“the corrosion of reason”

by AC Grayling

 

An opinion panel research survey conducted in July 2006 found more than 30 per cent of UK university students believe in creationism or intelligent design. This raw detail is gasp-inducing enough in its own right, as indication of the effect of the fairy tales that once served humankind as its primitive science and technology in its intellectual infancy, and continue to assert a grip on too many. But it is even more troubling as a symptom of a wider corrosion, the spread of a more virulent cancer of unreason, which is affecting not just the mental culture of our own country but the fate of the world itself. If that last phrase seems hyperbolic, read on.

 

Take the local concern first, and ask what is signified by the 30 per cent statistic at issue. From the day the government of John Major allowed polytechnics to redescribe themselves as universities, and his and successive governments set a target of getting 50 per cent of school leavers into higher education, but without the huge investment of resources at all levels that would make this viable, it was inevitable that standards required for entrance to degree level courses would fall. And so it has dramatically proved. At the same time standards in public examinations at secondary school level have also fallen, by some measures a long way. The official line, of course, is the latter at least is not true: but such is the way with official lines.

 

The combined result is that a significant proportion of university entrants today are noticeably different from their average forerunners of a generation ago: measurably less literate, less numerate, less broadly knowledgeable, and sometimes less reflective. At the same time education has been infected by postmodern relativism and the less desirable effects of political correctness, whose combined effect is to encourage teachers to accept, and even promote as valid alternatives, the various superstitions and antique belief systems constituting the multiplicity of different and generally competing religions represented in our multicultural society. This has gone so far that our taxes are now arrogated to support faith-based schooling, which means the ghettoisation of intellectually defenceless children into a variety of competing superstitions, despite the stark evidence, all the way from Northern Ireland to the madrasahs of Pakistan, of what this does for the welfare of humankind.

 

The key to the weakening of intellectual rigour that all this represents is enquiry is no longer premised on the requirement that belief must be proportional to carefully gathered and assessed evidence. The fact that faith is enough to legitimate anything from superstition to mass murder is not one whit troubling to people of faith themselves, most of whom disagree with the faith of most other people of faith (thus: a christian does not accept Islam, and vice versa; so a christian’s claim to be certain, by faith, that his is the only true religion is rejected, on grounds of faith, by the Muslim; and so on, to the point of mutual assassination); which shows the non-rational mindset underlying religious belief, an essentially infantile attitude of acceptance of fairy stories, has not been affected by the best education can offer in the way of challenging and maturing minds to think for themselves.

 

Example: ask a christian why the ancient story of a deity impregnating a mortal woman who then gives birth to a heroic figure whose deeds earn him a place in heaven, is false as applied to Zeus and his many paramours (the mothers of such as Hercules, the Heavenly Twins, etc.), but true as applied to god, Mary and Jesus. Indeed ask him what is the significance of the fact this tale is older than Greek mythology, and commonplace in Middle Eastern mythologies generally. Why are they myths, whereas what is related in the New Testament is not? Do not expect a rational reply; an appeal to faith will be enough, because with faith anything goes.

 

Here is why the claim that the resurgence of nonrational superstitious belief is a danger to the world. Fundamentalism in the major religions can be and too often is politically infantilising, and in its typical radicalised forms provide utter certainty of being in the right, immunises against tolerance and pluralism, justifies the most atrocious behaviour to the apostate and the infidel, is blind to the appeals of justice let alone mercy or reason, and is intrinsically fascistic and monolithic. One does not have to look far to find shining examples of this pretty picture in today’s world, whether in the Middle East or the U.S. Bible Belt. The rest of the world is caught between these two appalling instances of basically the same phenomenon, so it is perhaps no surprise, though no less regrettable, that the infection should spread from both directions.

 

More regrettable though, is the fact that the civilised quarters of the world are not taking seriously the connection between the world’s current problems and failure to uphold intellectual rigour in education, and not demanding religious belief be a private and personal matter for indulgence only in the home, accepting it in the public sphere only on an equal footing with other interest groups such as trade unions and voluntary organisations such as the Rotary Club. This is the most a religion merits being treated as, as the following proves: if I and a few others claim to constitute a religious group based on belief in the divinity of garden gnomes, should I be entitled to public money for a school in which children can be brought up in this faith, together with a bishop’s seat in Parliament perhaps? Why would this be laughed out of court when belief of essentially the same intellectual value, say, christianity, is accorded all such amenities and more?

 

I remind those who seek to counter with the tired old canard that Stalinism and Nazism are proof secular arrangements are worse than religious ones, that fundamentalist religion is the same in its operation and effects as Stalinism and Nazism for the reason these latter are at base the same thing as religions, viz. monolithic ideologies. Religion is a man-made device, not least of oppression and control, whose techniques and structures were adopted by Stalinism and Nazism, the monolithic salvation faiths of modernity, as the best teachers they could wish for. When any of these imprisoning ideologies are on the back foot and/or in the minority, they present sweet faces to those they wish to seduce: the kiss of friendship in the parish church, the summer camp for young communists in the 1930s. But give them the levers of power and they are the Taliban, the Inquisition, the Stasi.

 

Give them AK47s and Semtex, and some of the fanatics among them become airline bombers, mass murderers of ordinary people and for the most contemptible reasons.

 

How far are the 30 per cent of students who believe in creationism from airline bombers? A very long way of course; the latter are a psychopathic minority only. But the point to register and take seriously is that there is nevertheless a connecting thread, which is belief in antique superstitions and the nonrational basis of the putative values they represent, values which can lead in the extreme to mass murder, as the chilling jingle reminds us: “faith is what I die for, dogma is what I kill for”.

 

As part of the strategy for countering the pernicious effects faith and dogma can produce, we need to return religious commitment to the private sphere, stop the folly of promoting superstitions and religious segregation in education, demand standards of intellectual rigour be upheld at all educational levels, and find major ways of reversing the current trend of falling enrolment in science courses. The alternative is a return to the Dark Ages, the tips of whose shadows are coldly falling upon us even now.

 

Taken from AC Grayling’s Against All Gods, published by Oberon Books.

 

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an actual primary school “science” quiz

 

 

A Grade 4 (primary 3 or 4) Science Quiz worksheet from a private elementary school in North Carolina:

 

 

(source)

 

This is pseudo-scientific anti-intellectual crazy fundamentalist christian rubbish. Thank goodness there is nothing like this in Singapore schools.

 

I am shocked.

 

*******

 

one example of why faith (or religion) is evil

 

The Ganges in India is among the world’s most polluted rivers.

 

 

 

As such, it is also a source of filth and disease. Decomposing cattle and human beings float along the waters. They baptise the river with toxic bacteria, bodily wastes and exotic smells.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful bodies also sunbathe on the shore.

 

 

 

A decent and educated human being will not swim, let alone bathe in, wash teeth using, wash clothes with and even drink the waters of the Ganges. But throngs of Hindu Indians do just that.

 

during a religious festival

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deceased Hindu Indians get cremated at its shores.

 

 

 

The poverty of the people who “use” the Ganges is besides the point. They do these absurd and irrational things because they sincerely believe the Ganges is sacred. They worship the river as a goddess by whom they receive forgiveness of sins through bathing in it. Some drink the waters for “health” and healing reasons. There is a whole Hindu mythology which surrounds the origins of this river.

 

They adhere to this absurdity by faith. Some testify to the river’s miraculous powers. It sounds all too familiar like evangelical christians testifying to the efficacy of intercessory prayer. It is all “by faith”.

 

In spite of the evidence.

 

Testing a sample of the waters of the River Ganges in a laboratory yields gross results. There are zilch vitamins and minerals in the water to suggest healing properties. Similarly, conducting a double-blind experiment on intercessory prayer yields no positive results. Claims of efficacy are often due to the random throw of the medical dice and the placebo effect.

 

I know of evangelical christians who mock the Hindus for their beliefs. These faith-heads do not realise they have the same thought patterns as the Hindus. They prize faith over reason and so-called “revelation” over the scientific method. They claim to value rationality and pretend to praise science when science appears to cohere with their outdated ancient texts. They then deride rationality and poo poo science when science contradicts their holy piffle. Think of young-earth creationism. Think of the no-abortion-at-all-times community. Or the homosexuality-is-a-choice idiots. Or the stem-cell-is-playing-god crackpots. All of these issues appear controversial because the bulk of the “controversy” is started by those who have a religious agenda. They want to legislate their brand of morality on the wider world who respects evidence and truth.

 

It is depressing.

 

*******

idiotic comment from republican congressman

 

“I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

- Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) (source)

 

*******

 

 

i didn’t know ray comfort can be so stupid…

 

 (source)

 

Ray Comfort is a New Zealand-born U.S. evangelical christian minister who writes books like The Evidence Bible, School of Biblical Evangelism, How to Know God Exists: Scientific Proof of God and World Religions in a Nutshell, among many others. They are sold in local christian bookshops like SKS Books Warehouse.

 

For someone who street-preaches to passers-by and debates with atheists and agnostics, this man is very daft. I don’t think he is aware of it but he embarrasses himself every time he opens his moustachioed mouth to speak about science and philosophy. But I didn’t know he is this stupid:

 

“If you call any other christian on this page a ‘bibliophile’ I will ban you. Please show respect for your fellow species.”

 

!!??!!

 

Comfort obviously doesn’t know that the word bible is anglicised from the medieval Latin as well as koine Greek’s biblia, which means “books”. The term bibliophile has nothing to do with the bible!

 

Anyhow, to sidestep a bit, paedophile is such an inappropriate word to describe someone who is sexually attracted to young children as it literally means a lover (non-sexual) of children, period. I love children in that sense!

 

The problem with evangelicals, like Ray Comfort, is that they tend to opine with gospel-truth certitude on almost any subject that catches their fancy. They interpret the world only from their narrow brand of christianity and this warps their understanding on issues like atheism, human rights, secularism, ethics, darwinian evolution, cosmology, history, etc. It becomes very partial and often loony and ridiculous to listen to or read their comments on world affairs.

 

Learn darwinian evolution from a biologist, science from a philosopher of science, the universe from a cosmologist, Buddhism from a buddhist scholar, and so on and so forth. Never learn these subjects from an evangelical christian “apologist”! Like Ray Comfort.

 

*******

the roads to hell are paved with…

 

almost everyone..!

 

 

(source)

 

There is something so cultish about this, don’t you think?

 

bible belt stupidity

 

“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body. That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organ in your body that are bigger than that.”

- Mary Sue McClurkin, Alabama House of Representatives (source)

 

 

This is what you get from the religious right. Utter scientific stupidity and ignorance. How does a political party as idiotic as the Republicans exist in the West?

 

The largest organ of the homo sapien is the human skin. The largest organ inside the human body is the liver.

