The Religious Deserve No Respect

"The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?"

Judith Hayes

It is deeply ingrained into our society's mind that we owe every religion and its adherents due respect merely because they exist. On a pragmatic level, this will probably save us from a lot of unpleasantness and possibly prevent the desolation of all of human civilisation in a mushroom cloud of "holy" wars - and more pertinently in Malaysia, a country which is predominantly Muslim, the reaction to criticism towards Islam all too easily degenerates into violence.

Do not for one moment, however, mistake my fear for respect.

In a previous post I penned on human evolution and the Neanderthal genome project, I displayed a complete irreverence for Bible literalists and Christian Young Earth Creationists; an irreverence I've hinted at in my previous posts on religion, but never actually demonstrated with all the bells and whistles. In the comments section, I engaged a holier-than-thou Christian apologist and proselytiser in a debate I've experienced a hundred times over in the past (and a lot of atheists will tell you that talking to a godbot feels akin to talking to a brick wall) where I promptly dropped all pretensions of courtesy. Anyhow, at some point, he demanded that I respect what he believes in, and my response was, um, colourful, to say the least,

"As for giving you and your religion respect... GO FUCK YOURSELF. Do you realise WHAT you're asking me to respect? You are asking me to respect a system of belief that calls for MY eternal torture just because I'm not one of its sheeple. You are asking me to respect an institution that has perpetrated some of the greatest injustices to humanity for centuries. You are asking me to respect a fairytale book filled with murder, intolerance, misogyny, homophobia and massacres. Come, let me hear you ask for my respect one more time now."

"Disturbing" was one of the adjectives he used to describe me. Now, the drama extended off-site a wee bit where another person also found my disrespect for other people's religion "disturbing". I wonder if at any point in time these people realise what EXACTLY it is they are asking me to respect? I have to respect their conviction that I deserve eternal torment at the hands of their god? I have to respect their psychopathic approval of the condemnation of so many of their innocent fellow human beings to hellfire?

What a fucking ridiculous proposition.

Hell yeah.

This is my point of contention; the automatic deference everyone is expected to offer up to religion and the religious, and how it is asked of us by people who do not even take a single minute to consider what that deference entails. Listen, I respect every human being's freedom to believe in whatever nonsense they want to. I have never, in my life, told anyone that they should abandon their faith and superstitions - but that is about as far as my respect would go. And why do these pious types have such a strong sense of entitlement when their entire worldview is built around the damnation of people like me? I have listened to enough church sermons to have no illusions about the "respect" they reserve for my ilk. Just because they don't drop the F-bomb in every other sentence doesn't mean that they actually respect me when they say they do.

What's even more bewildering and alarming to me is that they should find my disrespect "disturbing" but is totally cool with their all-loving and all-merciful god's policy of torturing untold numbers of basically decent people who happen to believe in something other than the Christian faith, and people who died without having any exposure to the Gospels - for ETERNITY without RESPITE. How can they approve such obscene atrocities and still be "disturbed" when all I did was deny them the respect they feel they oh-so-richly deserve?

Religion, I fear, have poisoned their sense of what's right and wrong. Insolence is evil. Sadistic everlasting torture is a-okay!

Mark Twain has something to say about that, and I quote him from Letters from the Earth (1962),

"... the world calls him the All-Just, the All-Righteous, the All-Good, the All-Merciful, the All-Forgiving, the All-Truthful, the All-Loving, the Source of All Morality. These sarcasms are uttered daily, all over the world."

When people use the same strong language in quarrels about political ideas, music genres or their favourite footie team or American Idol, we never hear these same shrill entreaties for respect. Considering that religion is also a matter of personal choice, why then must we toe the line in favour of the religious in these discussions?

As I've said in yet another post on religion,

"I do not believe in pussyfooting around the subject. Any idea - especially religious ideas - should be open to dispute. No one's ideas should ever be sacrosanct or protected from criticism merely because they are religious. The Spanish Inquisition was a religious idea. Hitler's Endlösung der Judenfrage and notions of a divinely-favoured master race (and an Aryan Jesus) were also religious ideas."

