say upon looking at me. I found this comment of my friend rather sarcastic. I literally found this embarrassing. To this I decided to give a bitter response. And I did that! The whole thread and the conversation are given below.

My friend clarified this by saying that he literally meant to prove this point that a machine was not able to do what I did as a human i.e., to respond while feeling bad. I agree with this. But then there are still a myriad of other questions that we need to address about the essence of epistemology.

Did I really know in advance that I will get a sarcastic response to my comment, which I made simply out of goodwill? Did I know at the time of commenting that after a few minutes of this, I will be feeling bad about the experience of commenting? Did I know that the deluge of bad thoughts I had about my friend’s remark on my intellectual aptitude would be hard to suppress? Did I know that my composure will fail? This is a very important question that one needs to address while building intelligent machines. Will the machine be able to predict its own failure? This is a profound question about intelligence. But can humans predict their own failure in advance? This is a rather liberating question for intelligent machines. How did I know how to choose to respond? I had the choice of staying quiet and ignoring the comment. I had the opportunity to respond to a joke with a joke. The response could have been a self-condescending joke or even a pun. Or the response could be a bitter letter of words that I posted back. And why did I choose to reply in this manner?

Most of our personalities are made of third-person influences. Indeed, if this had happened to me like twenty years ago, my response could have been extreme. I would either have internalized it or unleashed myself on my friend. But over the years I have learned to become a bit more calculated in my dealings with other people. Yet, I literally could not see it coming or else, I would have totally avoided my friend’s comment. It was a collegial relationship that I had tried to brew with calculated diplomacy over the years and then I had left it unperturbed in a casket of old things up in the attic of my mind. Even if he did not care about being diplomatic with me, I definitely would have taken it to diplomacy and would have created a win-win situation for both of us. This has been a part and parcel of my nature that I tend to cherish to this day. But then, as of recently, I come out of my skin and give a piece of my mind to the perpetrator.

How did I learn to do this? As I said, it is mostly out of third-person influences. Movies, friends, behaviors of elders, books, and stylish dialogues have taught me all such stuff. But the question is do I really know this stuff? Whenever I have to indulge in a behavior, I keep in front of me a bunch of templates of behaviors that I have learned over the years and choose the one that sounds more appropriate. You may argue that I really know this stuff.

Whenever I have to write something these days, I tend to consult a few templates in my mind about various writing styles that I find fashionable. I like the styles of Sam Harris (for his charism), Malcolm Galdwell (for the alacrity), Daniel Dennet (for the depth), and Marvin Minsky (for the simplicity and elegance). I just choose stuff and mix it and out come the words that I keep scribbling. But do I really know all of this stuff that I am writing? You might want to argue that I don’t know any of it. How about language models? Do they really know what they are talking about? I really don’t think so. By the way, do the language models really know how they are doing their calculations at every step while they generate a word? And this brings us to this million-dollar question, do we really know about the mechanisms that happen in our heads while we write things? I would say that we really don’t know any of that. Hu-aah! I think I have made a bit of an argument by this point in this article. When I started writing this article, I was not sure where I am headed. But I think I have already summed up the crux of what I wanted to write.

But I have to explain something about why Professor Minsky would ask us such offsetting questions. One of the reasons I guess is that Professor Minsky wants us to be clear about why we want to create intelligent machines. He wants us to understand what we want them to achieve. So when you ask him can we make conscious machines, he would ask in turn, are you conscious? And all such questions that can sound very puzzling in the beginning but when you think about them very deeply, they have simple answers and they largely simplify our quest for intelligence. I wrote about this in one of my articles that was a reflection on a research article by Professor Minsky; can machines be conscious.

