What is it about religion that makes it seem impervious to scrutiny? In many conflicts in the world today: Palestine/Israel, Ireland, Thailand, Iraq, Pakistan, Darfur, etc, a lot of awareness is raised of the violation of civil rights, women’s rights and needless deaths - but you’ll hardly ever catch people criticizing religion. And while none of these conflicts stem wholly from religion alone, when you tiptoe around it or dismiss it as “personal beliefs” or “sensitive” you’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

Take Elizabeth Wong’s post (and I wanna make clear I love her blog) on the Lina Joy case :

To kill two birds with one stone is to have the majority view advocate for jurisdiction be placed in the realm the Syariah court, and the dissenting view aim at satisfying the detractors.

This is, after all, an election year.
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There were no winners on Wednesday morning, unless we include the Islamophobes who gained an additional dart or two.

Many are saying the Lina Joy decision is a violation of civil rights, which guarantees freedom of religion. And it is, indeed. But few are pointing out that the verdict was hardly political, or what the verdict means. The two Muslim judges voted to reject her appeal, with the non-Muslim judge the sole dissenter. There were hundreds of youths outside the courtroom shouting Allah-o-Akhbar (God is great). The motivation behind the decision isn’t rocket science.

And the reason the Lina verdict is devastating is not just because she is denied freedom of religion - indeed, I think that it is obvious even to the judges that you can’t control what people think or feel - it is because that to officially deconvert, she will have to go through the Syariah court. Islam carries heavy penalties for apostates. In more fundamentalist countries, this means death or imprisonment; in Malaysia it means a jail term or “rehabilitation”.

But because religion is “sensitive” and a “personal choice”, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone willing to point out that the root of the problem is how Islam handles apostasy. And so time and time again we get trampled by the elephant in the room.

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The Federal Court doesn’t “recognize” her conversion; therefore Lina Joy is still a Muslim. If she wants to become a formal apostate, she will need to go through the Syariah Court - considering the penalty outlined in the Quran, you can’t blame her for not wanting to.

The  judge says that “You can’t at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another”. I suppose being born into a Malay family is a completely rock-solid reason to be a Muslim.

[Update]
The Muslim Youth Movement leader says that “We invite anyone who feels that they are aggrieved or victimized within the current system to choose other, less confrontational and controversial attempts towards change and reform.” How exactly is changing one’s IC to read “Kristian” instead of “Islam” confrontational and controversial?

Was watching the RTM news and they quoted a judge as saying “sebagai seorang Muslim, beliau tidak boleh keluar daripada Islam“. Ouch… my brain just hurts from the logical contradiction.

Hundreds of Muslim youths gathered in front of the courthouse and applauded the verdict. The verdict was passed 2-1; the two votes coming from two Muslims. Meanwhile, today’s Star ran a speech by DPM Najib where he says:

“If the media replaces the “culture of clash” with dialogue by eliminating the logic of power and replace it with the power of logic, the world would be a better place to live,” he said.

Would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

But there’s a silver lining. At least we don’t have any illusions about the state of Islam in Malaysia, or the “unity” and “tolerance” bullshit the Government tries to feed us. Hey Pak Lah, is this part of Islam Hadhari? What’s that? Elegant silence?

This is also my 100th post. Whoopee.

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Unless you’re completely clueless about theology, you’ll know what Pascal’s Wager is: A “gamble” whether to believe in the existence of God.

It states that

1. If God doesn’t exist:
   • Not believing in God will gain you no additional benefit (negligible gain)
   • Believing in God would lose you nothing (negligible loss)
2. If God does exist:
   • Not believing in God means you will be sent to Hell (infinite penalty)
   • Believing in God means you will go to Heaven (infinite gain)

So the natural choice is to believe in God. Seems like a pretty solid argument - to a seven-year-old.

We’ll never know whether Pascal was just being tongue-in-cheek with this proposal. But if you ever hear a religious “apologist” invoking Pascal’s Wager, it’s a sure sign that either his arguments are weak, or he’s out of touch with the world. The deficiencies of the Wager are immediately obvious.

More than one way

There are myriad religions in the world. This was true centuries ago and still is. When you factor in the possibilities of every god existing - Thor, Jupiter, Krishna, Allah, etc; and the fact that most religions will punish you for believing in other gods, then blindly making the Wager will considerably shorten your odds.