And let me also add that it is pure folly to allow any viral idea to stew and proliferate unchecked. That's where the darkest chapters of human civilisation have their gnarled and twisted roots. Remember September 11. Remember the witch hunts and the Holocaust. Remember the honour killings and the human sacrifices. Remember when burning "heretics" alive was a perfectly legit way to resolve theological disputes. For a more contemporary instance of the problem of giving religion too much respect; we have the latest Catholic scandal of child-fucking priests and the Holy See's hand in covering them up (I've been following the BBC News site obsessively on this). Any non-religious organisation involved in such extensive obstruction of the law and the legal process would be deemed a criminal body, and international outrage would be so much the fiercer. It is a token of this horribly misplaced respect for religion that that fuckhead of a Pope isn't arrested the moment he places his Prada-clad feet outside of the Vatican.

I was also frequently told that I should not blame modern followers of a religion for the atrocities that their predecessors have committed in the past - a position I firmly disagree with. I believe it is our moral duty to constantly remind the faithful of the lurid, bloodstained legacy that their organisations have scarred this world with. We should constantly tell them, "THIS is what happened back when you guys were absolutely certain that you were right. THIS is what you people did the last time you thought God was on your side." Besides, just because these groups of people have remained relatively peaceable for several decades, whitewashing their reputations with the sheer passage of time; it doesn't mean that we should so hurriedly forgive centuries of their crimes and ignore the still-evident bigotry lying just beneath the polish.

And speaking of polish; it says "God with us". The Nazi Wehrmacht or unified armed forces wore these on their belts. Just sayin'.

To every person of faith reading this:

You do not ask for respect - you earn it. You deserve respect for believing in a deity as much as someone deserve respect for believing in fairies, invisible pink unicorns or the goddamn Batman. Deal with it. One should not get automatic respectability simply for being religious. I will respect your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your freedoms, your rights, your deeds... but I will not respect you for your beliefs and creeds.

And if you come into this blog demanding respect from me, I will quite reliably lose my temper and ask you to forcibly penetrate yourself from behind.



P.S. It is true that I afford far more respect to religious people who happen to also be my friends - but that's because I know them personally and have a good measure of their actions and morals. If you're a stranger commenting in this blog, you're nothing more than a mouthpiece for whichever religion you profess to. And the moment I feel that creepy missionary vibe emanating from you, the kiddie gloves come off.

P.P.S. I neither expect nor desire anyone's respect for my unbelief - and anyone is welcome to challenge (however rudely) everything I've said. However, I know it's far more likely that religious people would simply read this post superficially, declare "OMG, EVIL ATHEIST HAVE NO RESPECT FOR ME ME ME!" and completely ignore all the excellent points I made.

P.P.P.S. The opinions written in this post are mine and mine only. I do not presume to speak for other atheists.



Occasionally angry atheist,
k0k s3n w4i

My Special Delivery from Teluk Intan

"Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Not frightfully relevant, but I thought it's a nice quote to share.

I made a deal with my ex-roommate, class representative and all-round champion nice guy, Inn Shan, that if he gets me some of Teluk Intan's famous heong peng/peah, I'd get him some pickled nutmeg from Penang in return. It's a deal sworn in blood and brotherly clasped arms; a promise made between Real Men in a thunderstorm amidst seasprays from violent waves slamming on an epic cliff face. It's more manly than an outdoor barbecue - more manly than even than a hundred seppukus! Seppukus with handlebar moustaches no less!

And I totally dropped the ball on my end.

Yeah, I forgot to bring pickled nutmeg back from Penang like I said I would, and poor Inn Shan who was looking forward to some cool, sour, crispy, minty nutmeg pickles would have to wrestle with the dark, deep depths of disappointment and despair that can only come from a person being denied a snack he's been expecting to consume. I feel your pain, Inn Shan. I had a similar experience when I four when I dropped an ice-cream cone on the roadside and I was told that it was all my fault and that I didn't deserve a replacement cone. Tragic day, it was - I shed many a single tears.