So when Professor Minsky asks us this question “Are we conscious?” or “Do we know anything”, he is doing two things. The first thing is that he challenges us to think about our self-knowledge. And it always turns out that that self-knowledge is very limited. And then he consoles us by saying that it is alright to have this limited knowledge. This consolation is a recurring theme in his famous books; the society of mind and the emotion machine. Secondly, he assures us that it is perfectly alright to create machines with limited intelligent ability as even humans have limited intelligent abilities as well. This is a remarkable thesis as in my opinion, it is an enabler of growth in the area of artificial intelligence. Otherwise, if you read the first chapter of any contemporary book about artificial intelligence, you would find the quest for true intelligence a philosophical quagmire. What we can achieve tends to be limited by the thesis of Turing’s imitation game or Shrodinger’s cat, whatever that means.

As a matter of fact, Professor Minsky was a progenitor of artificial intelligence. A long time ago, he almost abandoned all the fancy algorithms. He assumed their ever-growing powerful presence in the known world and started looking for a practicable theory of mind. What he came up with was the society of mind. This postulates that the mind is not made up of one monolithic process but a bunch of small processes each one of which is responsible for a certain specialty. And then he talks about classifying these processes into certain types of modules, some of which are useful for calculations and the others are responsible for self-reflection etc. This is a beautiful theory. This has been somewhat adopted in the past under the umbrella discipline of cognitive architectures. Cognitive architectures were abandoned for a long time. But I think the time has come for their revival.

So, all in all, it does not really matter if the machines are as good as humans or not. So long as we have the ability to improve them, we are doing a fine job. And it is possible to have some machines that are better in certain disciplines than humans and in some their performance might remain dismal. But this is how humans are too. Whether or not those machines know stuff shall always beg us to ask this question that whether humans know stuff or not. And this will keep us challenged to redefine the essence of epistemology.

Photo by kconkling

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Yesterday we had a great conversation in our research group about an article by the late legendary Professor Marvin Minsky, Why People Think Computers Can’t. The article was published more than forty years ago and I found it quite interesting just like the rest of Minsky’s work.

Why People Think Computers Can’t

https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v3i4.376 Abstract Today, surrounded by so many automatic machines industrial robots, and the R2-D2’s of Star wars movies, most people think AI is much more advanced than it is. But still, many “computer experts” don’t believe that machines will ever “really think.”

I have had a chance to read The Emotion Machine and to review the lectures of the course The Society of Mind by Professor Minsky.

As soon as the conversation began I had the tendency to contribute to the discourse time and again. A few of our students asked questions that related to the current state and limits of what we now generally know about artificial intelligence (AI). I had the urge to explain to them that this paper was not about applied machine learning but about the future of what could be the field of applied true AI.

Slowly we reached the section related to consciousness in machines and computers. Consciousness is one such idea that has baffled philosophers from a very early age even when it comes to how to define it. How do we say if something is conscious?

Anyways, the real question in the group was how do we make conscious machines? There were the usual thwarting sort of arguments that it is difficult or impossible. Moreover, it is generally considered impossible to have consciousness in machines the way we humans do. So I had this tendency to jump into the conversation. I took permission from the moderator to jump into the discourse and started sharing my thoughts. The idea I wanted to bring across was that Professor Minsky actually makes it easier to conceive that consciousness can be brought in machines. So in the article, the professor notes that when he is asked about the question that whether conscious machines can be built, he would ask a similar question back to the person, are you conscious? This can be a very puzzling question. What would you, as the reader, answer to this question? Let me count myself in for the moment in the list of most ordinary folks around the planet. And I would say that yes I am conscious. And then Professor Minsky would ask, how do you add up a couple of numbers, like two and three, and give the answer? Our answer would be that we just do that. The answer is five and I really don’t know how I did that. It is just that I did that. No matter how sophisticated the methods of addition I learned as a child, I have forgotten them all. I can add two numbers and give the answer back really fast. But Professor Minsky, in as much as I know about his personality after auditing his work, would say to me that I really don’t know how my mind works. So there is something I seriously lack about self-consciousness.