*******

a device of satan

 

 

 

Familiar?

 

The lunatic short-sightedness of fundamentalist and evangelical christians.

 

If god had intended for Adam to fuck Steve, she would have either given Steve a vagina or at least made his arse-hole linked to a womb. If god had intended for man to suck another bloke’s cock, or a woman to lick another lass’ pussy, she would have sanctioned it through her holy prophets.

 

Yawn.

 

There goes “unnatural” things like spectacles (if god had intended for you to see well, she would not have given you myopic eyes), vaccines, in-vitro fertilisation techniques, and probably the whole of modern civilisation.

 

*******

the purpose of education

 

“ It amazes me that people have pre-existing notions that defy the evidence of reality. But that they hold onto them so dearly. And one of them is the notion of creationism.

…allowing the notion that the earth is 6,000 years old to be promulgated in schools is like teaching kids that the distance across the United States is 17 feet. That’s how big an error it is.

Now you might say, look, a lot of people believe that, so don’t we owe it to them to allow their views to be present in school? Well, as I’ve often said, the purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

Fifty percent of the people in the United States, when we probe them each year with the National Science Foundation, think that the sun goes around the Earth, not that the Earth goes around the sun. Now, does that mean in schools we should allow the anti-Galilean and Copernican idea that the sun goes around the Earth to be taught? Absolutely not. If, in fact, the very fact that people don’t know that, and the very fact that enough people are willing to somehow believe that Earth is 6,000 years old, means we have to do a better job of teaching physics and biology, not a worse job.

The last thing we want to do is water down the teaching of biology because some people don’t recognize that evolution happened. Evolution is the basis of modern biology and, in fact, if a lot of people don’t believe it, it only means we have to do a better job teaching it.”

- Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist)

 

*******

 

children for christ

 

 

 

*******

facts don’t count

 

 

(source)

 

!!??!!??

pea-brained southern baptist crackpot

 

 

 

A Southern Baptist preacher like Louie Giglio is the reason I have minus-zero tolerance for evangelical stupidity. With typical Yankee emotionalism this crackpot used the laminin molecule in a sermon a few years ago to illustrate the truthfulness and relevance of Christianity.

 

• Louie Giglio – Laminin (Short Version)

 

The laminin molecule has a cruciform shape.

 

 

 

 

Although the shape is only incidental, Giglio exploits it to yip about how this essential protein molecule in the human body shapes itself “perfectly” in the “cross” of Jesus. He goes on hysterically about the pseudonymous Pauline text of Colossians and how it states in Christ, “all things hold together”, alluding to laminin’s body-building function.

 

??!!?

 

First, the cruciform is one of the most common shapes, apart from the circular, in the natural as well as man-made world. Vegetation such as trees and small plants assume a naturalised cruciform. Architecture of all kinds comprise steel intersections which are obviously cruciform. Road intersections too. Blah, blah, blah. So it appears that Jesus is everywhere.

 

Second, in all likelihood the “cross” which Jesus allegedly died on might be more of a T than a cross. Historians are not certain about this but this just shows the silliness of evangelicals idolising the cruciform. Besides, whenever the christian testament writers speak of the “cross”, they are not refering to the physical wooden beams but the theology of which it symbolises. It becomes irrelevant what mode of capital punishment Jesus went through. Winding back the clock, I wonder what christianity’s icon looks like if Jesus was beheaded or hung instead. Catholics might be kowtowing to a guillotine or noose today! If Jesus is a 21st-century figure, we will be seeing an electric chair or needle in all our churches!

 

One would think he is a genuine postgraduate with a postgraduate intellect if not for the institutions he came from. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Grace Theological Seminary. No wonder.

 

No mainline protestant preacher educated in Union Theological Seminary (New York) or Harvard and Yale divinity schools will make these kinds of loony remarks.

 

*******

 

bumper sticker stupidity

 

 

 

*******

idiotic right-wingers respond to the newtown shooting tragedy:

 

 

James Dobson: We elected the wrong president and allow abortion, so: “I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”

 

William J. Murray: “Without the authority of God, there are no morals, and none are taught in the public schools today. The ethics that are taught are situational, perhaps the same situational ethics that led to the logic that caused the tragic shootings in Newtown.”

 

Gary DeMar: “The problem is, our current culture – through the educational system – is telling young people that they are animals, in some cases, less than animals. So genetically we are no different (really) from a worm, a bug, or a dandelion.”

 

Mike Huckabee: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

 

Bryan Fischer: “I think God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’d be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first. I’m not gonna go where I’m not wanted; I am a gentleman.’”

 

Louie Gohmert: “I wish to God she [the principal] had had an m-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out … and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids”

 

Ann Coulter: Only one policy has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws.”

 

Megan McArdle: “I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. “

(source)

 

Ignorant ignorant comments.

 

*******

do you want to know why i am angry?

 

 

(source)

 

*******

the freedom to think

 

“People will only trust a broadcaster if they know that he or she is not simply reading a script written by government, but is paying people the ultimate compliment of letting them make their own minds up.

In other words, real freedom of speech, the kind that is morally important and politically essential, involves two things – freedom to stand back from any particular loyalty in the name of loyalty to the truth, and freedom to speak truths that the powerful want hidden or ignored.

Truth is not likely to be found where people are told never to ask questions or where those who are backed by force have the right to dictate what counts as news, so that the human reality and human cost of injustice or disaster can be swept out of sight and mind.”

- Rowan Williams (emphasis mine)

 

One of my heroes, Dr Rowan Williams, spoke on the importance of free speech six days ago, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the BBC World Service. The above is an excerpt from which the entirety is posted on his website.

 

This man speaks as a thoughtful christian (an oxymoron in today’s American evangelical-empowered “christian” world) as well as a child of the Enlightenment and a humanist.

 

When I read the above paragraphs, I think immediately of Christianity in Singapore (I cannot comment on the other religions) of which the overwhelming majority of churches govern with pitch forks. They may not be cults in the fundamentalist theological sense (teaching “unorthodox” doctrines) but do linger on the edges of psychological abuse. They “encourage” attendees to join small (they call it “cell” or “care”) groups to effectively control and manage what their parishioners should or should not think. Church leaders do not admit this (who taught them to fib, I wonder) but spin about small groups as avenue for interpersonal spiritual encouragement. Yawn.

 

The encouragement part may be true, like all social gatherings of like-minded people. But there is a catch. One is often discouraged to think critically and in depth about Christianity. There is always an unspoken peer pressure to self-censor one’s thoughts. Questions and issues which “edify” (promote and propagandise the faith) are alright. Questions and issues which promote cognitive skills and thus philosophical rigour are not. They supposedly rock the ark and stir “doubts” in one’s fellow christians. Especially the “weaker” intellectual types. Gee. The “stronger” ones are usually those stubbornly biased against anything and everything that appear to contradict their idiotic literal understanding of the bible.

 

How does one gets to the truth without doubting and asking questions??

 

One doesn’t.

 

In evangelical christianity, one doesn’t pursue truth. It is already there. In the bible. One has all the truth. The human sciences and other religions which differ from the bible are wrong. Full stop. One ignores the numerous irritating literary and historical contradictions in the bible. One ignores the scientific fact of human evolution and our ape-like origins (must be the devil’s ploy) and replace with pseudo-scientific piffle like creationism or intelligent design. One ignores the disturbing lack of archaeological evidence to support the Pentateuchal (first five books of the Tanakh) stories. One practically shuns modern biblical scholarship – they are secular and worldly – and perhaps study only sectarian “scholarship” espoused by the likes of the loony Far Eastern Bible College or the East Asia School of Theology in Singapore. The tongue-screaming charismatic ones are worse. Anyhow, most of our more-than-ten theological institutions are faith-based and a disgrace to genuine academic biblical scholarship. There are just no biblical studies department in our local universities.

 

One also has to ignore the cries of our LGBT friends – too bad for them – they have to stop buggering or fry in hell. It is their fault – they choose to be LGBT – in spite of all the evidence which suggest the contrary.

 

SIGH. When one thinks critically and is passionate to know the truth, one inevitably gets shit from the church. One is labeled divisive or trying to be. One is lamented about, behind one’s back, of being deceived by the devil. One is labeled as spiritually weak. One gets “counseled” by the small group leader. More like being coerced to stop reading and thinking about all those information that debunk much of evangelical hogwash. If that fails, higher management drops by.

 

If one’s an active parishioner, say a small-group “bible-study” leader, one gets “encouraged” to step down. Bullshit. They just want to prevent more parishioners from knowing the truth. One cannot go on informing their dumb flock lest they revolt.

 

If this is not psychological abuse and a violation of one’s right to individual conscience and opinion, I give up.

 

This was why I left Lighthouse Evangelism Singapore more than ten years ago. I was still very evangelical and accepted the bible as divinely inspired and roughly inerrant. But I started to doubt the tongue-speaking (as evidence of the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit”), healing-in-the-atonement, Jesus-is-not-poor, holy-laughing, slain-in-the-spirit, hotline-to-god, hocus-pocus nonsense of charismatic neo-Pentecostalism. One cannot justify any of these piffle from even a non-critical interpretation of the bible. Like any sincere christian, I researched into the issue and asked my pastors. I got better impartial information from my own research than my pastors. Some of them are clueless about Pentecostal or charismatic history and the development of their peculiar teachings. They seem to think that charismatic christianity was historic and genuine christianity. Duh. As a youth and cell-group leader, I had to buck up and tie these theological loose ends. I was labeled as being oppressed by a “spirit of doubt and deception” behind my back – a pastor told my parents just that. A loser’s excuse for being impotent in grappling with theology.

 

Lighthouse Evangelism is a megachurch founded and led by Rony Tan, an unschooled self-appointed faith-healer who couldn’t read the original languages of the bible, was ignorant about the sciences, and a neanderthal about the history of his own religion. I had raging fits every time he preached. I am allergic to preachers who opine so surely and certainly on things they know zilch about. This chum didn’t even know his own field – biblical studies!

 

Alas, most independent megachurch pastors are like that. They poo poo evolution even though they haven’t read a single textbook by an evolutionary biologist. They poo poo other religions when they haven’t studied the scholarship of these religions. They rant against the evils of atheism when they are clueless about the fields of moral philosophy and ethical theory.

 

This tendency to curb the individual liberty to think critically and speak the truth is also the reason I left Church of God (Evangelical) past June. Just ask the LAY “pastoral” leaders (yes, it wasn’t even the pastor) who shut me off and refuse to discuss and debate, and demanded my “repentance” for emailing the parishioners (it’s a teeny-weeny community) my disgust for an invited camp preacher. The buffoon Francis Khoo. Take a look at his photograph. “So-sure-of-himself conceited prick” written all over his face.

