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Neo- Headhunting

Headhunting is a practice of beheading, displaying, and in some cases preserving human heads for various reasons. The practice of headhunting originated in some cultures from a belief in the existence of a more or less material soul existing in the head. The headhunter sought, through decapitation of his enemies, to transfer this soul matter to himself and his community. Headhunting is thus sometimes found with certain forms of cannibalism as well as with human sacrifice.

The practice of headhunting was prevalent not only among the various tribes of the Nagas but other countries like China, Nigeria, Nuristan, Myanmar, Borneo, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Micronesia, Melanesia, New Zealand etc. It has been, therefore, practiced worldwide. ‘It has been associated (1) with ideas regarding the head as the seat of the soul; (2) with some forms of cannibalism where the body or part of the body is consumed in order to transfer to the eater the soul matter of the victim; (3) with phallic cults and fertility rites intended to imbue the soils with productivity; and (4) with power, prestige, fame and glory. In short it is associated with mortification of the rival, ritual violence, cosmological balance, and the displaying of manhood, cannibalism, and prestige.

The miscellaneous tribes of Nagas were a home to many headhunting people. The entire life of the Nagas revolved around headhunting. It was not only the cause and effect of war; it was also the inscription for the Naga works of art. The primary purpose and function of the practice of headhunting was a part of the process of structuring, reinforcing, and defending hierarchical relationships between tribes, communities and individuals through fighting for dominance, glory and prestige. Inter-village wars, culminating in the taking of the enemies’ heads, were part and parcel of every day life among the Nagas.

Regardless of the arrival of Christianity into the soil of the Naga and the Nagas calling Nagaland a Christian State, the age-old practice of headhunting still carries on in our State. But it has taken the most complex form with the advance of modern sophisticated means and scientific techniques. Gone are the days when our great grandfathers took part in active headhunting for countless reasons. Now we feel proud that such practices do not exist any more in our social fabric.

But still it is very much in our veins and blood. Headhunting is seen very much in our day to day social conflicts. A variety of conflicts existing in our societies is nothing but the residual of the past practice of headhunting, which is now crystallized in various forms of factional clashes. Headhunting continues but the automatic Kalashnikovs and firepower have replaced daos and spears. These weapons or Kalashnikovs are much more powerful in taking away ‘heads’ than traditional doas. These clashes are a sign of lack of solidarity and integration. Obviously, all the Nagas are not aware of the new factional headhunting.

Urbanization and scientific technology have furthered headhunting in the new complex form of factional group clashes and conflicts in our society. In order to reinforce its identity each group is fighting for its preeminence and domination. Each one is fighting for power and supremacy creating havoc in the state of Nagaland. What else can we call these clashes and conflicts in our social fabric except a new form of headhunting?

In the old form of headhunting, innocent women and children were not spared, nor does today’s neo-headhunting. The innocent are the worst victims from primordial time. We ruin ourselves by killing our innocent brothers and sisters. Are we, you and I, aware of it?

Tribalism is the feeling of superiority of one tribe over the other tribes. This superiority complex leads to enmity between persons or groups. Headhunting could be closely connected with the tribalism. Tribalism breeds clashes and conflicts, so does the practice of headhunting. Tribalism is an intricate form of headhunting where effort is made to crush the spirit of other tribes. This tribalism is becoming more and more complex in our state. Nepotism is a new form of tribalism, which is very much prevalent in our society. Favouritism, by acting of kindness to one’s own kindred or tribe or party, breeds enmity between the pubic and the government, the politicians and the bureaucrats.

