I’d actually heard of gold dust and teeth making an appearance way way back but I didn’t know it was making a return to Charismatic circles until I heard a sermon about it on Sunday. A lady went up after and said gold dust had appeared on her during the sermon.

My first thought was “why gold fillings or gold teeth?” Heaven is supposed to be paved with gold - now why would God fill your tooth with pavement? Why not just restore the tooth? Aren’t gold teeth status symbols of the rich? Strange that what is termed a “spritual revolution”; faith in the unseen, makes great weight of teeth bring turned into gold or gemstones appearing from nowhere. From several accounts, the people had specifically prayed for teeth fillings to be turned into gold - why pray for something of zero practical value, and something that could have been easily put in by a dentist?:

Skeptics can also point to Dick Dewert, president of CJIL-TV in Lethbridge, Alberta. Dewert claimed during a fundraising campaign that God had given him a gold tooth. But he retracted his claim March 25 after his dentist, Jack Sherman, reminded him that he had given him the filling 10 years before.

“The media tend to hit on the ones that are questionable, unfortunately. But this is why we want to move carefully, and to seek medical verification,” says Rev. Dr. John Roddam of St. David’s Anglican Church in Tsawwassen.

There was also the usual scoffing at skeptics who would rather question than believe this phenomenon; I wonder what the reaction is then for the “miracles” seen on the other side of the demoninational divide, e.g. visions of Fatima , or statues weeping tears of blood, or Hindu statues lapping up milk (I spotted posts on Catholic forums mocking this as “theology for gangsta rappers”).

Reactions from Christians themselves range from the amazed to the cautious, and the outright disbelieving. An observation I found stood out in my mind, and pretty much summed up my last thought on the matter as well:

Questions are raised in our minds about God’s goodness and open-handedness when, on the one hand, he seems unwilling or unable to prevent Auschwitz or the contemporary tragedy of Kosovo, but seems both willing and able to adopt the role of a modern dentist and provide not only cosmetic wonders, but phenomena more in keeping with the Fortean Times than the Bible.

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Last week saw a landmark case - the (first?) recognized deconversion from Islam. From AFP:

Apostasy, or renouncing the faith, is one of the gravest sins in Islam and a very sensitive issue in Malaysia where Islamic sharia courts have rarely allowed such renunciations and have also jailed apostates.

Penang Sharia Court judge Othman Ibrahim said he had no choice but to allow an application by cook Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah to renounce her faith and return to Buddhism.

“The court has no choice but to declare that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah is no longer a Muslim as she has never practised the teachings of Islam,” Othman told a packed courtroom.

“I order the conversion certificate to be nullified,” he added.

Siti Fatimah or Tan Ean Huang, 38, said she had never practised Islamic teachings since she converted in 1998 and only did so to enable her to marry Iranian Ferdoun Ashanian.

The couple married in 2004 and she filed for the renunciation after her husband left her.

Forgive me for being a bit crabby but OMFG it’s about time. The very idea that you can “prevent” a deconversion by Our relief would be tempered somewhat though by a depressing letter that featured on Malaysiakini last week as well, “JPN on the look-out for illegitimate Malay children”:

On the evening of April 7, a terribly upset young couple walked into my surgery. Earlier in the day, they had an altercation with the staff of the National Registration Department (JPN) at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital.

The woman was 18 years old and her husband 24 years old. On April 1, she delivered a baby girl weighing 1.4 kg. She was so tiny she had to be put in an incubator. On the day in question, they had gone to visit their baby with a couple of friends. After that the whole group went to the JPN office to register the baby’s birth.

The counter staff scrutinised their marriage certificate and after doing some arithmetic, publicly announced the baby was conceived out of wedlock. As such only the baby’s name and the mother’s name could be entered in the register.

In the space for father’s particulars shall be written ‘Information not Available’. In the baby’s MyKad identity card shall be entered baby’s name followed by ‘bin or binti Abdullah’.

The couple refused to register the baby. They were so upset and humiliated. The baby has since died of prematurity. She never had a birth certificate.

After enquiring from several JPN offices at various places, I learnt that the director-general of JPN had issued an internal circular on July 6, 2007 to the effect that JPN should ‘look out’ for illegitimate Malay children and that they be labelled, accordingly, ‘bin Abdullah’ or ‘binti Abdullah’.

From that day many babies do not have their father’s names on their birth certificates.