 

The leaders reprimanded me about “respect”. One does not respect pricks and charlatans. One does not respect bad ideas. And one does not respect christians who behave like barking army sergeants who demand unthinking obedience.

 

My conscience is clear then as it is now. If the clocks unwind I will still do the same thing. I will fight for what is true and for the civil freedom to think, opine and express without the buggering of religious ignoramuses.

 

Unless my family and I leave to the US or the UK where there exists liberal traditions of christianity, I don’t think I will ever attend a church again.

 

What about Christmas? I don’t know. I do not wish to have a raging fit again.

 

*******

a pastor’s ignorant comment

 

What can be said at a time like this?
The experts will opine on why this happened.
All I can say is this was pure evil.
The heartlessness and wickedness of this man that did the shooting is really unimaginable

(source)

 

*”pastor” Greg Laurie

 

Rugged Sean Connery-esque good-looker Greg Laurie who also happens to head an independent evangelical megachurch in California expresses the above quotation in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

 

 

True to stereotype, he displays the lowbrow ignorance so characteristic of the Caucasian middle-class American evangelical (and the Chinese middle-class Singaporean christian). He acknowledges he has no expertise on mass shooters but blabbers on matter-of-factly the “evil” of the deceased twenty-year-old Rambo. What makes him certain Adam Lanza is so devilish as to personify “pure evil” when scholars on criminal psychology are just beginning to understand the whys and whats of this tragedy?

 

It does not help to demonise people like Lanza because what “pastor” Laurie is doing is baptising what is in fact a potentially psychological and psychiatric issue as spiritual and religious. Contemporary research into psychiatry contributes much to our understanding of why people like Lanza or for that matter “serial killers” do the appalling things they do. Much has to do with abnormalities in their brains which inhibit the normal human impulses like empathy and commonsense moral decision-making. It does not reduce their responsibility as human persons to account for their actions since psychiatric defect or not, the brains belong to them! But an awareness of psychopathy allows authorities to make rational decisions on prevention, treatment, imprisonment, rehabilitation and justice.

 

One does not bypass the difficult matter of investigation and study by using erroneous labels like “demonic” and “evil”. No human being is “evil” in the sense that the mythological Devil is. Homo sapiens are good and bad because this moral tension is who we are as an evolved animal species. We are good because we are highly social animals with remarkable intellects and self-consciousness. We are bad because we still have vestiges of our reptilian and “lower” mammalian brains, resulting in primal instincts for mating rights and dominance, territorial power and the like.

 

Not surprisingly Southern Baptist nutcase Mick Huckabee blames the tragedy on the increasing secularism in American schools. I wonder what he will say if he comes to Singapore. Every school here is secular – we don’t pray, we study – otherwise we have to listen to taoist, buddhist, zen, animist, zoroastrian, muslim, hindu, ba’hai, new age and maybe even wiccan prayers and chants every morning! We do religion in our respective places of worship, not places of education.

 

Anyway, Laurie once again shows the evangelical tendency towards existential cop-outing by appealing to an afterlife. In his case, he uses the phrase “eternal perspective”.

 

At times like this we need perspective.
An eternal perspective.

We need to remember this life on earth is not all there is.
There is an afterlife and there earthy wrongs are righted.
There is a final judgment for this man and others like him that commit these heinous crimes and they will have to face God.

 

He reveals the wishful thinking of those who “imagines” an afterlife – they hope for all the wrongs done to them in this life to be righted and as such the concept of an afterlife consoles their sense of justice. But there is no good empirical and rational evidence to suggest that we exist beyond bodily cessation. Note that even religiously, the ancient Hebrews did not have a concept of the afterlife the way in which Christians understand it. It is the latter who superimpose their christian texts onto the tanakh.

 

The truth is that this is the one life we have. The injustice, pain and suffering some of us endure may be difficult and overwhelming. They may even be hopeless and without remission. But it is a brutal fact we homo sapiens have to accept and face with Sisyphus-ian courage. This is why there is moral grounding in atheism. Do not get distracted by the religious loonies who say without Santa Claus there can be no “objective” grounding for morality. Bullshit. Because this life is the only precious we have, because being homo sapiens may perhaps be the one precious opportunity we have to experience this beautiful and strange and impartial universe; we want to make this one act the best we can wish it to be.

 

For ourselves and for our fellow beings.

*******

van from hell

 

 

 

(source)

 

Evangelical (or fundamentalist) idiocy once again.

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old news worth remembering

 

 

Fellow agnostics, atheists, free-thinkers and liberal religionists should realise by now that the public nose-digging habit of some among us (I am guilty as heaven) of mocking and caricaturing the religious right-wingers as lowbrow, nutcases and crackpots is not just British football hooliganing.

 

Religious fundamentalists and evangelicals are really daft.

 

A study done in 2009 came out with these conclusions:

 

• the more intelligent a person, the less likely he or she is religious
• the more intelligent a population or society, the less likely it is religious
• the overwhelming majority of the intellectual elite in most countries do not hold to any religious belief compared to the general population
• there is a decline of religious belief as children and adolescents grow older

 

One can read the study here.

 

Another study done in 2011 by the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh also came out with similar conclusions. It suggests that intelligence and cognitive skills are negatively associated with fundamentalist religiosity. People with greater cognitive abilities tend towards thinking independently and away from anti-authoritarian structures and hence religion. One can read the study here.

 

In the 1990s, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health surveyed youths in grades 7 to 12. The adolescents who identified themselves as very liberal showed an average IQ of 106 while those who identified themselves as very conservative showed an average IQ of 95.

 

While intelligence may be prenatally and environmentally determined, the opportunity for education is not. It appears to be common sense that the most religiously fanatical countries in the world comprise mainly poorly educated inhabitants. Think of the swinish countries of the Middle East that idiotically presume the universe revolves around them and their view of reality. Think of the lowbrow drawl of the Bible Belt which reminds one of loony evangelical demagogues who teach Noah’s Ark in science classes, believe that dinosaur fossils are the devil’s ploy to distract the true believers and continue to reject empirical and rational evidence in favour of archaic ancient texts.

 

So on and so forth.

 

Anyone who gets offended by my already mild prose just proves my point. Unless you are really daft, I am not talking about you.

 

*******

PS: I still have nightmares about my former church, the Church of God (Evangelical) Singapore. The “pastoral team” really think they are stupid – maybe they really are – and gets offended so easily by honest feedback. I thought it is in their ethos not to fib? Oh okay…I forgot religious people are one of the most hypocritical of our species.

an awful arrogance

 

“Generally the state of mind of a believer in a ‘revelation’ is the awful arrogance of saying ‘I know, and those who do not agree with my belief are wrong’. In no other field is such arrogance so widespread, in no other field do people feel so utterly certain of their ‘knowledge’. It is to me quite disgusting that anybody should feel so superior, so selected and chosen against all the many who differ in their beliefs or unbeliefs. This should be bad enough, but so many believers do their best to propagate their faith, at the very least to their children but often also to others (and historically there are of course plenty of examples of doing this by force and ruthless brutality).

 

The fact that stares one in the face is that people of the greatest sincerity and of all levels of intelligence differ and have always differed in their religious beliefs. Since at most one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. One would have expected this obvious fact to lead to some humility, to some thought that however deep one’s faith, one may conceivably be mistaken.

 

Nothing is further from the believer, any believer, than this elementary humility. All in his power (which nowadays in a developed country tends to be confined to his children ) must have his faith rammed down their throats. In many cases children are indeed indoctrinated with the disgraceful thought that they belong to the one group with superior knowledge who alone have a private wire to the office of the Almighty, all others being less fortunate than they themselves.”

- Physicist Hermann Bondi

 

*******

lowbrow dung from “the pastor”

 

I have just read the pastoral column in the Church of God (Evangelical) Singapore bulletin dated November 11, 2012. The writer is very intelligent. He must have an IQ of Sponge Bob Squarepants. I smack my egged head, clutch my smiling Buddha tummy and do a Keanu Reeves to stop myself from performing laughing yoga. This infantile dung cannot be from the kindly septuagenarian pastor I know.

 

Lowbrow content aside, the prose style is so unlike him. For years, theological views notwithstanding, his columns are always a comfortable read. He may not be an Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse, but he is definitely not an engineer!

 

Perhaps it is some literary-challenged bloke (definitely not a lady) who acts as the pastor’s ghost writer. There are two things I have a very low tolerance of. Stupidity (or anti-intellectualism) and bad prose from otherwise very intelligent people. This column stinks of both.

 

I have a problem with the first sentence:

 

“Paul the apostle writes to clearly teach that we cannot understand and interpret the Bible…”

 

One should employ either “writes” or “teaches” exclusively. There is no need to lump the two together to form a semi-tautology like “writes to clearly teach”. Very clumsy writing.

 

The first sentence of the next paragraph is also problematic:

 

“The Bible is a normal, logical communication but the understanding (mystery) of it is abnormal.”

 

What on earth does it mean?? The syntax seems so elementary school-like. One can only conclude that the writer himself does not know what he is trying to say. This is often the case with fluffy ambiguous language.

 

Enough about the language. The theology and philosophy is also problematic.

 

“Paul the apostle writes to clearly teach that we cannot understand and interpret the bible through our human intellect. This is why we find that a person who is not saved, who does not have the Holy Spirit cannot fully understand the bible and interprets it from a human perspective.”

 

The writer uses 1 Corinthians 2:13-16 as the proof text:

 

“This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words (or Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual). The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgements about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgements, for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” NIV

 

While the writer understands the general thrust of the passage, which is that for the bible to function as sacred scripture in the community of believers, the interpreter(s) has to approach it in faith, in the light of the Christ event as perceived by the faith community; he appears very naive in his practical treatment of the passage. Like most evangelicals, the writer appears to have a Gnostic view of the human intellect, as though only the spirit is good and anything remotely homo sapiens is evil, bad.

 

And like most evangelicals, I safely assume he subscribes to either the dichotomy or tripartite view of human nature, the latter being more philosophically erroneous (it is no wonder that Pentecostals and charismatics hold this view) and implausible. I personally think that the Roman Catholic position is more tenable, in the light of contemporary scientific understanding of human nature. Catholic theologians like Karl Rahner, and even the current Pope, I think, believe that man is a psychosomatic unity, an embodied whole. He is not a soul (or spirit) who happens to live in a body. He is incomplete without a body. He is also not just the body. Or a brain. He is a whole being, with a mind, intellect, self-consciousness and a body. So in a sense, the soul is a “form” of the body. The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is Anglican if one does not already know, subscribes to this nuanced view as well.