Sorry, mate. I will make it up to you come August when I return to Penang.

A bagful of Inn Shan's manly but totally non-homoerotic love for me.

I fell in love with two of Teluk Intan's most well known eats (their heong peng and their very special mutant chee cheong fun) when I made a short dinner stopover there back in 2007 after a Penang road trip with Inn Shan and Sze Yin - and I still pine for them on most nights after I have run out of most other things to pine for (I usually pine for yet another album by Regina Spektor, a fully-electric Mini Cooper and the death of organised religions worldwide). I would also have loved me several kilograms packets of fresh Liew Kee's chee cheong fun but since the shop is only open for the evening meal peoples, Inn Shan couldn't get them for me as he was leaving his hometown in the morning.

This time, he got me Ta Sin Guan Tin confectionery's heong peng instead of Hup Aik's, but I must say it's as just delicious as the latter. I assert this as a matter of personal opinion, of course.

More of Inn Shan's viscous, sticky love for me inside. Wait, that came out wrong.

For my non-Chinese, non Malaysian readers (I know I have some, don't lie), heong peng literally means fragrant biscuits or pastries. They are incredibly flaky, have sprinkles of aromatic sesame seeds on top and are filled with with a gooey, ambrosial, sweet-savoury filling born of the sexy union between malt sugar and shallots. Don't you just feel like sinking your teeth into that picture above now? I've no idea if these fucking delicious baked stuff are kosher, halal, or whatever word it is that Hindus use to say "contains no cow" but lucky me, I suffer from no dietary restrictions whatsoever.

Someday, I got to try some of Ipoh's heong peng too since that town's version is supposedly much more famous. Any Ipoh native feeling generous here?

My diet plans are crumbling around me faster than my life's happiness. See, I just started the final year of med school and after a brief disorientation session by the faculty this morning, my future seems like this dark and joyless place to me.

But at least I'll have pastries.



All gooey inside,
k0k s3n w4i

Lost Weight, Won Bet

"We are the pretty people
You wanna look like us
We are the pretty people
Give it up, give it up, give it up
We are the pretty people
Best of humankind
We are the pretty people
Flawless by design"

Pretty People (2004) by Dexter Freebish

This prodigal son returneth from Butterworth yesterday morning after a grueling 7 hours of unaccompanied, monotonous driving (though the scenery on the highway just south of Ipoh was real grand, I must mention). If you think that's hard, try upping the ante by starting the journey at 4:00 am after skipping an entire night's sleep. For those who were worried about my safety, fret no more. For those that have been hoping for news of my demise, sorry to disappoint.

Now, remember this post I wrote about a month ago? In that, I mentioned in passing that I wanted to lose 5.0 kilograms of hunk meat off my manly girth while I was half-vacationing in the de facto food capital of Malaysia - that is to say, I was taking on a task most Herculean. Overconfident much?

Nope.

I actually did it! I lost not 5 but 6 kilos in 5 weeks - dropping from 76 to 70. To put it into perspective, that's about 8% of my total body weight. It's quite a feat, even if it did not compare to that other time when I shed 9 kilos over 3 weeks through semi-starvation. Now, in case anyone starts shouting "ANOREXIC!" in my face, I want to point out that I have no body image problems whatsoever. In fact, anytime my weight goes above 74 kg, my body mass index falls squarely into 'overweight' territory. I am merely trying to maintain a healthy average, is all.

The story actually started at the beginning of this year when I discover that I am circling 77 kg after an impromptu weighing in at an ENT clinic where I was posted. In March, I told my grandmother that I'm turning vegan for a month and told her to adjust the dinner menu thus - though I still devour with gusto the flesh of many small and large animals outside of home throughout that period. I figured that turning the biggest meal of my day into rabbit feed would would be a big blow to my caloric intake, and at the same time, I also intensified my daily routine of crunches and push-ups which I started sometime at the end of last year (this, I'll explain why later).

