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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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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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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In his introduction for The Malay Dilemma Revisited, M. Bakri Musa comments that every nation has its day of infamy permanently etched in its collective memory:

The French have July 14, 1789, Bastille Day; the Americans, July 1, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg. Both events had their share of gory and grizzly moments that indelibly stained their nations’ histories. For Malaysia, it is May 13, 1969…

But unlike Bastille Day or the Battle of Gettysburg which is memorialized by their respective citizenries, Malaysians have no wish to acknowledge, let alone remember, that infamous day in May.

It’s that day soon. The newspapers will probably be running articles with Minister X telling us to “remember May 13” and remind us that only the Government can bring stability. Toss in stock assertions about “unquestionable Malay rights” and “the social contract that everyone agreed on” and you have our annual dose of political laxative.

The average Malaysian student will not be able to tell you what happened on May 13. I went looking through a few bookstores to confirm this: none of the SPM/STPM textbooks or workbooks elaborate on it. It is invariably referred to as “Peristiwa May 13“, a bogeyman vaguely connected with “perusuhan kaum” but with no specifics.

These days, though, you can look it up online - Wikipedia has an excellent entry, TIME has archived harrowing articles from May 23 and July 18 of that fateful year. A cursory search for “Malaysia ‘May 13′ 1969″ on Google Books and Google Scholar returns about 400 results each.

A new book will also be released tomorrow by Dr Kua Kia Soong of New Era College, based on recently declassified information in London. According to him, the official version of May 13 is “nonsense”, the events before and after part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Tunku and establish Malay dominance. Of course, we can’t pass a judgement on the book until we actually read and analyze it. But that it would be plausible at all reflects on the implausibilities in the official version.

Admission of Failure? Or Another Agenda?

May 13 is treated like a blank cheque that endorses the Government. But shouldn’t the Government’s boast be that we are moving away from what happened on May 13? That we are on the way to narrowing the economic disparity between races, that we are a people matured enough to see more than colour? Constantly invoking May 13 is basically admitting that the Government has failed us, that we are all no better off, economically or socially, than we were in 1969.

Constantly implying that the Malays are ready to run amok, all this brandishing of kerises - this sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Monkey see, monkey do” becomes “Monkey listen, monkey do”. We all remember the furore last year over the calculation of Bumi-held equity. But the mind-boggling question is: shouldn’t the Government be proud if they succeeded in increasing the share of bumi equity? Was that not a main goal of the NEP?

Short-sighted

Why do we have affirmative action? It is because the Malays need it, or because they have the right to it? The difference is everything.

I am all for the former - and not because the underprivileged are Malays; because they are Malaysian. This is a target that we can all aspire to, and a noble one. The latter is a dead end - yes, excellent for gathering votes in the short term by essentially doing the same thing as what the British did long ago - divide us along racial lines to make us manageable, and quoting Khoo Boon Teik’s conclusion in his analysis of ethnicity in Malaysia: “thrive on inequalities, chiefly by insistently imagining the fortune of one ethnic community to be the deprivation of another.”

Will it still make sense decades, centuries from now to invoke “ketuanan” Melayu, this “us” versus “them” mentality? In 2169 will we still have not moved on from 1969, still shamelessly saying “this is what we all agreed on“, or, like DPM Najib, conjure 400 years of imaginary “national debt”?

If the answer is “no”, then we are a doomed people indeed; if it’s “yes”, surely we could start now and avoid generations of Malaysians being told that their race divides them or that their favour comes from accidents of geography or birth; “all equal, but some more equal than others.” An article from The Age that was widely circulated some time back challenged: “it’s time Malaysia grew up”. Looking at the first serious survey of racism where not even half of us identify themselves as Malaysians first, we have not grown up.