 

The spiritual sense of scripture aside, there is no getting by the historical-critical approach to interpretation. The bible may be God’s Word and is sacred, but it IS also written by human authors and therefore bound by the cultural, societal and philosophical norms of their day. Much of the bible makes no full sense without understanding the philosophical, societal and cultural times of the biblical writers. Does one need to have “faith” to do historical-critical study? I don’t think so. The historical-critical enterprise is a very intellectual endeavour and one has to do the “secular” thing by trusting the human intellect to seek and understand knowledge and truth.

 

St. Augustine, an ancient theologian whom evangelicals themselves admire and acknowledge, made it clear that:

 

“If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning (logic, philosophy and the human sciences), this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth, but the meaning which he has wanted to give it.”

 

The parenthesized words are mine.

 

Many evangelicals and christians in Singapore disagree. When the human sciences disagree with the bible, they are more than happy to accept the bible and throw the science. This is idiotic. There is nothing more that can be said.

 

The writer then drops the bomb:

 

“Being in the flesh, even spiritual persons may fall into the fallacy of using his human intellect to understand the scriptures. That is why we have differences of interpretation by different persons, who are both believers.”

 

I don’t know about evangelicals, but from where I come from, only the mentally retarded will not find anything wrong with the sentence.

 

First, a fallacy refers to any form of error involving logic (deductive or inductive), reasoning, argumentation and concepts. One does not use the word fallacy to refer to an error of method, as in the above statement. One does not “fall” into a fallacy. Duh…

 

Second, Christianity is NEVER monolithic. So-called orthodoxy is also NEVER monolithic. Evangelicals have this stupid idea that somehow only their version of Christianity is the correct and orthodox one. The reason why there is a kaleidoscope of interpretations is NOT because believers apply their fleshly intellects to the bible!! Although the bible is not quantum physics, the bible is also not an instruction manual! One does not read the bible as literally as an instruction manual! It is a corpus of ancient hebrew, aramaic and greek texts written by different anonymous writers who live in cultures and societies far removed from the 21st century. These texts often employ mythic, poetic and literary genres which do not go well with literal readings. Very spiritual people can come up with differing interpretations! There is no such thing as every christian reading the bible with spiritual faith and coming up with similar interpretations. Interpretation is a human enterprise. And please, just because it is a human endeavour does not make it “fleshly” or “corrupt”. Really, this dung cannot be written by the pastor I know. Only an ill-schooled bumpkin will say something like this.

 

Sigh. I should not be mocking and ridiculing. But I can’t help it. Christian leaders and pastors should know better. I am just your average free-thinking, half-past-six, cultural “christian”. And if I have to school pastors in the very field they should know more than me about, namely theology and philosophy, it is the end of the world.

 

It is no wonder more and more people are becoming atheists and agnostics. It is no wonder more and more people are deconverting themselves.

*******

allergic to evangelical stupidity

 

 

I am surprised I did not blog for two weeks although I know that books can sedate my senses to everything else besides. I am allergic to appealing to hearsay or authority (especially evangelical ones) and am one of those irritating smart alecks who go straight to the sources (not always primary ones as ancient scholarship do require a knowledge of other languages of which I am an idiot). This makes me very intolerant of stupidity over the lectern or pulpit. Educated individuals should know better than to pontificate on issues they know zilch about.

 

There is ignorance galore in christian pulpits these days, especially among independent evangelical churches where nothing other than the bible is swallowed. Evangelicals have a strange ability, or should I say disability, to reject issues without being educated about them. Preachers can mock and ridicule scientific FACTS like evolutionary biology without ever reading any literature by evolutionary biologists! Christians can mock the blindness of Jews in “rejecting Jesus” without knowing something as rudimentary as the tanakh or the talmud. Worse, there are extreme protestants who love to demonize Roman Catholics while being idiotically ignorant about what Catholicism actually teaches about Christ and salvation. Sigh. For goodness’ sake – if you want to criticize a particular viewpoint, philosophy or religion – please read up! Read both sides of the argument. Get yourself acquainted with other religions and their foundation documents. Read literature by their scholars.

 

Otherwise, don’t even think of making a value judgement on these issues.

 

It is a waste of time conversing with evangelical christians. That is why I am currently ignoring people from my former church. Unless they value the fields of human knowledge like evolutionary biology, neuroscience, modern cosmology, history, archaeology, sociology, anthropology, etc – there is nothing I have in common with them. It is frustrating when these idiots choose to blindly accept explicit fables like a six-day creation, Adam and Eve as historical persons, the global flood, the exodus, the fall of Jericho, etc despite the lack of historical, archaeological, geological and scientific evidence. It is frustrating when all they can engage in is subjective experiences and anecdotes. No discerning individual will justify a claim based on hearsay or personal experience. Imagine believing that some strange fruit juice can cure cancer because a friend testified to its miraculous powers.

 

Many theologians and biblical scholars have rejected such nonsense but it seems that the findings of biblical academia are not disseminated to the man in the pew. There is this huge disparity between what the theologians and biblical scholars teach and accept and what the local pastor and christian know. Many do not know that much of the tanakh as well as the new testament are anonymously composed. Many are ignorant of the very man-made nature of the christian doctrines they think they know about. I am horrified that many think they can understand the bible and glean ethical theories by reading it at face value. I am so frustrated. There are even jokers who think the original bible was composed in Elizabethan English! How daft can one get???

 

The bible employs symbolic and mythic language, from the perspective of the ancient Hebrews and early Christians, to explain what these communities perceived as the transcendent and the sacred. It is very naive to read it and interpret biblical statements as factual assertions. It is moronic to interpret highly symbolic literature such as the Apocalypse of St John as a crystal ball into the future as many dispensationalists and end-time loonies do. It is silly to just downplay stem-cell research, abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage based on very ill-schooled readings of the bible. I am actually quite surprised how liberal Catholic theologians can be on such issues and how even the very conservative ones do not rely so much on the biblical texts when formulating ethical views.

 

Enough complaining. I am going back to my books.

 

*******

 

choose to ignore

 

 

(source)

 

idiots across the causeway

 

“Have a muscular body and like to show their body by wearing V-neck and sleeveless clothes; Prefer tight and light-coloured clothes; Attracted to men; and Like to bring big handbags, similar to those used by women, when hanging out.”

- “Symptoms” of being gay

 

“Attracted to women; Besides their female companions, they will distance themselves from other women; Like to hang out, have meals and sleep in the company of women; and Have no affection for men.”

- “Symptoms” of being lesbian

(source)

 

The above does not belong to a crackpot outfit but the Putrajaya Consultative Council of Parents and Teachers Associations. Malaysia’s education ministry endorses it.

 

The Muslim government of Malaysia wants its parents to identify these “symptoms” and “correct” them in their children. I am surprised educators in Malaysia can be so stupid to assume that gays have buff bodies and like wearing V-neck and sleeveless apparel. Gays come in all shapes, sizes and fashion sense. They are ordinary folk like you and me. There are straight blokes who kid themselves into believing that most women get turned on by ghastly muscles. There are many straight women who like to hang out with their woman friends. How idiotic can the educators in Malaysia get?

 

*******

 

 

are these people for real???

(source)

*******

only evangelicals…

…can come up with mentally retarded slogans like this:

 

(source)

 

purpose-driven nutbag

 

This is what evangelical pastor Rick Warren, who wrote the plebeian Purpose Driven Life has to say about the recent Colorado shooting:

 

(source)

 

It toilet-flushes precious minutes every time one has to unpack misconceptions about evolutionary biology such as the above. So this time, let’s leave it as that. The philistine tweet simply demonstrates how compassionate and loving evangelical christians can be.

 

In contrast, this is what an atheist has to say:

 

“A tragedy like this reminds us of how fragile and precious this one life of ours really is. What we do every day is significant; we must make use of every opportunity we have to extend love, sympathy, and support to others, and we should never fail to live up to our highest ethical ideals. We extend our deepest condolences to those who have lost loved ones, and our sincere wishes for full recoveries for those who were injured.”

(source)

 

*******

circular twaddle

 

You claim to be rational yet are plainly irrational.
If HPV causes cervical cancer and the only way a person can become infected with HPV is through having sex – note that so-called “protected safe sex” using condom etc does not work – then you must advocate abstinence and monogamy as advocated by us religious through the institution of Marriage.

- Roger Eldridge’s comment on one more reason why religion is evil

 

My dear sir.

 

I refuse to concur with that flimsy prose of circular twaddle and will hold you to that irresponsible assertion.

 

But let me first say that the concern here is not contraception, but vaccination. If I go by your bovine piece of nonsense, then the only absolute way of not getting infected with anything at all is to adopt a Salingerian approach and isolate yourself from society and the world. Just ask how the exclusive brethren or the Amish do it.

 

Even if one is god-sure that one’s daughters will not enjoy the occasional backseat bang, it is wise and prudent to get them vaccinated anyway.

 

Now, one is irrational if one simply receive orders from outdated ancient piffle which religious zealots assume to be divinely authoritative. For your information, as a father of three I too wish my children to abstain from any form of premarital buggery – not because of any twisted view of ancient morality – but simply because I prefer them to focus on their schooling. Besides, teenagers may not be mentally stable enough to handle sexual and emotional entanglements. But that does not mean I pontificate to them abstinence at the expense of safe sex practices! A knowledge of safe sex will do loads of good in the event they happen to bonk around.

 

No one is perfect. I am sure you know that, my christian brother.

 

There is also evidence that nations which try to force abstinence-no condom policies on their societies end up having more unwanted pregnancies and sexually related problems. Someone as decent and intelligent as yourself should know.

 

Life is never ideal. To preach abstinence and chastity to a very sexual mammalian species and not allowing them to have a free will on the matter is totalitarian and evil. Women have a right to their own bodies and no celestial Mao Tse Tung should dictate his corrupt manifesto on them. What is more appalling is when fanatical adults police their monstrous views on children who have no real intellectual and emotional autonomy to make their own decisions.

 

I am also for monogamy, by the way. I personally opine that lifelong monogamy and sexual fidelity is beneficial to the human species in the long run as it contributes to healthy families, stable societies and thus good civilisations. I will be sexually faithful to my wife because not doing so will harm her emotionally and psychologically. It will also be unhealthy to our sex lives.

 

But I cannot and will not bully others into accepting or practising my opinion because heterosexual marital fidelity is a cultural product of the Judeo-Christian myth and not something that is absolute for all times and places. I believe in monogamous sexuality because of sociological and anthropological reasons and nothing to do with divine law. Otherwise I will have to butcher anyone who performs coitus interruptus (and oral and anal sex), practises wicca and wears synthetic apparel, among other ridiculous rules, to be consistent.

 

I am cool if consenting adults engage in safe sex before or outside marriage, as long as no one is harmed in the process.

 

Humans should be autonomous in making their own decisions in life. Freedom of conscience.

 

I rest my case.