All that only managed to lose me one measly kilo.

I was crushed.

Now in Penang, I revised my strategy and... no, I did not resort to dodgy weight loss supplements, but I did follow this regime;

• Order only the smallest possible portion whenever I eat out, and finishing only about three-fourths of it. If a serving is big, I split it with Phoebs. Strictly only 2 meals a day, and no snacks - or rather, I've replaced snacking with swigging fruit juices. Calorie-wise, I actually ate less than Phoebs on most days.
  
• Swim till exhaustion 4-5 times a week. And by 'swim' I mean 'flail about helplessly like I'm drowning' since I've never actually taken lessons.
  
• Crunches and push-ups every other day.
• Always choose the stairs when going up. My parking spot in Phoebs' condo building is on the 4th floor while her unit is on the 12th floor - so that's 2 to 3 times a day of massive stair-climbing because we both enjoy going out a lot. Moreover, the pool is on the 5th floor so after every dip, I have to drag my battered, limp body up seven entire floors as well.

When I return from yesterday to Malacca, my grandmother said that I look thinner. Would you believe that it had been 3 long years since the last time I hear anyone say that to me? Hold on, I think I got something in my eyes...

Somewhat related to this is a wager I made with Phoebe last year and the condition of that wager is; whoever manage to have visible semilunar lines first, he or she wins an iPod Touch (or another gadget of comparable value). Essentially, we're betting half of our very first paychecks here and I only did it because I needed a strong motivation to work out. As for Phoebs - well, she just wanted an iPod Touch very, very much.

For those that did not have the benefit of a whole year of human anatomy classes, the semilunar line is a curved groove running along the lateral border of each rectus abdominis muscle - and the two abdominal recti form what is colloquially known as the "six pack".

Meh, close enough.

I won that bet, naturally.

And no, I won't post up any pictures of my abs here because I swore never to bare my body to get ahead in life on the internet. You never know where those photographs might show up, you know.

Of course, being the awesomely magnanimous boyfriend that I am, I allowed to Phoebe to extend the conditions of the bet (after I have won) to whoever gets a six-pack first so she would have a chance to win it back. I never seem to have been able to collect my winnings from all the bets I have made in the past. A friend said that he would cut his penis off if I manage to get a girl to be my girlfriend while another friend said that he would eat 10 kg of his own shit. That girl would later become the Ex-Grrrfriend™ that I mention occasionally in this journal (and just in case anyone reading this is a star Olympic Conclusion-jumper; I was already going after her at the time, and yeah, my high school friends were dicks).

Now, that I think of it, the Ex-Grrrfriend™ also lost a bet to me once, and my prize was that I can ask her to do anything - anything at all - and she would have to comply. The main reason why I didn't feel like holding her up to her end of the bargain was because I lost a bet to her in turn - and that one says that I have to dress in drag in a maternity dress (complete with a faux-womb) and allow her to take photographs of me.

Over my dead, now-sexy body. Oh yeah.



One of the pretty people,
k0k s3n w4i

Our Month Living Together

"Oh, oh, starry eyed
Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit me with lightning."

Starry Eyed (2010) by Ellie Goulding

I am a difficult person at the best of times, and so much more difficult to live with - I understand this. I am not a man with illusions about his failings. I am arrogant, irreverent, obsessive, disrespectful of authority and conventions, and on top of it all, kind of a slob and a know-it-all. So understandably, I am apprehensive of the prospect of living together with anyone for an extended length of time. Scrape apprehensive - the whole concept scares my pants into low Earth orbit.

"I can't imagine having a boyfriend like me," I've told Phoebs many, many times. "I can't even be friends with someone like myself. I'm precisely the sort of person I despise socialising with."