Looking at our own college, we see and experience tribalism practiced in every activity. A capable person, who could lead the group ably but belonging to a minority tribe, is not give an opportunity to do so due to the practice of tribalism. We forget to stand on moral ground and also forget to use our reasoning power. We become slaves of our feelings and emotions. Tribalism has not changed with Christianity but has taken a new form that co-exists with Naga Christianity. Our religion becomes secondary when there is an ethnic conflict or clash. We are all enslaved by this tribalism. Why don’t we learn from our own history? Why don’t we learn from others? For instance, by looking at the ethnic conflicts between the two tribes Tutsi and Hutu in Africa, we see clearly that the Christians themselves were found killing each other ruthlessly and cruelly. If the Nagas do not learn from history, the ethnic conflicts or clashes between various groups could grow to be worse than those between the Tutsi and Hutu.

Fortunately we have our common enemy “Indian,” under whom we are fighting for freedom, without whom the spirit of tribalism and factionalism or of ‘headhunting’ that is very much present in our blood would have burst, creating chaos in our State. We claim to be a Christian State and take pride in “Nagaland for Christ”. But we are now caught up in the crossfire, in the neo headhunting web which is extremely difficult to give up. But, if we all dare together and collectively voice our concerns, perhaps we can stop this menace of neo-headhunting which is eating away our society. But who will bell the cat? One group clashes with the other creating havoc in our state. Can’t Nagaland be the epitome of tribes, cultures, dialects/ languages of the world- a state that celebrates diversity instead of allowing factionalism and tribalism to breed conflicts and clashes? Can the rainbow of Naga culture continue to shine in the Milky Way? When will the honey of peace and reconciliation reign in our land vanquishing the conflicts, factional clashes, brutality and displacement of the people for good? The choice is ours. Our tomorrow depends on what we decide to do today. Let us choose peace, progress and prosperity. Let go of ‘headhunting’ and start hunting for peace and unity. What do you say?

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war that is nothing neither sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason,” says Ernest Hemingway.

Seven Reasons Why a Scientist Believes in God

WE ARE STILL IN THE DAWN of the scientific age, and every increase of light reveals more brightly the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. We have made stupendous discoveries; with a spirit of scientific humility and of faith grounded in knowledge we are approaching ever nearer to an awareness of God.



For myself, I count seven reasons for my faith:

First: By unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by a great engineering intelligence.

Suppose you put ten pennies, marked from one to ten, into your pocket and give them a good shuffle. Now try to take them out in sequence from one to ten, putting back the coin each time and shaking them all again. Mathematically we know that your chance of first drawing number one is one in ten; of drawing one and two in succession, one in 100; of drawing one, two and three in succession, one in 1000, and so on; your chance of drawing them all, from number one to number ten in succession, would reach the unbelievable figure of one in ten billion.

By the same reasoning, so many exacting conditions are necessary for life on the earth that they could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance. The earth rotates on its axis 1000 miles an hour at the equator; if it turned at 100 miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten times as long as now, and the hot sun would likely burn up our vegetation each long day while in the long night any surviving sprout might well freeze.

Again the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this "eternal life" warms us just enough and not too much ! If the sun gave off only one half its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave as much more, we would roast.

The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our seasons; if the earth had not been so tilted, vapours from the ocean would move north and south, piling up for us continents of ice. If our moon were, say, only 50,000 miles away instead of its actual distance, our tides might be so enormous that twice a day all continents would be submerged; even the mountains could soon be eroded away. If the crust of the earth had only been ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen, without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and no vegetable life could exist.

It is apparent from these and a host of other examples that there is not one chance in billions that life on our planet is an accident.

Second: The resourcefulness of life to accomplish its purpose is a manifestation of an all-pervading Intelligence.

What life itself is, no man has fathomed. It has neither weight nor dimensions, but it does have force; a growing root will crack a rock. Life has conquered water, land and air, mastering the elements, compelling them to dissolve and reform their combinations.

Life, the sculptor, shapes all living things; an artist, it designs every leaf of every tree, and colours every flower. Life is a musician and has taught each bird to sing its love song, the insects to call one another in the music of their multitudinous sounds. Life is a sublime chemist, giving taste to fruits and spices, and perfume to the rose, changing water and carbonic acid into sugar and wood, and, in so doing, releasing oxygen that animals may have the breath of life.