 

*******

one more reason why religion is evil

 

The human papillomavirus (HPV) is the main cause of almost all cervical cancer cases. This makes the HPV vaccination programme in England a boon for human progress. It is currently offered to English girls aged 12 to 13.

 

The moral conscience (innate in all of us, caused by evolution via natural selection) in any decent and intelligent human being compels us to do the right thing by ensuring that the young girls among us participate in the programme.

 

It is no wonder that the majority of English schools applaud the programme as attributive to the fight against sexually transmitted disease.

 

Except two dozen odd christian FAITH schools which opted out. Many of these are probably private evangelical and fundamentalist institutions which are not part of the minimally religious Church of England schools.

 

Schools deny girls cervical cancer jabs on religious grounds

 

Some engaged in deceptive language by claiming that the programme is “not in keeping with the school ethos”. It is more honest to just say “christian principles”, whatever their twisted understanding of christianity is. Others are more blatantly self-righteous, trumpeting that their “pupils follow strict christian principles, marry within their own community and do not practise sex outside marriage”.

 

One local doctor was puzzled as to “how immunisation against cancer can be rejected.”

 

He should go to church more often, especially the evangelical garden variety where kabuki-faced crackpots preach out-dated piffle from an ancient text which critical scholarship has long incinerated to be a hodge podge collection of premodern near-eastern myths and fables.

 

There is a pinch of smug religious arrogance for such schools to reject vaccination because they do not believe a need for it. I remember how during my army stint when I refused the free military-issued condoms when there was training overseas just to show a “christian testimony”. Bah – more like to show off my avowed “chastity”. There is always this aspergic-autistic view of reality among the so-called “bible-believing” christians that such displays of moral condescension testify to the “glory of god”.

 

Anyhow, the religious argument these schools use are retarded at worst and flimsy at best. They are assuming every girl in their kooky community is an avowed virgin. They are assuming every girl in their loony subculture do not get horny once in a while. They are assuming too much for their teenagers who belong to a demographic adept at keeping up appearances in front of paranoid adults. I know – I was a teenager once.

 

It takes religion to make otherwise good and intelligent people to do evil things and make retarded decisions.

 

*******

“festival of praise” cancelled

 

A whisper of good news indeed. The annual Festival of Praise (FOP), a supposedly nondenominational and ecumenical but conspicuously charismatic-evangelical sing-song event, will not be running for its 26th edition this year.

 

Festival of Praise concert scrapped over CHC troubles

 

The nutbags and demagogues who shake their legs on the committee decided to cancel this year’s edition (a few days before Singapore’s independence day) due to the imminent (with hope…) incarceration of its “executive director”, Mr Kong Hee, who is currently begging his imaginary yahwist fairy godfather to help him out of a situation which might possibly tsunami away all secret ambitions of world dominance.

 

The tongue-rollers must be goddamned (pun definitely intended) disappointed that they will not be able to bunny-hop themselves into a trance with campy “praise and worship” songs which attempt to imitate the best of contemporary pop-rock music albeit very poorly.

 

Speak of “not being like the world”.

 

It is excruciating that not only is the mantra session garbaged with mediocre music and lowbrow lyrics, the pep talks (delivered usually by guest fundamentalist preachers from overseas) are sodium thiopental for the mind. I know – I have been there.

 

The white noise can be somewhat stirring – as expected by unschooled despots – but landmined with logical fallacies, poor arguments, half-truths, sappy anecdotes and worst of all, orwellian doublespeak.

 

It is good riddance, for this year at least, that this stalinesque monstrosity is cancelled.

 

Hallelujah.

 

*******

love singapore drivel

 

“God’s dream shapes history.

 

It enters Earth through the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It’s a force for good and not for evil…”

 

- 4 July’s entry, “politics of dreams” (Love Singapore 40-Day Prayer 2012)

 

The above is excerpted from this year’s 40-Day prayer devotional, an intercessory prayer initiative by the Love Singapore network of evangelical churches. This christian network kids itself into megalomaniacal wishful thinking – that secular Singapore will some day be christianised. Legend has it that the chief christian shaman of South Korea, a Pastor Cho Yonggi of the notoriously dubbed largest church in the world, has once claimed that god told him (what charismaniacs call “prophecy”) Singapore is akin to the city of Antioch of biblical times and that countless numbers would bleat the name of Jesus in this country.

 

Dishonest christian demagogues love to fortune-tell what the sheep likes to hear – and they are often grandiose prognostications about personal calls to preaching and pastoral ministries, corporate visions of national christianisations, and even the proselytisations of political leaders.

 

And thus while the overt christianisation of Singapore is an orgasmic thought for evangelical christians here, it is but sandcastle-making in the nanyang air. There is this illusion of grandeur for many years about a spiritual “revival” which will some day occur in Singapore, airbagged by a facade of christian “success” in the likes of blood-diamond mines like City Harvest Church, New Creation Church, Lighthouse Evangelism, Faith Community Baptist Church, Trinity Christian Centre and Victory Family Centre.

 

But the statistics concerning the religious demographics gargle a more banal story. Although the number of buddhists has tumbled a huge 9.2% from 42.5% in 2000 to 33.3% in 2010, it is still the majority religion in this country. The statistics for christianity is a bit serpentine, as it umbrellas together Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Protestantism and perhaps even neochristian sects like the mormons ( I am not sure on this).

 

This means that while the number of christian adherents is a far second from buddhism with 18.3% in 2010, the actual number of evangelical christians (all protestants in Singapore) is a lot smaller. This makes the number of people with no religion as the second largest group of Singaporeans, at 17.0% in 2010 (the numbers may have increased by 2012). The third largest group would be the muslims at 14.7%.

 

If yours truly is allowed to do some prophesying , I will wager on the high probability of an “atheist” revival in Singapore, with many of its adherents dropping out of Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism. One has to realise that there are also a significant number of people who call themselves christians, buddhists, taoists or even muslims only out of cultural and ethnic loyalties. Many of them do not seriously believe any of the superstitious and premodern woo woo claims of these religions. Does that make them really christians? Or Taoists? Or muslims? Remember, some of these communities have serious esteem issues with people who want to leave the religion.

 

Anyhow…back to the excerpt at the start of the post. It was the reason for my scribbling anyway. Jeez, boy am I a windbag.

 

The scribbler for the 40-day drivel does not realise how stupid that first few sentences of the 4th of July entry makes him (or her). While Yahweh supposedly created the observable universe 14-odd billion years ago, he dilly-dallied for about 10 billion of those donkey years before fashioning this one singular planet in this teeny-weeny solar system. He procrastinated again for about 1 billion or so year before deciding to birth the first biological “life” in the solar system – some self-replicating molecule.

 

This omniscient warrior-god doesn’t seem to know what he is doing – allowing homo sapiens to arise only about 100 to 200 thousand years ago. What is he doing all those millions of years? Playing with the bacteria? Dancing with the flora? Fucking the dinosaurs? He is very benevolent and loving indeed, to allow his magnum opus – human beings – to grovel in the mud of a struggling and despairing existence for about 96 to 196 thousand years before he finally comes to his senses and “dream his Dream”. One wonders why he calls himself Yahweh, a very tribalistic hebrew name, if he wasn’t a tribal deity. Christians do not realise that they are relying more on greek philosophy than Jewish categories when they pontificate about Yahweh being metaphysically simple, all-powerful, all-knowing and singularly one and indivisible.

 

It becomes even more absurd why this god chose to “reveal” himself in mythical stories that cannot be verified by the best of our contemporary historical and archaeological research. One has to assume that sketchy figures like Abraham and Isaac are real historical people if one is to read the biblical narratives in any meaningful way. One has to assume also, that Adam and Eve are real (are they neanderthals then? Or homo erectus?) – otherwise the whole original sin thingy is rubbished.

 

Yet…no intelligent person today can honestly accept that the creation and national myths of the tanakh are historically accountable. And without the historicity of the hebrew texts, what more can we say about the christian new testament, a haphazard collection of scribblings which were obviously based on the hebrew tanakh to get their ideas?

 

*******

 

the church bullies with lies

 

I will not give up the fight for truth.

 

Church of God (Evangelical) Singapore has no right to criminalise (in every sense of the word) my inalienable right to free speech, especially if it concerns empirical and rational truth. Church of God (Evangelical) Singapore has no authority to cut off my tongue and cannibalise my intellect just because some insecure leaders fear “confusion” and “division”. Church of God (Evangelical) Singapore cannot bully me into prostrating to a soap opera Jesus oozing with sentimental love when the leaders themselves behave more like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

 

It was this evening. I smiled myself into the church’s cry room, a la interrogation chamber, at about 1930 hours, along with the benign director whose homely car I shared on the way there. Two of the director’s cronies were already seated. They were very unsmiling.

 

I have already prepared a mental list of what I would be expounding in justification of my case. The list included elements of biblical scholarship like the mythic language of the bible, how it parallels much of ancient near eastern literature and how many of its texts contradict current archaeological and historical research. While I did not expect the “discussion” to take the theological route considering the narrow-mindedness of the cronies, to mention that I had a nervous breakdown would be a superlative understatement when I did not have the lee way to even mention my pet peeve.

 

That is, the evangelical tendency to spurn critical thinking, stifle intellectual freedom and discourage individual autonomy of thought.

 

In fact, none of the factual statements I made in the email seemed relevant to the church. Crony A started the assault by throwing biblical punches – babbling assinine texts about not engaging in useless disputes (hinting that my email was disputatious) and “respecting” church authorities.

 

The babbling is fine by me – he is just quoting his favourite statements from fairy tales – which does nothing to me at all. Just wasted minutes.

 

He claimed he was done – using the bible to rebuke me – but all I saw was visions of myself yawning.

 

Anyhow, he passed the cat o’nine tails to Crony B. This time it was a more decent conversation, an attempt to evaluate how “offensive” and probably insolent my email was. I explained it was written tongue-in-cheek, with probably more than generous helpings of sarcasm and irony. Although the particular crony was a journalist in his previous life, he appears clueless about the literary uses of hyperbole and metaphor. I also mentioned how commonplace it is for the british press to take naughty potshots at their political darlings without receiving insecure accusations about their being “rude” or “offensive”.

 

Read the Guardian. Read the Telegraph. They are not thrashy red tops, mind you, but rather middlebrow broadsheets. Yet even their “boring” columns on business and finance can be rather nail-biting, if one appreciates tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, that is. Of course there is the frequent dull and hackneyed prose (journalists can be very guilty of cliche) – but literary merit aside, the british are not as petty as Singaporeans who can go nutty over some ink and paper.

 

Okay, now comes the evidence. The church claims my piece was “offensive” and can cause “divisions” among the congregation. Let’s put the claim to the test. I sent the email to a garguantan number of 18 recipients. Only ONE recipient responded to me that SHE (yes, a lady) was offended. I can also accurately suggest that 2 or 3 more probably were too. That makes a total of 4.