By the way when I took to the mic to deliver my ideas to the audience, just before that I had a chain of thoughts go through my head. When I started speaking I was quite confident that I will be able to deliver my ideas one by one to the audience in a coherent manner. However as I was speaking, I slowly began to realize that I had forgotten most of the ideas that I wanted to speak about. I kept speaking about the current idea I was talking about in the hope that I would soon recall what I wanted to say. But in just a few moments I realized that my mind was absolutely blank. I tried a couple of times to recall, but I failed. Soon I began to have a feeling that the audience, who were still not aware of what had really happened to my mind, would begin to lose patience with me. I told them that I forgot what I wanted to say. I was a bit embarrassed about myself. But I stepped off the conversation with an excuse. I also joked at the end that computers are not capable of such human errors. They normally don’t forget unless the memory hardware has failed.

Did I know about this aspect of my mind? Did I know in advance that I will simply forget my very heartfelt thoughts? Clearly, I am not really aware of this aspect of my mind. And this is the point Professor Minsky wants to make as well. What I understand about his idea is that although consciousness is an important aspect of the human mind, we need not worry about a perfect implementation of it for a computer to be truly intelligent. We can work away with a machine being partly self-conscious.

What is consciousness anyway? I said in the beginning that hyper-educated people from society have found it challenging to define it for millennia. Let me try to describe it through a couple of examples from my memory. I was reading the annotation of a podcast on consciousness between two famous neuroscientists once upon a time. So when the guest was asked to describe consciousness, he somewhat gave the example of a worm and said that when we prick it with a needle, it suddenly squeezes. That is, what he said, was consciousness. Let me give another example that does not involve physical contact, as the latter may cause pain that machines are incapable of feeling. Hoover a tennis ball over the head of your pet dog who is also playful somehow. The eyes of the dog will vigilantly follow the ball. Suddenly throw the ball to a side and your dog will jump to fetch it. That is consciousness. And any living thing that can do something like this is also conscious.

By the way, I would like to end this with Avicenna’s famous thought experiment about consciousness. He said that if you lie down on a flat surface and imagine that your body is lying behind, on the bench, and you are lifted up and out of it, lying in the air. And that if you can still conceive yourself to be alive, then you are conscious. Again, I have quoted this from memory. And this is a wonderful thesis.

Anyhow, whatever it may be completely, the truth is that we are not genuinely self-conscious. I know things about myself. I know that I can be lazy and so I have to overcome that. I know that I have to get up early in the morning, I have to do my work, spend time reading, indulge in my hobbies, etc. I also know that I can be a bit moody so I have to be wary of that as well. And all of this kind of knowledge is enough for me to get around my daily chores and life. I think most of us are the same. We all have our unique set of likes and dislikes. And there is a great deal of stuff that we don’t know about ourselves. And that is absolutely alright. We can be reminded of that. And we can and do forget that again. And I think that is absolutely fine as forgetfulness is also considered a gift in certain cultures.

The very fact that a part of our consciousness helps us keep moving in life is very good. I think that Professor Minsky also wants to argue about the same. What I get from his reading is that when it comes to building conscious machines, it would be nice if we figure out first what that machine needs to be conscious about. We can achieve that using sensors and actuators and some intelligent logic. If we want machines to be conscious of heat and humidity, we can have respective sensors for them in the machines. We can have actuator logic built into machines that tells them to evacuate places where there is fire. Pain sensors wouldn’t do as machines are not living beings and do not have pain nerves. But to have intelligence is a totally different thing than to be alive.

Nowadays we have AI for self-correcting codes and software. This is a great leap human beings have taken since the time when Professor Minsky wrote this article. The ability to self-correct source code is normally even more than what a human has. If we have a tumor in our head, all we can normally do is complain about something being wrong with it. What exactly is wrong with it is normally not known to us unless the radiologist reveals to us that we have a tumor. So I think that machines have the potential to be even smarter than humans in certain respects.

Similarly, normally our vision system can only tell us how far or near an object is. Computer vision nowadays can tell us with considerable accuracy the coordinates of the object a system is looking at. This is a great deal of accuracy. Similarly, in other domains we might not be able to get machines to be as intelligent as human beings. But perhaps we may get machines to be as intelligent as snails or insects. And that is also true intelligence.