But I did it. I lived together with my girlfriend for more than a month, and we managed it without any bloodshed serious altercations. Except that incident with the mop. The floor was obviously clean after I was through with it, Miss Phoebe. When you insisted on mopping it again, you're clearly smearing faeces all over my handiwork (note: I don't mean this literally). What if I take the Maggi mee you already cooked, huh, and cook it for an extra 2 more minutes? You will have to eat soft, sodden, overcooked instant noodle, that's what. And that's so not delicious.

Now, it seems foolish to be so worried about being stuck together for this short period of time - and it appears so much shorter to me right now looking at it from the last night I'll be spending with her (note: this I mean literally). As I go tap-tap on the keyboard this instance, Phoebe lies in sweet repose, dreaming whatever dreams it is that Phoebes dream. And because she insulted my honour by mopping over the floor I've already mopped, I am going to take revenge by rudely waking her up at 4:00 am on a school night by whispering in her ear,

"I love you."

She stirred. Success! My honour has been avenged!

"I heard that," she breathed lazily, and ruffled my hair in that way I adore so much. It makes me feel like a puppy. If I have a tail I would wag it right there and then.

"Go back to sleep," I told her. "I'm not sleeping tonight. There's something that I want to do."

"What is it?" she asked.

"Manly stuff," I told her, and returned here to continue this little letter.

Aside from my numerous and colourful foibles, Phoebs and I also have to contend with our diametrically opposing worldviews; I am an atheist, flaming and shrill, and she is a good Christian girl. This, I do not have to tell you, is one of the top entries in The Great Whopping Recipe Book of Disaster. I have had friends asking me how we managed to make it work for the last... how long has it been since the Boxing Day of '07? Gosh, we're halfway through our third year already and it didn't feel as if we have to work at it at all. We've fought all of 3 or 4 times in total with any seriousness all this while, and it has not once ever been about our very differing positions on faith and god. If miracles exist, this is one for the canon.

Truth is, we didn't make it work. At least, the "we" part of it is untrue. Phoebs made it work, and she did it pretty much single-handedly. It's hard to explain but it's just impossible to start a quarrel with her. Maybe I can furnish an example,

In one recent instance (one of many), I spent hours pulling apart Biblical scriptures verse by verse in an incredibly dull damn engaging monologue to her. Then, I launched into a rant about the latest lies committed by yet another American evangelical preacher on the public to discredit legitimate science while telling her about a report I read the other day on cetacean evolution. Right after that, I burst into a passionate soliloquy about human morality in general and how religion... oh, you get the picture, right?

Anyhow, when I finally (finally!) stopped talking, I noticed that Phoebe appeared to be deep in thought. There was a short, solemn pause before she turned and looked me in the eyes and asked me,

"Can we go for ice-cream tonight?!"

She had that childlike earnestness in her eyes which tells you that ice-creams are a very serious business indeed.

"Wha- were you even paying attention to me at all?" I sulked in mock-indignation.

"Of course I did! You were talking about the Bible, like usual! And something about a creature, or preacher, or something like that. Wait, wait... you mentioned whales too! See, I was paying attention! Hey, that dress is sooo cute! Let's go into that shop!"

I'm mostly paraphrasing here since I do not have an eidetic memory (but the ice-cream line is totally true, I swear). Sometimes, the only logical response to Phoebe's absurdities is to laugh - and she makes me laugh very often. I have never met a girl who can be so unintentionally hilarious so much of the time.

She has started snoring softly now. Haha, can't wait to laugh at her about it when she wakes up at seven. Speaking of waking up, her alarm will raise hell in less than hour. I better finish writing this.

While waiting for the elevator to take us up to her place after we returned from a dinner date with her cousin, I nudged her and said,

"Don't cry when I leave, okay?"

"Cannot," she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my sweater. "Must cry."

And I didn't say anything after that. Felt oddly unfinished, won't you agree? So right here and now, I would like to finish what I have started.

