User:Kenfyre/Nirmukta

Nirmukta is an online community and website in India founded in 2008 that promotes scientific temper, rational thinking and secular humanism. Nirmukta means "liberated" in Sanskrit.

History and work
Nirmukta was founded in 2008 by evolutionary biologist Ajita Kamal. It was originally a website and by 2012 it had become an organization with regional groups in 8 major Indian cities, including Bangalore, Delhi and Chennai. The online forum Indian Atheists, which has more than 27,000 followers on Facebook, started as an activist arm of Nirmukta. Because of recent attack on atheists in India, the organization adopts strict checks before allowing new members.

Nirmukta regularly conducts workshops in collaboration with other rationalist organizations to promote scientific temper and create awareness about pseudosciences. The organization also has a blog on the Freethought Blogs network, which was co-founded by PZ Myers.

In May 2011, Nirmukta hosted rationalist Narendra Nayak's challenge to Indian astrologers to predict the 2011 election. Nayak is a regular contributor to the website. Among the other regular contributors are Srinivas Kakkilaya and Dr. Vinod Kumar Wadhawan, a Raja Ramanna fellow at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. In October 2011, Nirmukta organized an Eye donation campaign and has been running an organ donation drive on it's website. It also organized a "Hug an Atheist Day" event in India on 7 June 2013. It has also been participating in Pride marches in those cities.

When Nirmukta's founder Ajita Kamal died in January 2012, PZ Meyers wrote that Kamal was " a leading promoter of science and freethought in India."

Unethical Practices
The articles in the Nirmukta Website are written by people in a manner which seems to be heavily biased towards what the author "believes" but without any reasoning or logical discussions about the opposite points of view.

Moreover, if anybody wrote any comment in the comments sections with an opposite points of view, the commentators are called names such as liars etc,. These kind of unethical practices shuts down any meaningful debate on the Nirmukta site.

Any comments of the opposing views are heavily moderated and usually the said commentators are blocked from posting again and their comments deleted.

One example being an article about Yoga ((http://nirmukta.com/2015/06/19/no-yoga-does-not-cure-any-disease/) where the author with a medical "degree" flip-flops in the comments section when commentators pointed out his heavy bias against Yoga without practicing it, even though he claims to refer research papers. His whole premise of referring to research papers fell apart when somebody pointed out a Harvard University article which details the usefulness of Yoga to treat anxiety and depression. There is no reply from the learned Doctor till today. This episode alone shows how biased and useless the whole site is except to feel self satisfied about the "rational" thoughts the website owners have. The Harvard University article is this: http://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/yoga-for-anxiety-and-depression

Moreover, one only need to see the comments by a namesake Captain Mandrake to come to a conclusion that the Nirmukta site is not for free thought but serve the huge egos of the website owners and their followers.

Positions
The organization supports social justice movements like feminism, LGBT rights, and rights of people with disabilities and has a zero-tolerance policy against harrassment. They have also taken a strong stand against the caste system.