So the crux of what Professor Minsky implies in this context is not to strive for perfection but for pragmatism. And this is a great piece of advice.

I think if we embrace just this idea, it will usher in a new era of innovation in AI and computer science and engineering. This will be a paradigm shift of sorts in which we will not simply be creating narrow AI for the particular problem we are trying to solve but also building systems that shall be addressing practical concerns related to general AI.

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Neural Correlates of Belief – IEEE Conference Publication

Much of the degeneration of the human condition is attributed to religion. As we move in the midst of the twenty first century, enjoying the cornucopia len

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One of the reasons I think like this is because of the great war. I am talking about the second world war. This was the greatest of the wars that happened on planet Earth. Almost every country in the world was drawn into it, willingly or unwillingly. And almost every country suffered. Even the victors suffered. It is said that the war caused bankruptcy to the British empire. Similarly, other colonial powers like France, Spain, and Italy also suffered huge financial losses. Germany surely lost the war, but the Russian economy bled badly too.

It is said that the only true victor of the war was the United States. This is quite right. The US joined the war quite late and stole the show when everyone else was really tired and exhausted with the war. But this is not the complete truth. The US was not the only victor. In my personal opinion, there were other victors too. And these were the countries that were colonized before the war. The Indian subcontinent was a victor, for instance. It gained independence from the British Raj in 1947. It is said that the British left India on its own as they could not afford its budget any longer. The bankruptcy caused by the great war had drained Britain so badly that she had to abandon her Indian ambitions altogether. Same is the case with the middle east. They colonizers retreated in the 40s. The Republic of Ireland, for another example, gained it complete freedom in 1949 from the British after almost a millennium-long hegemony. So that’s the kind of story the history has about the era of 40s. One thing we often fail to acknowledge is that although the US emerged as the sole victor from the great war, not all countries were losers. The colonized countries gained a lot. Primarily, if nothing else, they gained their freedoms. Their freedoms came as bounties for the colonizers’ financial losses and crippled economies.

Wars ceded to a great degree after that. Or at least we should believe that they have not happened at the scale that used to happen before that. There has not been a single war after the great war of the 40s that was equivalent in magnitude to previous wars that have happened in human history. Before the 40s, war was an enterprise. After that, even though wars involving superior technology happened, they did so much out of necessity. The cold war, even though a much wider and technologically intense event was not nearly as epic as the battle of Hydaspes. Instead of large-scale organized wars, technical apparatus proliferated in every sphere of human life including war and civilization. Villages, towns and cities evolved and thrived with huge buildings, hospitals, schools, banks, cars, transportation systems, political ideas and shopping centers with all sorts of goods, confectionaries, groceries, drinks and technical gadgets that mankind had never seen before. The ordinary man who could have had to struggle to buy a bunch of candles during the nineteenth century would be highly discomforted if the electricity of his house was shut down for five minutes only. Such are the expectations of today’s modern man about his life and from the society.

Humanity has progressed a lot ever since the decade of the 40s. It is the kind of progress humanity has never ever seen before. And most of this progress has been observed in countries who suffered in the war. Excluding the US, the sole victor, these countries include the Western European countries, the UK, the Scandinavian countries, Japan and China. The good thing about these countries is that most of these countries while making economic and technological progress, have also aspired to become welfare states, even if they have not been able to become so.

What remains are the countries that have not done so well. If you look at the world map closely, these are middle eastern, central Asia, and subcontinental nations. Consider UAE for instance. It has developed a lot of infrastructures but has poor labor laws. Consider India for another example. It boats to be the largest democracy in the world, but it has not been able to straighten up of caste oriented hierarchical society where one bunch of human beings are superior to another through a divine ordinance of some sort.

And now consider Pakistan. Ever since its independence, she has been suffering from tragic episodes of one kind or another. Despite all the resources she has, and despite all the progress she has made on various fronts, her people are suffering from poverty. The total population of Pakistan is of the order of 193 million as of this writing. Even in the midst of the 21st century, her people face a lot of problems. Basic amenities of life that have become hackneyed in the developed world are not accessible to most of the people of Pakistan. People have issues concerning basic housing facilities, healthcare problems, schooling of children, public transport, inflation and a sham democracy.