 

The remaining 14 were not offended by my email at all – many showed genuine concern for me and my frustrations – and offered encouragement.

 

Statistically, to make a case for a disputatious and scandalous email when it offends only 28 per cent of the readers is fraudulent. How can one make a claim that a piece of writing is offensive when more than 70 per cent of the readers couldn’t care less???

 

Anyhow, the horror started when Crony A interrupted our conversation. The hebrew genocidal despot of a god began to emerge as that same leader contorts his normally benign and handsome countenance into that of a Stalinesque kabuki mask.

 

He raised his voice two octaves higher and croaked a mighty growl at an already stunned me. He is obviously frustrated at his inability to engage in a decent intellectual discussion and hence had to resort to cheap shots by shouting monstrously at me.

 

I am a very fragile soul. For someone who is on medication for anxiety, panic attacks and hypomania, to get shouted at is to receive an electric chair shock to the neurobiological circuitry.

 

I flew into a manic rage.

 

This is CHURCH. A non-profit organisation akin to a charity. I am no one’s subordinate. As such, Crony A has no FUCKING RIGHT to scream at me like a pea-brained regimental sergeant major.

 

I screamed my lungs back. Emotionally overloaded, I mixed my screams with intermittent sobs and maniacal howls. Really, I almost wanted to clobber Crony A but bulldozered the wall with my fists instead.

 

I don’t know if my right hand is broken. They are hurting real bad.

 

The war has just begun.

*******

the truth hurts

 

Upon reflection, I wonder if my utter lack of respect for Francis Khoo during the church camp is due to my prefrontal cortex screwing up. Anyhow, I am not deflecting responsibility since my personhood is a function and epiphenomenon of my brain. In other words, I am my brain. My “soul”, is my brain.

 

I also emailed the previous post, without editing, to a significant number of the church sheep who attended the camp as well as former sheep who have since werewolved themselves.

 

Apart from the werewolves, none of the sheep responded to the email. I am not surprised as they are bleating their offence last morning in church. Many were offended that I hinted at their unthinking ways. Why would one be offended unless one is guilty of being unthinking and uncritical? And if that is the case, it proves my point. Still, I scratch my head as to why none of them had the testicles to confront my insolence in person.

 

I do not apologise for my verbal belligerence and am willing to gnash the sheep into mutton chops if the situation comes to that. But I suppose being the dumb sheep whom they are, they do not want to face up to the truth.

 

The truth that evangelical christianity cannot pass the test of philosophical, scientific and historical inquiry.

 

*******

 

this is hell

 

Hell is real. I just returned home from it. No, it is not the neurological delusions of a NDE – Near Death Experience – or the visions of a schizophrenic.

 

It is just Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) Singapore Church Camp 2012, Francis Khoo style.

 

All of my pre-camp fears monstered to life in the otherwise edenic golfing resort of Pulai Springs, Johor; via the wild-eyed antics of the self-styled “reverend” Khoo whose countenance spookily resembles the very dead and gone Kim Jong Il, albeit the bespectacled urbanite edition. Worse, the horsepowered organ in my chest u-turned and skidded to a crushing stop, Ferrari vs. Taxi style, when I thought I saw the black-and-white, fundamentalist dogmatism of David Koresh and Jim Jones in Khoo’s maniacal eyes.

 

He appears as an angel of light.

 

No cult member admits he is a member of a cult. No sheep-brained devotee admits to brainwashing. Yet to any intelligent and sane bystander, the signs are all too evident. One could just see the awe and admiration in the eyes of my fellow campers as they lick the last drop of sanctimonious saliva that squirts out of his lips. They may argue to the contrary, but any fire-shouting is easily extinguished by the fallacious notion of “respecting the preacher” and “not judging god’s anointed”. Sigh – this is so like the religious fundamentalism of the Middle East which controls its people with barbarous laws as the blasphemy law. Apparently while one can criticise another’s choice of food, sport or music genre; one cannot criticise religion at all, no matter how irrational, how lowbrow, how dim-witted and how delusional.

 

I will criticise and I will fight against any religious, especially charismatic christian, crackpot who, because of his ill-perceived “authority” as a preacher, becomes a god to his cheerleading sheep. Let this capricious, vindictive, genocidal, dictatorial and Hitleresque fairy godfather strike me down, if the other christians think He (as though god has a gender) should, and all this unconditional love of god becomes a load of chicken droppings. Okay, elephant droppings.

 

I almost had an epileptic seizure on the first Tuesday night session with Khoo. His triumphalist, dominionist theology is rife with pollyannaish underpinnings which is nothing but Anthony Robbins’ positive thinking quackery baptised in christian terminology. Khoo pays lip service to suffering, but really, only lip service. While I respect the simple teachings of the classical christian ethos, Khoo is SIMPLISTIC in his presentation of christian victory and power. There is no empathy with genuine and real suffering that even many christians go through. Is it so simple as just to “appropriate” or “claim” the promises of God and thus live a “victorious” christian life? Even his admissions of his problems sound so trivial – oh I see – as a backslidden christian he had gone bankrupt and god somehow delivered him. Why must it always be mammon with these guys?

 

His unqualified claim that there are 7000-some “promises” in the bible is ludicrious. Not that I have not heard it before (all of his theology I have read and known as a charismaniac in my teens). Any serious and careful scholar of biblical hermeneutics will tell you that while there are indeed some “promises” in the real sense of the word in the bible, many are often time-specific pronouncements to a specific people in a specific time and place. Those “promises” have no relevance to the church. Okay, evangelical christians can be allergic to critical thinking and genuine scholarship. It is no wonder this Khoo smells of pseudo-scholarship all over – his lack of formal theological schooling is evident to anyone who has at least gone through the whole gamut of academic disciplines such as biblical and textual criticism, historical-archaeological research, the haphazard compiling process of the protestant canon (the earliest christians, such as the coptic christians, have biblical canons much larger than even the catholic corpus) as well as many of the other multi-faceted views on the bible.

 

Anyone who has actually got his intellect and thus christian faith ruffled and tested in the very godless and existentially miserable world of theological education will never preach the way Khoo does – so sure of “what the bible says”. For more than 200 years, biblical scholars are not even sure of the accuracy of the biblical manuscripts, with all of their discrepancies, forgeries and errors, let alone the real authors of the corpus; and here is one buffoon who thinks he is more competent that the scholars who expend their entire lives studying the biblical texts. I am reminded of the unschooled Pastor Rony Tan of Lighthouse Evangelism who used to preach that heaven is a real and specific place in outer space. While I believe Khoo is a lot smarter than that, his theological and philosophical ignorance makes him vulnerable to similar rubbish.

 

Think of the Rev. Timothy Khoo of Prison Fellowship. Or even the charismatic moderate Tony Tan of Revival Centre Church. Or even dear Uncle Neville, AOG Pastor Jack Theva or Pastor Song (now in Abundant Grace Presbyterian). They do not sound or feel like Khoo. It is not just homiletics (preaching method) – there is this gungho certainty of an immature and naive bumpkin which Khoo exudes.

 

And while trying to play to the highbrow minority in the congregation by using a “medical evidence” to buttress the virgin birth, he is one-sided at best. While it is true that the blood within the placenta does not mingle with the blood of the mother’s, it is irrelevant if one is trying to defend the supposed divinity of Jesus. What makes the whole person includes contribution of the DNA of both father and mother – and this includes the very human nature of Mary herself. I am surprised how an apparently intelligent bloke as Khoo can miss out the historical FACT that the ancient near eastern peoples, such as the hebrews, have a very primitive view of human conception. Ancient peoples believe that only the father, through his sperm, has ALL the biological data to procreate a child. The mother contributes nothing – she is only the carrier, the receptacle (there is no knowledge of the human ovum at that time). Hence it would be reasonable and even logical to “create” a virgin birth story – since Mary is only a carrier, the divine Jesus can be birthed without the stain of human sin.

 

Perhaps he is ignorant. Otherwise he is evidence of the fallacy of confirmation bias – human beings tend to accept data which inform their preconceived beliefs and reject, always idiotically, data that seems to contradict. This is especially so of evangelical christians, whose field of so-called apologetics are rife with out-of-date scholarship and fraudulent claims.

 

I became epileptic and maniacally so because of how gullible the congregation is – saying “amens” to almost every hallelujah nonsense he spews. While christians love to tout the “believing is seeing” fallacy, it does not take an astrophysicist to know that it is a no-brainer that a highly involved individual would “see” the truths of his beliefs, no matter how irrational the beliefs are. Homo sapiens are pattern-seeking animals. And the “truths” of the subjective seeker is always false – it takes an objective (or at least more objective than the devotee) bystander to really see what is going on. So just because a christian “sees” and “experiences” more spooky stuff than me does not make his metaphysics true. Besides, there is no way to empirically verify the spooky nonsense some of these christians talk about.

 

Khoo’s assumption of first-century Judaism and Pharisaicism is also problematic. While he appears to be knowledgeable by shooting off Jewish custom after Jewish custom and Jewish allusion after Jewish allusion, he is only appearing credible to the ignorant listener. While I do not claim to be an expert in the history of first century Palestine, I have read many scholars who do – and their conclusions on the matter is that Jewish practice is NEVER monolithic, then and now. His presentation of Jewish lore and custom is very one sided - what the ideal orthodox Judaism should be. I suspect when he glibly used the words Talmud and Mishnah, he doesn’t really know what he is talking about – regurgitating what he reads from second level secondary sources. Does he consult bona fide scholars in the rabbinic traditions and their works? I doubt so.

 

Even Pharisaicism is not what the Gospels portray it to be – there is much grace, love and emotional warmth in the teachings and practice of first-century pharisaicism than many realise. The legalistic, cold-hearted big heads as the New Testament portrays the Pharisees is nothing but an exaggeration and a caricature. While the gospels are essentially biographical, they are NOT biographies in the modern sense of the word – they exaggerate, conflate and fabricate stories to push their theological agenda. If I have to be brutally blatant, they are more like propaganda, with slivers of historicity and fact.

 

Although he tried to push his charismatic agenda during the second or third sessions, via a preamble on the “Baptism of the Spirit” (I once taught a course on this charismatic woo woo in my previous church at youth level), I wish it was my aggressive resistance to his conniving that led to him not going down the path of gibberish goobledygook. Really – while he mentions that the filling of the spirit does not always evidenced in tongues, he revealed his intentions when the first thing he wanted to do was to pray for people to speak in tongues.

 

By then, I was already mentally and emotionally exhausted to the point of insanity. The chemical pathways in my brain are exploding and my manic complex is on overload. If I am impotent to silence this crackpot, the only way out is to banish myself out of Pulai Springs. Unfortunately for the good people of Church of God, I had to endure the final night session.