It was bad enough when they had upstarts from RELA tell us not to hold hands, but actually having people in hospitals slam this in people’s faces is just so…ARGH.

What conceivable good can come out of denying a father his name on the birth certificate out of spite and piousness? Surely the “solution” to premarital sex is not to oust the father and promote single mothers instead! If anything I’d actually congratulate the guy for sticking by the mother and taking the responsibility. Registration personnel should have better things to do than calculate when the baby was born!

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Before the Flood, there was a canopy over the Earth. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. During the Flood, the canopy fell onto Earth as water, meaning that after the Flood there was no longer a protective canopy.

As a result of this, life on earth is exposed to UV rays and the harmful effects of radiation. That is why we have genetic diseases today, e.g. Down Syndrome and homosexuality, as opposed to before the Flood when man could live for nearly a thousand years.

One of my earliest articles was the Just World effect, also known as victim blaming, where man reasons that misfortune occurs because one deserves it - or inversely, that if something good happens to you, you must be a good person.

The quote above illustrates the other side of the spectrum and it’s not exaggerated - it was recited to me with a straight face. It sounds like Calvinism’s total depravity, only more depressing and more irrational. Taking the Flood literally is already pretty shaky, what more trying to whip up science from a time when people didn’t know what the water cycle was! The same person declared there would have been no sicknesses or deaths if not for the Fall - I asked what would happen if a flu virus invaded the body, and from the response I got, I gathered virii and bacteria must be the products of Sin too.

I really felt like I was in the twilight zone for a moment. It has to be pretty depressing thinking you’re living in such a damned world.

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Recently I was participating in a discussion which touched on “Christians and the State”. I was disappointed at the direction it went because it ended up being the typical assertions of “God is in control” that has been regurgitated many times - we didn’t manage to discuss the practical issues that concern all of us today.

I took issue with one point in particular: the pastor wrote on the board that governments were “appointed by God”. I pointed out that if I were to vote for the opposition, knowing full well that the current ruling party would return to power anyway, then that’s saying I’m going against what God wants. To which the other side backtracked and said that God grants us free will to choose, but will use whatever government that is in place to carry out his plans. The pastor also added that we should pray that we choose according to God’s will.

The root issue here is free will. In fact, the pastor adhered nearly exactly to an earlier post that I made, the Superlative God.

First you have an argument along the lines of Calvinism: God appoints the government. This would, of course, be very attractive if you are in government yourself.

Next you have the Arminian-influenced belief: God has granted you the “free will” to choose, but we should all try to choose our candidate according to His will.

The last alternative is in the fashion of Open Theism: People do indeed freely elect their own governments, based on the qualities they want in the candidate or party.

Many, if not all denominations will say they believe in “free will”, but I’ve realized that most of the time it starts and stops with the Garden of Eden. Just far enough to blame Eve for the apple.

The rest of the time what most people do is “pray” that they will “follow God’s will” - often I wonder if they really mean what they say. I have never, for example, seen a patient just diagnosed with cancer immediately ask whether it is God’s will for them to be cured or to seek treatment; but (if) the patient passes on everyone says it was God’s will and part of God’s plan. On an exam graded according to a bell curve ( where a fixed percentage of students will get a certain grade ), you won’t find any students - or their parents - thinking that it’s God’s will for them to NOT be at the top.

The most cynical interpretation of this phenomenon is that people use God’s mandate for their actions. Mike Huckabee, for example, claimed divine intervention when his poll numbers unexpectedly improved. And of course we have Rafidah Aziz - Malaysians saw a weak PM not daring to fire her, while she claimed a mandate from God.

A more empathic way to see this, which is probably closest to the truth, is that humans will usually only leave it “up to God’s will” when they are unable to help themselves or have no other recourse. The more devout will seek God’s will to override their own, the egoistical claim that whatever they do is by God’s will.

Here the questions arise: how sacred is free will to God, and how important is it to you? There are plenty of instances in the Bible, for example, where God manipulates man’s will, the most famous being the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart [Exodus 7:1-3], followed by horrific plagues upon Egypt because of his refusal(?) to let the Israelites go.