Above all, the major problem all of us have is that we love to blame a foreign nation for all of our problems. Most of those problems do not have anything to do with a foreign nation intervening in our domestic issues at all. It is true that foreign influence has indeed been a cause of retardation of our progress. However, to blame everything on a foreign nation is not only mistaken, it is very much a cause of our backwardness. For instance, consider the piles of filth that are accumulating on our roads and streets. It is definitely not a conspiracy of the US, India or Europe. It was supposed to be our responsibility to come up with an economically viable idea to clean the filth off the streets.

Similarly, attributing every religious, sectarian and ethnic quarrel to a foreign nation is not impressive. It was our job as a nation to elevate the standards and functioning of our institutions to a commendable level. Institutions that dispense justice, equality, and fairness to its people should have been put in place right from the onset. A culture of research and development should have been fostered right from the beginning. And even if we have failed to develop our country on progressive lines from the very start, its never too late. There is still a lot of margin and room for development. With prudent and scrupulous planning, we can raise the standard of living in our country to a level that matches that of the developed world. Currently, we are walking on lit streets like blind men. I wonder how long we would be able to walk like this.

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Thought Experiments

Thought experiments are basically devices of the imagination. They are employed for various purposes such an entertainment, education, conceptual analysis, exploration, hypothesizing, theory selection, theory implementation, etc. Some applications are more controversial than others. Few would object to thought experiments that serve to illustrate complex states of affairs, or those that are used in educational contexts.

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Time, for one thing, is a cause of our emotional well-being. Our mental health can largely improve depending on how we perceive time. Much of our depressive and anxious states of mind are related to our notions of time. I read a long time ago that depression is caused while thinking about the past. Anxiety, on the other hand, is caused, while anxiety is caused while contemplating the future.

If we convince ourselves about the fact that time does not exist, it can change our view of past and future. Well simply, if time does not exist, then past and future also do not exist. And time does not exist! It is just a projection of our minds. This may not help to improve our past at all. Something that has happened to you in the past cannot be undone. But this inability to undoing the past would still prevail even if time did exist. You would simply not have been able to time-travel in the past to undo the undesirable events of the past. I wonder how that would have been possible. So non-existence of time can sound like a really bad idea especially if you somehow deeply want to change the past.

Due to the non-existence of time, you cannot change your future either. Reiterated, if time does not exist, the future does not exist either. And future really does not exist, it is just a projection of our minds. This can sound like a bad idea to anyone who is used to a lot of future planning. But let us try to see if this gives a sigh of relief to a person who worries too much about the future.

So if the future does not exist, all our worries and concerns about it are pointless. All we have is the present moment, and the concerns or plans that we have in our minds. Our concerns are simply pointless, as they are about something that really does not exist. Our plans can make sense as they are for something that may eventually arrive. And the future keeps on arriving moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, day-by-day and year-by-year. It is just that in the present moment, it does not exist. So planning about it makes a lot of sense. However, worrying about it is pointless. Actually, it is something to worry about if you are not planning it at all. As someone said, if you don’t have a plan for yourself, then someone else has it for you. And that someone might as well be the future as well, that although does not exist but does unravel gradually.

And as it unravels, it can bring along with itself calamity, disaster and misfortune. In the present moment, you have no control over it. You can not even fathom what it will bring along with itself. It is also unwise to fret about it too. But if you are on a mountain top with impending winter, it is quite unscrupulous if you are not making all the plans to deal with the changing weather. You might want to plan to cope with the snowfall, try to make your home cozy, or even plan to roll down to plains. And the present moment is the right time to do all that planning.

And the present moment is all you have. if your body is intact, your mental faculties are functional, just enjoy the space that surrounds you, for that is all you have. And that may not last forever.