This also doesn’t take into account religions that don’t have a deity (Buddhism). It also assumes that all religions send nonbelievers to Hell - which is not the case (Judaism).

It doesn’t consider that if your life is indeed all you have, then spending your time and effort on a false religion wastes it.

And more damningly, it assumes that belief - even blind belief will get you into Heaven.

Blind faith

Pascal’s Wager plays on one of our most basic fears - the fear of death. It strips from religion any pretense of humanity and reason; basically demanding “believe, or die”.

Deathbed conversions are a prime example. One wonders how a such “conversion” can be real - surely a person should die as (s)he lived. I hear stories of families saying, with relief, “Oh, we told him to nod his head if he accepts God, and he did. Praise God!”

This cheapens both man and religion. If one can get religion just by paying lip service (or in this case, by nodding your head) only when there is nothing to lose; without ever pondering over its validity, its doctrines, or its historicity; without ever spending any effort on it; then it’s safe to say that the patient would have “accepted” whatever religion thrust at him. If he was unfortunate enough to have relatives of differing religions than I pity the poor thing. Or who knows, the patient could have been saying “Yes, whatever, stop annoying me!”

And you wonder who the conversion was meant to benefit - the “convert”, or the people doing the converting, to give them peace of mind.

To a lesser extent this applies to some who convert only after a near death encounter, where religion becomes the ultimate health insurance.

Belief is not a Choice

Can you “choose” to believe, like the Wager says? Can you “choose” to believe in Santa Claus, or “choose” to disbelieve in gravity? If I pointed a gun to your head and asked you to “believe” that my religion is true, and you said yes, does it mean you believe? If, like in Indonesia, the state rules that it is a crime not to “believe” in a religion, does that mean that Indonesia is the most religious country in the world?

We can never “choose” to believe - for anything worth believing in, it is not lip service or self-delusion that determines belief, but whether we accept the premises and rationale behind it.

Later today, the Federal Court will pass judgement on the Lina Joy case. This is about more than religious freedom - it is about your very right to think for yourself. She needs “certification” from the Syariah Court to renounce Islam. A New York Times article quotes a senior fellow at the Institue of Islamic Understanding saying that “If Islam were to grant permission for Muslims to change religion at will, it would imply it has no dignity, no self-esteem”.

If religion is automatic, then surely heaven will be filled to the brim! In fact, I’d say that if Islam were to force “Muslims” to “believe”, when they so obviously don’t, it is that which implies that Islam has no dignity, no self-esteem! Anyone wanna place a wager on the outcome?

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Linking to newspaper articles in a blog entry is very common, and encouraged - it shows you have done research.

Problem is that some newspapers and magazines “archive” their online articles. The practice varies from one publication to another. I’ve managed to find archived articles from TIME.com from all the way back in 1969 (!), for example.

For Malaysian papers, the Sun seems to keep its articles online indefinitely (at least for now). The Star archives articles after a year. The New Straits Times takes articles down after 2 months.

Just something to keep in mind. If you want to quote an article, you want to get a link from Sun if possible, otherwise the Star. For NST, after you find the article, search its headline on Google, then link the Google cache as a backup. Sure, if you’re out of your mind you’ll subscribe to the NSTP archive for RM300/year, but don’t expect your readers to do the same.

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Nothing quite like the sweet smell of being right, is there?

I have to admit that I was half-rooting for Blake towards the end - rooting for the underdog and all that sort of thing. What’s absurd is the winning entry for the songwriter’s contest - This is My Now? Well whatever the criteria for the contest were, grammar wasn’t one of them. And to be fair, shouldn’t there have been a fourth song that required Jordin to beatbox? Oh well.

Is it just me or are we having an Entertainment 2.0 revolution, just like the Web? Idol was a brilliant next step after “reality” shows like Survivor, Apprentice, etc. It’s proof of the saying “if every person in China gave you one cent, you’d be a millionaire many times over”. No one loses - you spend a few dollars on SMS and you get your entertainment fix. Ford gives Jordin and Blake two Mustangs and in return it gets 15 seconds of product placement. And while the initial selection process for the Hollywood round is a little dubious, every Idol winner is essentially a rags-to-riches story.

People who hate the concept of Idol are just jealous they didn’t think of it.

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I sometimes find myself “filtering” conversations with others.