How important is free will to you? I can already imagine some looking up a rebuttal to the verse I quoted; it might save you time if I gave you the typical answer: “Pharaohs heart was already hardened, God merely completed the process”. To which I would reply: how receptive would you be if your neighbour came up to you and demanded that you release your Indonesian maid? More to the point, what decision would Pharaoh have made if God hadn’t hardened his heart? If Pharaoh would have decided to let the Hebrew slaves go anyway, why did God harden his heart and kill the firstborn of all Egypt?

The Free Will Defense, a term coined by Alvin Plantinga, is a popular argument that tries to explain the problem of evil. The problem of evil has its roots in the very first chapters of the Bible: Why did God place the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, and allow Eve to eat it? The proponent of FWD argues that humans must have the free will to choose God of their own accord. Here free will becomes a sacred thing.

But the question now is this: what is the “free” in “free will”? The mere ability to choose has no meaning, just like randomly crossing boxes on a ballot wastes your right to vote. Some people misuse the FWD by saying that “God cannot reveal himself to us because it violates our free will; we would have no choice but to believe”. But free will is only meaningful when you acquire or are provided enough knowledge to weigh the pros and cons and make an informed decision - something that comes across as ironic, since Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from the Tree that would provide them this very ability.

I would like to take time here to discuss whether God himself has free will - if God knows the future, he knows what decisions he is going to make. Even if you bring forward the argument that God is outside time, basic principles of logic dictate that you need to be capable of logical sequences (if A, then B ) - but it’s getting late, my brain hurts, and wills me to stop :).

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The only time Malaysia seems to get on Digg/Slashdot/Google News these days seems to be when people are shaking their heads at us, so it was a relief to see this piece from Reuters - Malaysia’s top court draws line after Islamic cases:

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia’s highest court has ruled that legal cases involving non-Muslims cannot be decided by sharia courts, drawing a line after a spate of high-profile cases that left many in legal limbo.

The Federal court, in a landmark judgement, held that disputes between a Muslim and a non-Muslim on family and Islamic matters should be settled in a civil court, the New Straits Times reported on Thursday.

“They (non-Muslims) can’t be present to defend themselves in the sharia courts,” Judge Abdul Hamid Mohamad was quoted by the daily as saying.

The ruling came amid a bitter debate on whether the mainly Muslim nation is an Islamic state. The polemic has exposed religious and racial faultlines ahead of a widely expected early general election.

Preventing a repeat of the Lina Joy and Revathi Massosai cases will be a huge step towards making sense of Malaysia.

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The Sun and Malaysiakini have the news (and of course, LKS his opinion): Najib declares that Malaysia is an Islamic state.

The amazing thing is that this was a reply to a question asking if Malaysia was moving from a secular government to an Islamic state! I have to grudgingly admit that the man has guts; instead of giving the politically correct answer, he just gave it straight to us (that said, he might very well pull the “misquoted/misunderstood” card tomorrow so don’t hold me to this):

“Islam is the official religion and Malaysia is an Islamic state, an Islamic state that respects the rights of the non-Muslims and we protect them,” he said when asked to comment on concerns that Malaysia was moving from a secular government to an Islamic State and whether is Malaysia is one.

“I want to correct you (reporter), that we have never never been a secular state. Secular by Western definition means separation of the Islamic principles in the way we govern the country.

On one hand, this attitude does explain why MPs slaughter cows in Parliament, why deconverting from Islam is treason, and why this year the hottest story around the globe about Malaysia is Lina Joy. You have to pity the people over at the Sun who wrote that piece on “upholding our secular Constitution” some time back.

“”But as an Islamic state, it does not mean that we don’t respect the non-Muslims. The Muslims and the non-Muslims have their own rights”, quotes Malaysiakini. The question here is what on earth we infidels are supposed to make of all this, or did he think that we wouldn’t hear of it?

On the other hand, it could be that he just doesn’t know what “secular” means, or he could be just looking for brownie points - with all that’s been happening lately, no secularist is going to vote for BN anyway; might as well try to look (and sound) holy.

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Fresh on the heels of the Joy case is a little gem from Reuters:

A Malaysian Muslim man switched at birth in a hospital mix-up has filed a lawsuit seeking to become a Buddhist and have his name changed, newspapers reported on Saturday.

The gaping logic hole that is our constitutional definition of “Malay = Muslim”, coupled with Islam’s anti-apostasy stance, makes for a dilemma that would be comical if it weren’t so sad (I know, I know, I’ve been using this phrase lots).

[Edit]: This story is actually a few months old.

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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.
…
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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