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So as we drove, he spoke about how life could be difficult for a highly educated person. He meant it in psychological terms. As a person attains education, he (or she) tries to seek purpose in life and in the universe. And often times he finds his whole experience of living lacking in zest. This can be depressing.

As he said that, I added that the life of a layperson, or any person who is not as highly educated, would be better than that. This latter kind of person lives his life while being encircled by the idea of fulfilling mundane diurnal chores. I call them mundane since they might seem so to the highly educated, purpose seeking individual. But they might not really be so to our common folk if he enjoys doing chores. Consider the thrill of driving and woodcutting to someone who enjoys doing them.

My friend agreed with me in response and gave a reason for such a happy life. The reason he gave was that as the latter lives according to his gut feeling, he does not have to think too much. He simply obeys his gut feelings and lives accordingly.

He further added that our subconscious minds generate a myriad of ideas. It is more like an ocean. The conscious mind, instead, is like a pointer on that ocean that we use to choose ideas generated by our subconscious. The educated person learns to tame the conscious mind about how to utilize the input generated by the conscious mind. He goes through a process of refinement throughout his life to tame the conscious. The common folk

The common folk does not really care too much as to how to use the gut feeling. He just acts upon it. And this reduces the pain of refining the conscious mind.

As he said this, it reminded me of a mention of randomly generated ideas in our minds. It read it in one of the articles of Sam Harris. When I read it for the first time, it made me wonder about that and I was not convinced of the idea, I was rather impressed.

Much of our ideas are randomly generated in the mind. Our emotions, desires, actions, wit and sense of humor can be dependent on randomly generated ideas in our minds. Even the revelations that lead to Eureka moments in lives of celebrated scientists are generated randomly most of the times. The idea that I am going to write this post was generated in my mind randomly too. I thought about writing it around a year ago. Then I procrastinated. Eventually, it came to my mind around a fortnight ago. And finally, after postponing it again and again, I am writing this now.

This can be a good thing and a bad thing as well. It is my personal experience, that our jokes are funniest when they are randomly generated by our minds. So this is a good thing. But then our minds can generate so much stuff randomly that some of which can be diabolical not only to ourselves but also to people around us. Consider impulses of anger and rage for a couple of examples. They can be generated randomly. And if acted upon, they can produce catastrophic results.

So not all of the gut feeling is so good all the time. There are good and bad things about living by the gut. To me, this raises the necessity to tame the gut. The word tame appears simplistic to me. I wonder it would be a better idea to tame the subconscious to generate good stuff most of the times. Similarly, once the subconscious is generating nice things, it could be extremely beneficial to have a conscious mind that can choose between those ideas. A clear subconscious can make the job of the conscious much easier as the latter would not have to filter, and eventually litter, so much stuff that our minds generate.

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In a very short time Genghis Khan arose from Mongolia. He marched with his army into almost all of the Muslim world. He sacked Baghdad, brutally killed myriads of people, raised minarets with skulls of the dead and annihilated civil infrastructure.

In another version of the story, Genghis Khan himself accosted the sultan as he casually hunted the deer in the jungle. And upon seeing the aloofness of the sultan, he went back and prayed in the aforementioned manner.

Let me tell you another story. You would definitely find it incredible. Saman Sandhu was a Muslim inhabitant of Khairpur Mataalwi. This town is now in Pakistan. He lived there at the time of partition of the subcontinent in 1947 into what we now know as India and Pakistan. According to the narrative of the story, he used to loot the belongings of the Hindus migrating from Pakistan to India. Many native Muslims warned him that Allah did not like anybody treating another human beings so mercilessly even if the victims were non-Muslims. He did not pay any heed to those warnings and kept on snatching belongings of poor Hindus migrating to India.

At last, as is the case with any living being, Saman Sandhu died. People of his town tried to bury him in a grave. However, they failed to dig the grave on the place prescribed for him by the town’s people. The earth had become so hard. Eventually they dug a grave on another spot. As they buried him there and left the spot, the grave caught fire.

