Finding a true religion is not the Holy Grail By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari &Weeding out

 Good lies need a leavening of truth to make them palatable. ~ William Mcilvanney

A true religion never escapes yet always

Finding a true religion is not difficult. All one has to do is to find a religion that is relative to a different point in time, relevant to the moment being considered in the context; yet always goes beyond it. true religion is to be in a sense a paradox.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

T. S. Eliot, Eliot's doctoral dissertation in philosophy; submitted to Harvard in 1916. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, Chapter 7, Columbia University Press (1964).

3:145 "...If any Do desire a reward in this life, We shall give it To him; and if any Do desire a reward in the Hereafter, We shall Give it to him. And swiftly shall We reward those that (serve us with) gratitude".

When our attitudes change and we become thankful for every small or big things in life we will see the world in a different way. It is not the negative events in ones life that usually makes one unhappy, it is rather the negative reaction to these events that makes one unhappy. The state of being unhappy is created by ourselves. This statement can also be learned from an interpretation of the following verse:

4:79 "....Whatever good, (Oh man!) happens to thee is from Allah, but whatever evil happens to thee, is from thy (own) soul..."

Whining and dwelling upon negative events wont do us any good. The simple act of regularly practicing gratitude will make an improvement in the well-being of a person and lead to a sense of happiness in life. Reflect on your own life. Look back at all the difficult moments in your life and you will soon come to realize the many blessings that Allah has showered upon you.

 

Weeding out your significant other? The effect of marijuana on relationships

Being young involves quite a bit of exciting change. There’s the end of high-school, the start of college and some measure of independence, and a whole slew of new experiences.

A recent study conducted by Judith Brooks at NYU School of Medicine has revealed that one of those experiences, smoking marijuana (weed) may be associated with more relationship conflict later in life. What’s amazing about this study is that the drug use here occurred earlier in life for most of the 534 participants, while the relationship trouble was assessed around their mid- to late-twenties.

Could other factors explain this finding?!

Now you may be thinking to yourself that there are a whole lot of other aspects of a person’s life that can affect their relationship quality and their probability of smoking weed in adolescence. You’d be right, but here’s what the researchers in this study ruled out as possible confounds (the scientific name for variables that obscure findings):

·         Relationship with parents

·         Aggressive tendencies

·         adjustment difficulty

·         gender

·         education

Even after controlling for all of these things, smoking marijuana as a teen still predicted having less harmonious relationships later on in life.

Limitations

All humor aside, this research is not saying that if you smoke weed you will definitely have a lower quality relationship later. What it does point out is that, on average, given a person with similar social skills, aggressive personality, and education, the one who smoked marijuana around their mid-teens is likely to have a less satisfying relationship.

UPDATE: Before you leave another angry comment about how wrong this article is to suggest that marijuana can cause any problems ever, please read my article on the difference between causality and association; this article is talking about an association, not causality.

In statistics, a confounder (also confoundingvariable or confounding factor) is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and independent variable causing a spurious association

A counterfactual conditional (abbreviated CF), is a conditional containing an if-clause which is contrary to fact.

(Plural counterfactuals) A claim, hypothesis, or other belief that is contrary to the facts. (Philosophy) A conditional statement in which the conditional clause is false, as "If I had arrived on time . . .

What is a counterfactual analysis?

This involves counterfactual analysis, that is,

“A comparison between what actually happened and what would have happened in the absence of the intervention.” Impact evaluations seek to answer cause-and-effect questions. In other words, they look for the changes in outcome that are directly attributable to a program.

Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.

What is the fundamental problem of causal inference?

“Causation ≠ Association” The “identification problem” refers to the difficulty of separating causation from association. Assumptions are unavoidable! Since the fundamental problem of causal inference is a missing data problem, we need to make assumptions to fill in the missing values.