Phoebe, don't cry when I leave, okay? You cried every time we have to part and to tell you the truth, it breaks my heart to see you so sad. I don't want to be the reason you do something so unlike yourself. I want to thank you yet again for loving me so completely, flaws and all - and till today, two-and-a-half years down our road, I am still incredulous that I managed to win your heart. I dislike making promises I have no way of knowing I can keep like "I will love you for eternity" or "I will never leave you" - I think they are just sweet nothings and empty calories that goes down easy, but never nourish.

What I can honestly say instead is; Right this moment here, I feel like I can love you for all of time, I want to be with you till the day I die and I wish you feel the same way too.

And I laid these words out in writing in case they need to last forever.

This half of us,
k0k s3n w4i

The Caveman in Us All

"To be human: To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."

Hogfather (1997) by Terry Pratchett

BBC reported yet another incidence of science marching on yesterday as the majority of humanity still cling on to the literal interpretation of a bunch of doggerels started by a tribe of superstitious shepherds in the fucking Bronze Age, and was added to by four followers (who, by the way, can't seem to get their stories straight) of a Jewish Magic Man in Pontius Pilate's Judea who was his own father, born of a virgin, went dead for a weekend and is devoured every Sunday ever since by his believers in the form of little holy crackers. I usually say all of this in a ridiculous sing-song falsetto.

No, I don't think I'm being too offensive or disrespectful here. After all, I'm talking about a belief system which clearly insists people like me should be tortured in hellfire for all eternity. Feel the Christian love, yo.

No time to argue about the contradictions in said books. This will save everyone a lot of time.

Anyway, the short of the newsflash is this; a team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany - over a 4-year period - discovered that up to 4% of our genome were contributed by the Neanderthals. For the chronically unschooled, the Neanderthals were a separate species of hominids from ours (or a subspecies, depending on who you ask) and we started to part ways with them on the evolutionary tree about 600,000 to 350,000 years ago but according to Christian and Jewish Young Earth creationists, our planet is at most 10,000 years old only. I'm not saying that all Christians and Jews are as batshit as these kooks, but those that are make a sizable team indeed.

Now, our ancestral story started in Africa when a small number of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (us!) migrated out of Africa and went on to populate the rest of the world, replacing other more "archaic" species of humankind like the H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis - there's debate on how this happened exactly. Did our great, great, great... great, great grandparents simply out-hunted and out-bred the competition? Were they assimilated into our family through some hot interspecies homo-on-homo action? Or did we simply eat them with some fava beans and a nice Chianti? *hissss*

Prof. Svante Paabo et al. now have definite proof that, yes, most of us have some amount of H. neanderthalensis within us. Search your feelings, Luke, you know it to be true.

Let's take a gander at the lineage tree, shall we?

I, uh, improved upon it.

I find it interesting that the Han Chinese people (yours truly included) descended from the original progeny of H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis cross-sub-species love and can't wait to see if the Neanderthal Genome Project will uncover any Neanderthal-specific traits that my genealogical tree inherited from those unions. I'd like to look at some of the published papers that inspired this BBC news piece, but I haven't had much luck with Google Scholar so far.

Today, scientists are battling conservative Christians in the United States who seek to sideline (and eventually eliminate) the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection from their high school biology curriculum by replacing it with some scriptural-derived bullshit called Creationism - a hypothesis that essentially says "Godidit". Here in Malaysia, Muslim conservatives ensured that even the merest idea of evolution is suppressed from our high school biology textbooks and my very first exposure to the most important theory in biology occurred late in college. This is ludicrous because nothing in biology makes sense outside the light of evolution.

Even in college, I've met extensively brainwashed godbots that still reject evolution in spite of all the evidences presented to them. There was an intelligent Christian girl I knew in my A-levels biology class who remained adamant that evolution is bunk. I asked her, "If you don't think it's true, why study it?"

Her reply went something like this; "To get a degree, to be successful in life and to glorify God."

The same girl has parents who forbid her from reading the Harry Potter series because they think it's the work of Satan. Funnily enough, she disobeyed them behind their backs.