It really depends on various factors concerning your personality how you perceive the above stories. Cultural and academic backgrounds play a lot of role in what people are interested in and how they react to various stimuli that are presented to them. If you are a simple Pakistani or an Arab, you would definitely have found the above narratives interesting. If you are a hyper educated, university going professor or researcher you would have found these stories fantastic. It even takes a clever skeptic to figure out elements of wishful thinking in the accounts. If you are the last type, you would not only not like to lend any credulity to the subject matter, you might also love to bash it away as a product of wishfully conceived fairy tale.

No matter how unrealistic these stories might appear to you, but I heard them in sermons of Ubqari institute. Ubqari delivers weekly sermons on peace and spirituality. Actually the second story was even published in the monthly Ubqari magazine. Moreover, there are elements that are worth pondering in the above stories. Chances are that if you have read them casually, you might easily have evaded a few subtle ideas that are worth speculating irrespective of whether you are a Muslim or not. Actually it would be nice if everyone, including Muslims and non-Muslims, contemplated on a few ideas for a while.

An important hint that I picked up from these sermons (or articles) was regarding the concept of will of God. If you are a skeptic who systematically doubts existence of God, then at this stage you would be about to exclaiming, “Hold on! God does not exist.” However, I request you to hold on for a while and keep on reading as you relax in your chair.

Whether or not God exists is obviously a question of philosophical and scientific concern. However, much of the atheistic literature bases religions and believers of those religions for respectively preaching and believing in bad ideas that provoke human beings to bigot with one another. This is obviously a rational criticism of religions in general specially if we believe that what is told to us about the teachings of various religious scriptures is true. Islam is particularly considered as a terrorist’s religion worldwide.

One thing that every person should pay heed to in these articles is that God, according to the central teachings of Islam, does not like oppression even if it is done against a non-Muslim. Another thing, that at least I found very interesting about Ubqari institute is that it is teaching Muslims on as to how to develop their beliefs regarding social behavior. In our times, it is natural for a person to be confused given the current state of world’s peace. There are a plenty of other things about Ubqari institute that are worth exploring. Ranging from medical tips and medieval stories to accounts of scientific breakthroughs, the magazine publishes articles from people all across the world. There is also a small section on Islam and tolerance, where accounts of treatments of non-Muslims by earlier caliphs of Islam are written to encourage people to adopt those kinds of behaviors in their personal lives regarding non-Muslims.

Now let’s talk about a different theme for a while before I conclude this article. Let’s reflect for a while on the matter of existence of God. In street epistemology, Sam Harris defines that epistemology is a way in which people learn about any idea or a subject matter. Street epistemology is concerned with how people learn about their religious beliefs.

In what follows, some effort is done to develop an epistemology for religious belief. Whether or not God exists requires extraordinary evidence. In his work, Sam Harris appears even desirous to be able to see the God of people’s dreams and imaginations. Just because Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindus believe in a God (or many Gods) does not mean that there is really a God out there that needs to be worshipped, praised and offered sacrifices to. Just by projecting one’s God as a loving and kind deity that hates his believers to oppress people who do not believe in him is also no proof that that God really exists. In order for the God to exist, there should be tremendous evidence about his existence. Otherwise, the claims made by that God should be systematically and scientifically verifiable.

One of the claims that almost any major world religion makes is the existence of soul in the body of a living human being. Call it a soul, spirit or a non-physical mind should also be verifiable with the help of some type of an experiment. For centuries people have completed on the idea of soul. Notable contemplators have existed from almost all schools of thoughts and they have included Christian, Jews and Muslims alike.

Recently science has begun to formally admit the idea of eternal survival of human consciousness after bodily death into mainstream academic scrutiny, The truth is that empirical evidence about the existence of human soul in some realm other than our known world has existed since as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. There were many respectable scientists all over the western world who researched into that. To name but a few, Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crookes were quite renowned for their work in spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the last couple of years an enormous hype was created about disciplines such as reincarnation, near death experiences, out of body experiences and quantum physics for consciousness studies. Overall, most of the literature and findings affirmatively point to the existence of human consciousness after death.