 

In EVERY “prophetic” and “healing” session which I gone to as a tongue-speaker in the past, the ministers vomit the same old puke about “new seasons”, “new life”, “new beginnings”, “changes”, “crossroads”, etc. While Khoo tries to rot about prophetic words not akin to fortune-telling, it works the same way! He is claiming that God is speaking to people through him. What is a “word of wisdom” but a word birthed in the spirit about the future? According to charismatic terminology, that is.

 

But nothing these ”men of god” say are specific to the point of being verifiable! Experts call it the barnum effect – the way words are used so generally that it applies to everybody. This is also how the horoscope appears to be accurate to some people.

 

After sharing an obviously misdiagnosed (you can only suppose the supernatural when all of the natural is ruled out) case of calcified arteries and how god healed him without ever undergoing the knife, it is reasonable to suggest that the congregation is now somewhat primed psychologically to receive suggestion - a hypnotic method – that they too can be healed of any heart condition.

 

So a few men came forward. Including my dear pastors. And then Khoo said something which sounds so campy as it is stupid – he appears to have an impression from the spirit that pastor Jack, other than a heart condition, has high blood pressure as well. COME ON – who are you trying to fool? The probability of an overweight Indian man having high blood pressure is very high to the point of being predictable. It is more honest of Khoo to simply ask Jack if he has HBP then acting as though he just received a cosmic impression. To prophesy that Uncle Neville has a “new ministry” of spiritual fatherhood, yadda yadda, is also dishonest – any discerning person can tell how congenial, warm and grandfatherly Uncle Neville is, and how common sense can tell he is either retired or contemplating a baton-pass of leadership.

 

Being a rather intelligent person himself, Khoo has a keen awareness to details about his environment. There is nothing supernatural or divine about his pronouncements and he should never pretend to be. Pastor Song Cheng Hock was one such pastor who could conjure the same effects but refuse to do so on christian principle. He once cheekily “prophesied” very accurately over a taxi driver who later thought he was some pious guru of some sort. Song later admitted to the driver his methods of induction – a Sherlockian ability to seize up the environment and make relevant deductions.

 

Really, most of the time it is simply our unconscious human ability to seize up the situation and make the relevant deductions of a person’s personality, temperament, social status, current moods, etc. But being the boiling zealot that christians sometimes are, we tend to unconsciously mask these deductions as prayer and divine foretelling.

 

Oh how I missed Pastor Song and his intellectual honesty. How I missed his realistic view of life and his mature expositions on human suffering and the angst of the existential condition. How I missed him for his honest answers to my philosophical and sceptical probings and his acceptance of ambiguity and the notion of failure and suffering in the christian (or nonchristian) life.

 

If there ever was a man of God, it is Pastor Song. It is Pastor Neville. Men who try to live a courageous life following the enigmatic man from Nazareth, with all of their doubts, failings, struggles, warts and all. They do not pretend to be supermen, as the quack Francis Khoo does, but real and fully human men.

 

As Jesus was.

 

Alas, I feel alone in a community of zombies, people who do not enrich their lives intellectually as well as emotionally. Besides, emotions are part of the brain, a neurobiological function – and it becomes non-sense to talk about emotions as though they are apart from the brain, specifically, the human heart. Conversations with christians are always dull-witted, and my existential angst are often seared by even more simplistic answers. Where are the pastor Songs, the Steven Gohs, and the Jael Tangs? Where are the John Solomons and the Weng Khiongs? It pisses me off even more when the church labels people like us as the “weaker” christians, the lukewarm and weaker-in-faith ones. I know. The so-called discipleship team of our church are as impotent as they are cookie-cutter christians with nothing to offer.

 

I beg to differ. What is more robust a faith when it has been burnt, crushed and sifted by the behemoth of empiricism, rationalism, historicism, existentialism and all the academic disciplines the so-called godless world offers? What is more mature a faith than a faith who clings on despite the ravages of nihilism and the dark night of the soul? What is more glorious than an impoverished individual who still clings to that last shred of belief while being stripped of everything he has?

 

It is one big joke.

 

*******

 

church camp woes

 

From tomorrow to Friday, it is church camp. At a place called Pulau Springs Resort, in neighbouring Johor. I am woodpeckering my nerdy highbrow now at how reptilian I was in even deciding to sign up for this “retreat”. While the venue promises calm away from the Singaporean urban gulag, the guest preacher at this retreat is Francis Khoo.

 

And that means four days and three nights of hot air, white noise, unschooled bible-thumping and unceasing tongue-speaking hysterics. Khoo may be a lawyer by professional training, but a decent Humean rationality seems to elude this hallelujahing buffalo. He is a narcissistic megalomaniac who mud-bathes in delusions of his own grandeur – he thinks he is god’s gift to the church. I am not engaging in hyperbole – anyone who assumes a daily hotline to a sugar grand-daddy in the sky by pontificating “prophetic” messages for people is a self-deluded megalomaniac. He/she is unlike many in the IMH wards who claim to have real relationships with “people” whom only they themselves can see, hear and feel.

 

But in Khoo’s case, the invisible person is the christian god, and that somehow transforms the clearly psychotic nature of the delusions into authentic holy spirit experience. How irrational can the evangelical christian community get?

 

Anyhow, I am sticking to my plan of enjoying myself in the resort as much as possible. Snigger…the children will be my excuse of busy-ness and my allergy to shouting buffoons will be my bank stamp out of every session with Khoo. Otherwise, this clown has to be prepared to endure my sarcasm and insolence. I do not respect actors who pretend to be clergy – why does a Singaporean who has a “ministry” in Singapore go all the way to fanatical Pakistan to get ordained??

 

Has he no credibility among his own people?

 

Although I bemoan the absence of a fellow skeptic friend who managed to worm himself out of having to sign up for a camp he has no stomach for, my salvation arrived yesterday in the person of a lady friend who is attending the camp out of social obligation. She is Jezebel (not her real name) and a common friend with my darling and I, and for the past ten years or so has been living overseas. She did a Bachelor’s in Church Music (I think) and a Master of Arts in Intercultural Studies in the School of Theology at Anderson University, a private liberal arts institution affiliated with our church.

 

She is currently working as the children’s minister in a Church of God congregation in Auckland, New Zealand. Of all places.

 

We had a lovely two hour-plus conversation last afternoon while my darling was rehearsing some silly worship songs to be sung at the church camp sessions.

 

And what a revelation. I am surprised that an institution as evangelical as the Church of God (Indiana) denomination has a seminary which teaches a curriculum as liberal as Harvard Divinity School or Union Theological Seminary in New York City. It is a good thing as real biblical scholarship IS German-inspired liberal modern biblical scholarship. Evangelical seminaries are a shame to academia and scholarship.

 

Jezebel apparently discarded her evangelical rags for a more synthetic and eclectic “christianity” when engaging in biblical studies during her degree programmes. And that – I am not surprised. Many liberal christians, sceptics, agnostics and freethinkers become that way because we think critically about the bible. Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalists and evangelicals do not know much about their bible – they are cluelessly idiotic about textual or biblical criticism, canonical formation, christian history, and a buffet of other complimentary disciplines. And the people who do study the biblical texts often become agnostic or sceptical about the divine origins of the very obviously man-made bible.

 

I also shared about my own similar existentialist struggles which birthed out of my dabbling in amateur philosophy, neuroscience, darwinian evolution, as well as my studies in the hebrew bible and the christian new testament. It is a struggle because I often have to wrestle with the vestiges of my fundamentalist childhood indoctrination. Fortunately for me, unlike her, I did not embark on a religious vocation before opening my eyes to the falsehood of religion.

 

Okay, to be fair to her, she did not go so far as rejecting the god hypothesis all together. How can she, anyway, since she is a children’s minister? She has to keep up with the show. But it does not take a physicist to know that the god she professes to know is definitely NOT the Jeremy Lin-supporting, carpark lot-answering, headache-and-cough-healing god of the fundamentalist bible.

 

Life is so different now. It is liberating as well as suffocating, light-headed as well as heavy-hearted. Sometimes, she wonders if she is faking and acting, lying and conniving all at the same time. I understand. People like us will always be on the fringes in a community which spurns critical thinking and the intellect. It is no wonder she made the decision never to come back to Singapore. How can she return to a subculture that is so insanely idiotic and exclusivisitic in outlook?

 

Anyhow, I am keeping my fingers crossed for what may come in Palau Springs.

 

*******

dining with dunces

 

I vacuumed the glass of iced coffee as darling chirped about her singing that morning in church to a homemaker-cum-former model-cum former TV actress-cum former recording artiste friend. We were lunching at Changi Chity Point last afternoon and darling wanted some “professional” critique. Besides, this former songbird friend was a “worship leader” before giving birth to her third edition.

 

It appears that hallelujahing in church is no different from crooning or rocking in the nightclub. While evangelicals swear by the “empowerment” of the holy spirit in all their doings in church, and in this case, in leading the lambs in singing eulogies to their Kim Jong Il in the sky; they don’t realise how contradictory they appear to the sceptical bystander when they start commenting on the banal intricacies of not only the physiological mechanics of singing but also on how to use these skills to create stage and voice presence so as to minister the “presence” of God to the lambs.

 

Our common friend was using the example of Darlene Zschech, a superstar worship songstress from a charismaniac megachurch in Australia. She was appraising the aussie’s ability to somehow create the “feel” in worship. Of course, I am paraphrasing the friend’s words.

 

The problem in such talk is that contrary to how evangelicals present the spiritual aspects of obviously banal and carnal methods, it is always fabrication and manipulation. It was apparent the friends at the table did not like my use of the word manipulation. They appeared defensive and started on a rhetorical monologue on how it is always the holy spirit and since human beings are primarily emotional beings, God does use such means to evoke powerful emotions in the lambs.

 

Yawn. I am allergic to these all-too-familiar goobledygook which is nothing but pontifications that are meaning-less and non-sense (in the semantic sense of the word). There is no way anyone can verify such fairy stories – akin to listening to a religious crackpot who claims a daily hotline to God – we can either spurn all critical thought and take these nonsense at face value or simply reject them as rantings of the delusional.

 

Anyhow, simply asserting that it is the work of the holy spirit is not enough. One has to be able to RULE OUT the possibility of crowd psychology and manipulation. Let me use a preaching or public speaking example. Evangelicals love to go orgasmic over how “anointed” or “powerful” a preacher is by claiming experiences of feeling “ministered” and “helped” and blah blah. It must the work of the holy spirit, or so these simple lambs say. But one can never be so sure as seasoned preachers often use their tricks of the trade such as using a different tone of voice, their choice of words and subtle histrionics. Studies have demonstrated how the choice of words coupled with vocal tone can influence the subconscious mind of listeners.