In the run-up to the U.S. Presidential elections we see among the candidates a woman, an Italian (or two), an African-American, an Irishman, a Croatian. Yet anyone from the U.S. reading that last sentence would immediately correct me: race, religion, and gender are irrelevant; they are American, no matter where their ancestors came from. Is it too naive to imagine a time when we too will select our politicians based on the issues they stand for rather than the colour of their skin, when we view our Constitution with reverence, not fear?

We need to learn from May 13, not use it as an excuse; or we’ll be left grasping at history while the world leaves us behind.

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I usually read TIME in the library now (it’s $), but their recent edition of the annual Time 100 (Most Influential People in the World) is worth a look.

Slightly US-centric, I don’t agree with some of the names there, and have to admit I know less than half of the names anyway. The interesting thing about TIME’s 100 is how the list pairs the subjects with the authors. Oprah Winfrey’s entry is written by Nelson Mandela. The article on businessman-turned-philanthrophist Warren Buffet is penned by Melinda Gates. Michael J. Fox authors the section on Douglas Melton, the co-director of the Havard Stem Cell institute. The legendary professional gamer Jonathan Wendel aka Fatal1ty honours legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo.

But by far the most interesting pairing for me had to be the piece on Richard Dawkins, the outspoken evolutionist who pioneered the concept of extended phenotypes. The author paired to him? Michael Behe, a leading intelligent design advocate who coined the term “irreducible complexity”. This shocked me enough to immediately buy the issue.

Some online digging brings up Behe’s original, unedited article. He seems miffed at the sections they cut out, though I can’t see that the core of his essay changed any.

What’s baffling is that he is unhappy with TIME for rephrasing his sentences, e.g.: “the Bible advises us [to be hot or cold but not lukewarm]” .

What he first wrote was “Someone once advised us [to be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm.]”

The irony is: wasn’t this precisely what was wrong with intelligent design?

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Jordin Sparks will win. She’s the most versatile and has the most appeal. If only she could stop being so sickly sweet and giggly off-mike. And she shouldn’t have redone her hair - argh. Every Jane, Jean and Gina has straightened hair.

Melinda and Lakisha are both excellent. But this is not a singing competition, it’s an idol contest - how do you think Daniel won Malaysian Idol? Melinda is going to suffer split votes with Lakisha (previously with Stephanie as well), both of them are too similar.

All the guys suck, except Phil maybe, sometimes Chris Sligh. Blake has the appeal but is highly overrated. Sanjaya is a big joke. The weepy little girl that got zoomed in on all night is the perfect sample of his fan base.

The remaining females are good. Haley sings better and better each week: wears less and less (yay!).

Simon’s right when he says he’s more valuable than Bruce Springsteen. He’s the only reason for sitting through the whole show, rather than skipping through the singers you don’t like. Only Melinda’s been spared his biting tongue so far. I wish they would put Hugh Laurie in-character as a guest judge though!

It’s been said before but Idol is probably the most popular, lucrative TV show ever. Wonder what took people so long to think of it.

[edit] Forgot to add the link to VoteForTheWorst.com, for those who are flabberghasted by Sanjaya’s miraculous longevity.

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Just another blog writer that got bored of blogging/ran out of ideas, right? I certainly wouldn’t be the first.

But that’s not the reason for the lack of updates, actually. I do enjoy putting thoughts into words, and I sure have a lot of things to say. It’s just that as I grow up, there are things you find hard to discuss, topics you are passionate about but would never broach in public; you even find that you’re censoring yourself - telling yourself what you can or cannot write down, dumbing it down so you won’t be controversial or shock people. And when you’re censoring yourself and holding back - that defeats the purpose of blogging. It’s a depressing feeling.

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Has Tim finally discovered art? Well no, it’s actually a picture of Mars, coloured by altitude. Google Mars displays the mapped regions of the Red Planet based on satellite photos. There’s also Google Moon and Google Earth if you want to stay closer to home.

Looking into space gives you both a sense of wonder and humility - you feel wonder that the Earth is the way it is, and humbled by how big and beautiful the universe is compared us tiny humans.