It would be worthwhile to reflect on the teachings of Islam about this matter for a while. I have a propensity for looking everything from an Islamic perspective. This is, however, true that I suffer from what Sam Harris calls as a confirmation bias of a believer. You could justifiably call me a wishful thinker. Nonetheless, I have my own reasons to hold my beliefs dear. This does not mean, however, that I have not performed a serious scrutiny of the subject matter.

According to Islam Judaism and Christianity are religions of one true God, Allah. Bible and Torah are books of God and are mentioned in the Quran many times. As a matter of fact, Islam considers Judaism and Christianity as earlier versions of Islam itself.

The most mentioned prophet in Quran is Prophet Moses (PBUH). Jesus Christ (PBUH) according to the central teachings of Islam was a prophet of Allah just like other prophets such as Muhammad (PBUH) and Moses (PBUH). According to Islam, Allah gives glad tidings to those believing jews and Christians who bow before him. Allah, however, laments that Jews considered Uzair (PBUH) as the son of God whereas, Christians considered Jesus (PBUH) as a son of God. However, Allah does not give any license to kill or harm non-Muslims in any possible way. When medieval Muslims went to Persia, they encountered Zoroastrians. They figured out that Zoroaster was also a prophet according to the central traditions of Islam. He (PBUH) is mentioned in the Quran as Dhul-Kifl (PBUH), and they offered the same kind of generous treatment as they offered to other people of the book i.e. Christians and Jews. According to Islam Hinduism is not a divine religion of one true God, Allah. However, it is against the laws and teachings of Islam to oppress them.

How do we learn about the prophethood of prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by the way? Apart from Quran and Sunnah, we learn about that from non-Muslim sources as well. We learn about that from jews, Christians and even Budha. Or that is what we are told. True, historical accounts are always biased. But it is not a bad idea to reflect on these things for a while.

Once Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) traveled to Syria for trade with his uncle. As they reached there, they were approached by a Jew. The Jew looked on the back of his neck in order to find what is called a seal of prophet-hood on his back. He found that and warned his uncle, Abu Taalib, to keep him in safe custody as he was to become a prophet. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was very young at that time.

Similarly, we hear that the arrival of prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was foretold in Bible and Torah. These books are already considered divine by Muslims and they are mentioned in the Quran. As a matter of fact it is one of the central tenets of Islam to believe and have faith in divine books, scriptures and revelations.

There was a television program the other day that reflected on the last days of Buddha. When Buddha was in his last days a disciple asked him if he was the last Buddha. Buddha replied that he was not the last Buddha. The last Buddha had to arrive. He would be a personification of purity, piety and virtue. He would be a guide for humanity. And his followers would be many. By this we infer that that last Buddha was Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). However, this inference is a great example of confirmation bias too.

Buddhism is a great religion. It preaches peace and tranquility. Although Buddha is not mentioned in the Quran, there is a great chance that he was also a prophet of Islam just as prophet Moses and Jesus (PBUH). After all, there were 124,000 prophets that were sent by Allah to guide humanity. Not all of them are mentioned in the Quran. Due to his teachings, there is a great propensity among the Muslims to believe that he was a Prophet.

But there are no bad religions after all. All religions teach good things. And almost none really teaches bigotry in its spirit.

Allah according to Islam does not have a material form. He is a loving God. He is beneficent in this life and merciful in the hereafter. If you attend any Islamic religious gathering, it is customary to hear that Allah loves us all seventy times more than our mother. This includes each one of us human beings. It is also said that Allah is oft-forgiving. Even if a hundred years old dying infidel, who has been bigoted to Allah for the most of his life, beg’s forgiveness from Him, he forgives him in an instant. It is even said that Allah knows when a person repents that he would sin again. However, He says that I would pardon my slave again and again and again. He does not like oppression however, and listens to the prayers of the oppressed even if they are infidels.

And eventually all of us die and revert to Him. He is the one who always was and would always remain. All the king’s men and all the king’s together cannot harm him even how minutely they may wish to do so.

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