Take for instance something that happened to me recently - two months ago, I borrowed a book from the library to refer to for an assignment. After I was done with it I passed it to a groupmate, who was supposed to return it to the library for me.

Long story short, I went to the library to fill in a clearance form before graduating and I’m staring at a big fat fine on the screen.

If I were telling this story to someone I don’t know well (including you, dear blog reader), it’d go something like this:

1) “You know, I reminded him many times to return it but he didn’t!”

Which is fine, but fails to convey how I really feel.

Telling this story to say, my mother, it’d go:

2) “You know, I reminded the stupid guy many times to return it but he didn’t!”

To a friend from church?

3) “You know, I reminded the guy so many darn times to return it but he didn’t!”.

You see where I’m going here? To someone I know well and am more comfortable with, I’d just come right out and choose the precise words to convey it:

4) “You know, I told that stupid fucker so many damn times to return it but the fucker didn’t!”

Only 4) properly conveys the extent of my aggravation then; 1), 2) and 3) are politically correct, but gives the impression that I’m only slightly annoyed.

Are You Sure You Still Want to Use That Term?

Now let’s digress a little for another story: about a week ago I came along a post in a friend’s blog. She was concerned about how people were using the word cam-whoring. She linked a definition from Wikipedia:

A cam whore (sometimes cam-whore or cam-slut) is an individual who exposes himself or herself on the Internet with webcam software in exchange for goods, usually via enticing viewers to purchase items on their wish lists or add to their online accounts.

“ARE YOU SURE YOU STILL WANT TO USE THAT TERM??? (sic)” was her conclusion.

If you read through the rest of the Wiki, however, the entry continues:

While the label is usually considered derogatory and insulting,[3] it is also used by these people to describe themselves, occasionally in a self-deprecating manner.

The term “cam whore” is also used to refer to individuals who post pictures or videos of themselves on the Internet to gain attention. The term disparages those who post pictures of themselves at inappropriate times or places, and usually implies self-absorption. This second usage of the term, deriding vanity and histrionics, is overtaking the prior, more intuitive definition. It is usually synonymous with attention whore.

Trends in Terms

The first thing to realize is that the meanings of words change. Damn, for example, comes from damnnation: a punishment from God. Fuck is right up there on the list of expletives, of course. The etymology of fuck is actually a good read - mainly because for all its controversy, the actual origin of the word is obscure (For the more liberal readers, there is a popular Flash of the various ways you can use the word). It literally means “sexual intercourse”. But I was obviously not condemning the offending person to fire and brimstone, nor am I privy to his nocturnal activities.

The Guardian published a list of TV’s most offensive words based on a survey, assigning an “offensiveness” rating to every phrase (to my credit, I know only about half of them). It shows that different groups of people have differing opinions on how offensive the phrases are. Arse is only “mildly offensive”, while arsehole is “quite strong” for some. Yet, bum, which has the same meaning literally, is rated “mild”. The most offensive body part is cunt - cock is only “a middle of the road” word (I wonder if feminists will be up in arms about this).

A common practice is to bowdlerize “offensive” words. “Oh my god” becomes “Oh my goodness“; “damn it” becomes “darn it“; “fucking terrible” becomes “freaking terrible“. When I was growing up I learnt the the thing in front was dadu (DARE-do); the thing I didn’t have was dudu. Internet slang has also conveniently introduced shorthand - people rarely take offense when you type OM(F)G, WTF, WTH, FFS, etc.

A friend of mine blogged about a comedy routine by George Carlin, who went one step further. Carlin made a list of “unspeakable” words, and assigned numbers to them. Now, would “You 6ing, 7ing monkey 5er. You think your 1 don’t stink well 3 off you 3ing 3er” be allowed on TV? Would it be any different from inserting strategically-timed beeps?

Enid Blyton was a very conservative children’s writer - you won’t find subtle philosophical insights or social upheavals in her writing (unless Georgina was a closet tranny!). But meanings change, and once-innocuous names like Dick (my favourite of the Famous Five) and Fanny have been censored with politically-correct versions. Same for the poor golliwog, a children’s toy that became a symbol of racism.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most memorable novels a child can read - on one side a captivating tale of childhood adventure, on the other, a glaring look at the racism of those times. Jim, the black slave fleeing down the Mississippi River, is elegantly portrayed by Mark Twain: black people were regarded as inferior, but Jim proves to be the only good man in the story. And yet, to this day it remains one of the most banned books in the US. The century-old controversy revolves mainly around the usage of nigger and negro. Apparently this makes the book “racist” and “offensive” - never mind that this is precisely what the novel portrays, the racism of those times!