Something like this:

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Calvinism is the Christian doctrine popularized by John Calvin in the sixteenth century, central tenets being that of “irresistible grace” and “total depravity” - that God calls those who are to be saved, and thus being saved (or condemned) is through God’s decision alone; and that people are so evil in nature they would not otherwise be able to choose to believe.

Arminianism, the teachings of Jacobus Arminius, echoes the concept of “total depravity”, but teaches “resistible grace”, which tries to address the inherent issues of predestination in Calvinism. God’s saving grace is extended to many by God, but people have the free will to reject it.

If Calvinism is one end of the spectrum then Pelagianism is at the other. Pelagius, who lived in the fourth century, did not believe in an original sin that condemned man, but believed that man had the ability to choose good or evil for himself, without needing divine intervention. Sadly, his teachings were deemed heretical and condemned. Semi-Pelagianism still survives today and is the opposite of Arminianism - man decides to accept God, and God’s grace completes the process.

Another indirectly related doctrine that has recently emerged is Open Theism, which attempts to address the conflicts caused by the predestination that is taught in many doctrines. In Open Theism, God has not determined the future with certainty (an “open” future), but rather intentionally limits his omniscience so that humans have meaningful free will.

What I personally find most notable about these doctrines is not so much the arguments themselves but the motivations behind them. Calvinism paints a God in control of everything, and man helpless to overcome his own nature. Arminianism tries to absolve God of the condemnation of man, by painting man as the guilty party in rejecting God. Pelagianism reflects a belief in meaningful free will and responsibility, rather than humans who start off already helpless and condemned.

The controversy over Open Theism is interesting. It reflects the need of people to have a deity in control of everything, the omnimax God. There is even a book criticizing Open Theism titled Their God is Too Small. Open Theism in fact resolves many issues with predestination, but that is lost in the furore over the “limiting of God”.

If God knows everything about the future, then he cannot be all-powerful or have free will, because he cannot do things that won’t fulfil the future. If God knows what you need, what you will pray and whether he will choose to fulfil it, then there surely isn’t any point in praying.

I give this my own term, “throwing superlatives at God”. This comes hand in hand with making man as small, helpless, and evil as possible. It fulfills man’s need to have someone in control, but is full of flaws when you think about it.

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The Just World Effect, closely related to the concept of “karma”, is a cognitive bias based on the belief that good things happen to good people; bad things to bad people. I would describe it as an anthromorphism of the cosmos - humans reward good actions and bad actions, so it is tempting to think the universe does the same thing.

At first glance there is nothing wrong with this phenomenon. But this bias leads to “victim blame”: the perception that the suffering of a person is deserved in some way. The most obvious examples are studies that show rape victims tended to be blamed for their ordeals, be it by dressing provocatively, inviting attention, or simply being there.

The Just World Effect is powerful when combined with religion. When syphilis first became widespread in the sixteenth century, the Catholic church proclaimed it the “wrath of god” for adultery. After the advent of penicillin this view was abandoned. More recently the emergence of AIDS also led to a similar decree by many religious leaders; at the time the misconception was that it only spread among homosexuals and therefore God was signalling his disapproval. It is a stigma that still exists today.

In the aftermath of 9/11 Pat Robertson, a controversial fundamentalist proclaimed it was the “lifting of His protection” and the result of America’s immorality. Similar things were said about Hurricane Katrina (or any other natural disaster for that matter), with people scrambling to blame it on everything imaginable: gays, gambling, alcoholism, etc.

The flip side can be just as deceptive - that good fortune justifies a person. Rafidah Aziz claims she has God’s mandate because she was reelected to the Cabinet. After Israel won the Six-Day-War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, it was immediately claimed a miracle had happened and God’s had given Israel their land - its aerial superiority and brilliant military tactics nonwithstanding.

This bias cheapens humanity and offers too simplistic a view of life. We should help others in trouble, not judge them; we should learn from mistakes and successes and not freely assume divine mantles.

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