 

The only way one can at least attribute to something other than this worldly causes is to maybe, preach in monotone using a manuscript. If the lambs still have a “spiritual reaction”, then it is likely that the experience is a genuine one.

 

Thank goodness I did not regurgitate the vegetarian lunch I had.

 

*******

primitive pentecostals

 

A wiry forty-something, duracell-charged indian mickey mouse bounces onto the stage. It is ten minutes past twelve. The homily is over and the tubby guest preacher from a fundamentalist-run halfway house for convicted drug addicts has shuffled himself off the glass pulpit.

 

The mickey mouse becomes mighty mouse. His diminutive frame rattles like a child toy as he starts to “share” his hindu-to-charismaniac conversion story with a screech that is too stentorian for his seemingly rodentish pair of lungs. It is the only consolation for my very english ears.

 

The Hi-5 sing-song cabaret has begun. He is the sincere kitchen sink choked with rat-brained fervour. Although he appears to have hypnotised ninety per cent of his fellow rat brains in the congregation with tear jerkers about human rights violations against the “christians” by the Indian authorities and Hindu extremists in his country, I am unpersuaded.

 

It seems unlikely that a country which boasts of a polytheistic majority would dislike the “christian” minority so much as to want to attempt to exterminate them like vermin. Many hindus view Jesus as among their hindu divine pantheon and have great respect for the christian ethos.

 

Unless…the christians themselves behave like vermin.

 

In the case of this bouncing mighty mouse, this is the likely scenario. He admittedly desires for the whole of India to hear the Christian gospel message and be “saved”, eventually. It is no wonder. No one likes fundamentalists who behave as though they are the only ones with the truth. No one likes mentally deluded crackpots who expect the entire world to follow their religion. And since India is so unlike civilised Europe, the only plausible “solution” to the fundamentalist menace would be physical violence and judicial discrimination.

 

The physical violence against the christians are appalling and should be protested against, but the primate in me, no matter how evolved, cannot resist the urge to finger-point the christians as the cause of their own plight. They seem to deserve it.

 

The mighty mouse in question is a Mr Jacob Marineni, an Indian Hindu who allegedly experienced some mystical delusions of Jesus when he was a cancer-riddled seven-year-old. He claims that the doctors at that time, from 1978 India at that, could not do anything to cure his luekemia and left him to die. But it was Jesus who miraculously healed him.

 

Since the diagnosis and the account cannot be verified by expert witnesses, I will doubt his fairy tale. Even if he really had some serious ailment of sorts and is now apparently so unsick, such “miraculous” recuperations can be explained naturalistically, without any claim to supernatural intervention. Experience informs me that such stories are usually exaggerated and embellished over time, especially religiously-inspired stories. And there is no logical link between the sincerity of the storyteller and the veracity of his claims.

 

He is also the pastor of his own tribal church, and the founder of a fundamentalist organisation which, among many other initiatives, seek to shelter (and “save”) as many street-housed orphans as possible. While I applaud his efforts in making this fucked up world a better place to live in, his crackpot ideology ruins it all for me. It is IMMORAL to sell humanitarian help to helpless people with the price of proselytisation.

 

We help because we want to. We love because we want to love. Period. We do not help someone so that we can blackmail them into accepting our ideology or religion.

 

That is disgusting.

 

*******

bible study? come on…

 

Last afternoon’s ninety-odd minutes of amateurish opining on a haphazardly collected thousand-plus pages of a premodern near-eastern text, did not went well. While studying the classical literary texts require participants to involve their cerebral cortexes to think critically about issues like interpretation and exegesis, as well as redaction or form criticisms, yesterday’s attempt seemed to assume a Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes for the text in question.

 

It is tedious work to interpret a text which is, among other things, a few thousand years old, anonymously authored and in a language other than the current lingua franca, English. Serious students of say, The Analects of Confucius, know that it is a waste of time to dabble in an English translation of the work without engaging the original Chinese text. There are many issues which will get muddled, let alone lost, in translation.

 

Besides, what’s the use of talking cock to one another about “how one feels” about a text when we should be talking sense about “what the text actually says”. Worst of all, despite what the facilitator may claim to the rest of us, he is already a dogmatist on what he thinks the text should mean. Not unlike modern totalitarian states like North Korea and Iran, participants are apparently butchered, via herd instinct, to bleat out only nice things about our Kim Il Sung in the sky – as well as ask only The Idiot’s Guide to-type of questions.

 

It seems to me that penetrating questions are not allowed – questions that should, by all counts of intellectual honesty, be asked.

 

All right, perhaps I should get to the point. We were “studying” a piece of ancient scribble called The Epistle (or letter) to the Ephesians. It is part of the twenty-seven-book koine greek corpus called the Christian New Testament. It is bound alongside the usually thirty-nine-book ancient hebrew cum aramaic corpus called the Hebrew Scriptures, which are often christened, albeit dishonestly, as the Christian Old Testament. It takes only an ignoramus to assume a “christian” provenance for the ancient near-eastern work.

 

While no serious New Testament scholar in modern times will thumb print certify that Paul of Tarsus wrote the letter, evangelical christians often prefer to ignore this difficulty and just assume pauline authorship. Many choose to do so to protect their cherished but very mistaken view that the bible was fingered by the cananite-hebrew deity – Yahweh – himself. Common sense suggests that just by the very haphazard way in which the bible was compiled through history erases the silly notion of a perfect deity writing or dictating a perfect and inerrant work.

 

Many evangelical christians choose to believe in this premodern idea because they have invested too much, their entire lives, in this god racket. They will not and cannot endure the existential pain if their cherished book turns out to be only a fairy tale, an Arthurian myth of the ancient Jewish people and the early christian community which has no historical validity and thus no eternal truth.

 

Poor me. I do not care about subscribing to a falsehood because it makes me feel good or happy. I only care about knowing the truth, even if that means a purpose-less and meaning-less universe that is impartial to biological life, let alone human life. An atheistic humanism is thus about living courageously, meaningfully and with dignity in the face of a possible annihilation of all that we know to be dear to us.

 

*******

crackpot comments in a crackpot world

 

Marion Gordon Robertson is one of the most housewife-watched raisined faces in evangelical charismatic crackpotdom. He is vulgarly known as Pat Robertson, and is the founder of many poisonous organisations like the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), the Christian Coalition and Regent University.

 

He is also notorious for making so many reptilian-brained comments on his surprisingly influential telly tubby programme, The 700 Club, that his very countenance becomes the epitome of evangelical mental retardation.

 

This is the rambling snake himself:

 

 

 

Here is a delicious sample of some of his most retarded remarks:

 

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

 

“The feminist agenda…is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

 

“I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes…this is not a message of hate – this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.”

(on “gay days” at Disney World)

 

“God considers this land to be his…for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, ‘No, this is mine’…he was dividing God’s land…Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the UN, or the USA…”

(on why Israeli PM Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke)

 

“It may be a blessing in disguise…haitians were originally under the heel of the French…and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay, it is a deal. Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

(on the earthquake in Haiti)

 

“And you don’t want to deal with horoscopes…it has a satanic pull to it.”

(on horoscopes)

 

“You don’t want to fool with that stuff. It is at best demonic, at worst it’s just superstition.”

(on feng shui)

 

“If enough people were praying, God would’ve intervened. You could pray, Jesus stilled the storm, you can still storms.”

(on tornadoes ripping through the Midwest)

 

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.”

(in a speech in 1993)

 

“Psychics get their power from demons.”

(on psychics on The 700 Club, 2006)

 

“It is happening because God Almighty is lifting his protection from us.”

(on the terrorists attacks, Sept 14, 2001)

 

“Planned Parenthood is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the bible condemns.”

(on The 700 Club, 1991)

 

“Many of those people who worked with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.”

(on The 700 Club, 1993)

 

This senile toad also labels any film with ghouls, vampires and witches “demonic”, such as the teenage cheapo Twilight series and Harry Potter.

 

Before anyone claims Robertson as part of the lunatic minority, be enlightened to the fact that the largest and fastest growing segment within contemporary christianity are the pentecostals and charismatics, of which Robertson’s demon-hunting paranoia is a very common theological motif. Educated and hence liberal christians make up a dwindling teeny weeny minority.

 

Charismatic christians in Singapore litter the largest congregations in the country, namely City Harvest Church, New Creation Church, Faith Community Baptist Church, Lighthouse Evangelism, Trinity Christian Centre, Victory Family Centre, Bathesda Cathedral, etc.

 

And despite the deliberate lies in front of a mediacorp camera, many of these third-world, premodern wannabes subscribe to the delusion of an immaterial world cupped to the brim with angels and demons who control world events, natural disasters and human behaviour.

 

It is also fucking difficult to get these people, many of them decent and educated human beings, from being willing specimens of religious brainwashing and deception.

 

Sad.

 

*******

 

despots and cheerleaders

 

Christians sometimes betray their cheer-leadered beliefs in a prayer-answering, illness-healing and New York Knicks-supporting grandfather in the sky when they offer revival meetings and church camps as solutions to the shriveling faith of a thomasian believer.

 

This all-powerful monarch who supposedly created the singularity that exploded into the universe about 14 billion years ago, although current cosmology suggests the possibility of either an infinite or multiple universe; and who sends tsunamis to muslims and earthquakes to homosexuals and pagans; appears impotent to revitalise a sceptical and doubting believer without resorting to the hysterical antics of crackpot “revivalists” and televangelists.

 

Yahweh, as this capricious sugar daddy is called, does not, or maybe cannot, do home visits. He appears to “heal” people of colds, backaches and sometimes even cancer and AIDS (often without official documentation) only at special events like miracle services, revival meetings and healing rallies. He rarely plies his trade in private.

 

Even if he does, he tortures the believer by dishing his power ever so incrementally that by the time the naif manages to praise his or her maker for his “healing”, one is surprised that the medical treatments and bodily rest do not work. 

 

One does well by watching british mentalist Derren Brown as he uses psychological tricks to deceive unsuspecting audiences into believing he is a real psychic, christian faith healer, and what-have-you. In one particular programme, he even recruits a stranger from the London streets and trains him to pretend to be an itinerant preacher and faith healer. The team then travels to the US and that was where the fun starts.

 

There is a lot of crowd psychology at work and what the professionals call mass hypnosis in mass gatherings of like-minded people like revival meetings, miracle services and church camps. It also helps that there is lots of congregational singing and repetitive choruses, spurred by the preacher’s cheerleading rants and slogans. All of that helps to psyche the followers and creates an atmosphere suitable for influencing the subconscious mind through group and auto-suggestion.

 

Church camps are the same. Like the mate who complains recently of fellow parishioners trying to hard-sell a forthcoming church camp to him, it takes only a God to fan the charcoaled flames of faith without human interference.

 

*******