What Matters

We need to realize is that words are a social construct. Words have no power except what we choose to assign to them, and the intent behind them. Bocor isn’t a swear word, but in the context where it was used recently, it was definitely offensive. Which is not to say that I encourage freely replacing all your adjectives with expletives (mainly because people won’t be able to tell if you’re angry, or REALLY REALLY angry), nor should you throw insults around for no good reason - rather, examine the intent, not the letters on your screen.

For those still squirming at the un-PC-ness of this essay, I hope I may soothe you with a catchy advertisement you won’t find showing here any time soon.

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From the Sun:

TheSun won two top regional awards for journalistic excellence at the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) held here last night.

A first-time entrant for the prestigious award, theSun came out tops for Excellence in Opinion Writing and Excellence in Public Service Journalism against major and more established regional publications in the category for local newspapers or small magazines published in English.

The first award for Excellence in Opinion Writing was for a series of six commentaries written by assistant news editor Jacqueline Ann Surin, who writes a fortnightly column, Shape of a Pocket, published in the eXtra! section on Thursdays.
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theSun’s second win of the night, for Public Service Journalism, was for “Low Cost Palace” by the Special Reporting and Investigations team of deputy editor R. Nadeswaran and deputy news editor Terence Fernandez.

The report was an expose on the lavish mansion constructed, without local authority permission, by Port Klang assemblyman and former Klang councillor Datuk Zakaria Md Deros.

Many kudos to the free paper - “free” in more ways than one.

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Today’s Star - Action against 38 undergrad campaigners:

JELI: The Higher Education Ministry has identified 38 students from various public institutions of higher learning who actively campaigned for the opposition in the Machap and Ijok by-elections.

Their names have been submitted to the ministry for action, said minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed after opening Sekolah Kebangsaan Bukit Jering’s Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) meeting here on Sunday.

He said the Universities and University Colleges Act prohibits undergraduates from participating in political activities.

Are they being threatened because they campaigned, or because they campaigned for the Opposition?

Ironically, a few pages away there’s a story headlined Expert panel: Our students not curious, too passive:

“Many of the IAP members found that our students lack a ‘questioning culture’ and that they are too passive. They also lack questioning skills, are not too curious and too readily accept facts told to them,” he said, adding that this was despite Malaysian students being praised often for being top performers in school.

Gee, I wonder how this came about…

For some context, read theCICAK’s Ijok exclusive, or a previous post of mine on this issue.

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You may know I hate spam. The practice of selling emails is very common, and while definitely unethical, the number of verdicts actually being passed are few and far between - what more in Malaysia!

Which is why this auction from Lelong.com is disgusting:

Here are few smart reasons to purchase the Email Marketing CD from us today:

1. Our database is of over 50,000 Malaysian emails and growing daily!!!
2. You can run your own email marketing campaign - as frequent as you can - change your email content for different products / services - just relax, the software will send email automatically when setting is done - manual included in this CD
3. Our email list - 50, 000 active email list, user check their email daily - Malaysian email (email from all over Malaysia) - targetted group: Managing Director, General Manager, CEO, Executive…
4. Our bulk mail sender software - delivers emails at 50 times faster than the conventional SMTP server - filters out duplicate & invalid email - generates a report of successful delivery & undelivered mail - supports HTML format email
5. Pricing - RM399 per CD - you are allowed to resell to gain back your RM399 - we will never know if 2 or 3 or even 10 person sharing to buy this RM399 CD for 10 person use
6. SPECIAL BONUS: Additional 10, 000 email is giving away for FREE!!! for the order made within 7 days from today!

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The Non-apology Apology. It’s actually become a well-known phrase. Wikipedia has a good article on it; and here’s another with more specific examples.

You already know the incident I’m referring to, of course. Now, I highly doubt that those two even know how to use a computer, much less be aware of other public apologies (CSMonitor says that public apologies have doubled from 1990 to 2002). But isn’t it a wonder how completely unrelated sleazebags can reach across time and space to utter the same nonsense and expect us to believe them?

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