Likewise, a great number of my Muslim and Christian colleagues in med school stubbornly dismiss evolution while being bombarded daily with proofs that evolution had occurred in the human body - proofs like the inside-out configuration of the human eye necessitating a blind spot; the tendency for humans to suffer from lower back pain due to our upright bipedal posture; the difficulty women experience while trying to give birth through a very narrow birth canal (another downside to being bipeds); the pain and trouble we often experience at the eruption of our wisdom teeth because our jaws have shrunk; our primate inability to synthesise vitamin C unlike other mammals; the neotenous capacity to digest milk which some of us retained into adulthood (while others are lactose intolerant); the long long list of vestigial organs we still possess like the third eyelid, the vermiform appendix, the tailbone, Darwin's tubercle, the small external ear muscles, the terminal nerve or cranial nerve zero, Jacobson's organ, the plantaris muscle, the male nipple... and I can go on for a long time on all the etceteras I remember from the top of my head but I advise you, intrepid reader, to go look them up for yourself. After 4 years in med school, I realise that if God really designed us... let's just say that he shouldn't have taken that day off after all.

And the way most bacteria and viruses develop resistance to antibiotics and antivirals? That's one of the biggest challenges the medical fraternity faces today, and it has basis in the Theory of Fucking Evolution by Natural Fucking Selection. The way these people ignore the obvious makes me want to scream through a megaphone at the top floor of a skyscraper while dressed entirely in traffic orange. Or something.

Christians have a long history of fighting science and progress because some of the things scientists uncover went contrary to Biblical "facts". Remember when Christians placed Galileo under house arrest for heresy because he supported Copernicus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round in the early 17th century? The verses they used were Joshua 10:12-13, Habakkuk 3:11, Psalms 19:4-6, Ecclesiastes 1:5 and many, many more. Giordano Bruno was burned alive and screaming at the stake by Christians for daring to discover that, gosh, stars are suns just like ours! And that there are planets revolving round those suns too! The list of vindicated scientists who were wrongly persecuted by Christians in their times included big names such as Rene Descartes, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, Adam Sedgewick, Louis Agassiz... and dear ol' Charles Darwin. That list reads like a Who's Who of science, doesn't it? The Christians' feud against science spanned centuries, and every single time, it's the Christians who have to suck it and admit that yes, they fucked up. Why, after being wrong for so fucking long, Christians still have the gall to oppose human advancement? How dare they?

I was invited to a church sponsored Christmas party in 2007 where a pastor denounced evolution and FUCKING LIED to his congregation that Darwin recanted his ideas and converted to Christianity on his deathbed - while all the stupid sheeps in the room just nodded smugly in agreement, drinking it all up. Similarly a year ago, I was at a church dinner as a guest of a Christian paediatrician where some guest superstar pastor from Singapore FUCKING LIED that his prayers helped a child grow a brand new kidney - something which would be heavily publicised in the medical and scientific community if true - just to win his Lord Gourd more new, stupid, unquestioning zombie converts.

A Muslim girl in my class simply explained, "Well, I'm a Muslim so I can't believe in evolution."

Well, I like to see how far Malaysia can go in the field of biology and biomedical science with its fingers in its ears going "La la la, I can't hear you!"



P.S. HERE's a useful beginner's read to evolution for anyone who's interested in learning more. While I strongly studying it sequentially, I find Part 2: Past History to be the most accessible section for even people with a rudimentary understanding of biology.

P.P.S. I am not against anyone practicing their own religion but when religion encroaches upon the territory of science and progress, I go marching on the warpath. I welcome anyone to comment and to argue with me, but be warned: I don't play nice.

P.P.P.S. Note that the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection does not explain the origin of life; only the diversity of life. I find that opponents of evolution frequently confuse it with the Theory of Abiogenesis. If I'm a charitable person, I'd say that it's an easy mistake to make - but I'm not, so quit confusing the two, you twits.



Achieved the Age of Reason,
k0k s3n w4i