Behold an almost invisible drop of protoplasm, transparent, jellylike, capable of motion, drawing energy from the sun. This single cell, this transparent mist-like droplet, holds within itself the germ of life, and has power to distribute this life to every living thing, great and small. The powers of this droplet are greater than our vegetation and animals and people, for all life came from it. Nature did not create life; fire-blistered rocks and a saltless sea could not meet the necessary requirements.

Who, then, has put it here?

Third: Animal wisdom speaks irresistibly of a good Creator who infused instinct into otherwise helpless little creatures.

The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and travels up the very side of the river into which flows the tributary where he was born. What brings him back so precisely? If you transfer him to another tributary he will know at once that he is off his course and he will fight his way down and back to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny accurately.

Even more difficult to solve is the mystery of eels. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from ponds and rivers everywhere - those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean - all bound for the same abysmal deeps near Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, nevertheless start back and find their way not only to the very shore from which their parents came but thence to the selfsame rivers, lakes or little ponds. No American eel has ever been caught in Europe, no European eel in American waters. Nature has even delayed the maturity of the European eel by a year or more to make up for its longer journey. Where does the directional impulse originate?

Fourth: Man has something more than animal instinct - the power of reason.

No other animal has ever left a record of its ability to count ten, or even to understand the meaning of ten. Where instinct is like a single note of a flute, beautiful but limited, the human brain contains all the notes of all the instruments in the orchestra. No need to belabor this fourth point; thanks to human reason we can contemplate the possibility that we are what we are only because we have received a spark of Universal Intelligence.

Fifth: Provision for all living is revealed in such phenomena as the wonders of genes.

So tiny are these genes that, if all of them responsible for all living people in the world could be put in one place, there would be less than a thimbleful. Yet these genes inhabit every living cell and are the keys to all human, animal and vegetable characteristics. A thimble is a small place to hold all the individual characteristics of almost three billion human beings. However, the facts are beyond question.

Here evolution really begins - at the cell, the entity which holds and carries the genes. That the ultra-microscopic gene can absolutely rule all life on earth is an example of profound cunning and provision that could emanate only from a Creative Intelligence; no other hypothesis will serve.

Sixth: By the economy of nature, we are forced to realize that only infinite wisdom could have foreseen and prepared with such astute husbandry.

Many years ago a species of cactus was planted in Australia as a protective fence. Having no insect enemies in Australia, the cactus soon began a prodigious growth; the alarming abundance persisted until the plants covered an area as long and wide as England, crowding inhabitants out of the towns and villages, and destroying their farms. Seeking a defense, entomologists scoured the world; finally they turned up an insect which lived exclusively on cactus, and would eat nothing else. It would breed freely, too; and it had no enemies in Australia. So animal soon conquered vegetable, and today the cactus pest has retreated - and with it all but a small protective residue of the insects, enough to hold the cactus in check forever.

Such checks and balances have been universally provided. Why have not fast-breeding insects dominated the earth? Because they have no lungs such as man possesses; they breathe through tubes. But when insects grow large, their tubes do not grow in ratio to the increasing size of the body. Hence there never has been an insect of great size; this limitation on growth has held them all in check. If this physical check had not been provided, man could not exist. Imagine meeting a hornet as big as a lion !

Seventh: The fact that man can conceive the idea of God is in itself a unique proof.

The conception of God rises from a divine faculty of man, unshared with the rest of our world - the faculty we call imagination. By its power, man and man alone can find the evidence of things unseen. The vista that power opens up is unbounded; indeed, as man's perfected imagination becomes a spiritual reality, he may discern in all the evidence of design and purpose the great truth that heaven is wherever and whatever; that God is everywhere and in everything that nowhere so close as in our hearts.

It is scientifically as well as imaginatively true, as the Psalmist said: The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.


A. CRESSY MORRISON,

Former President of the New York Academy of Sciences