Atheists in an Alehouse

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley"

To a Mouse (1785) by Robert Burns

Ever wonder what a cabal of atheists do when they get together?

Last Saturday, a Sabbath according to Jewish traditions and some Christians denominations, members of the Malaysian Atheists, Freethinkers, Agnostics (and their friends) had one of their sporadic meetings at the Craft Brews Brewhouse & Restaurant at Mutiara Damansara, Petaling Jaya. I arrived at the soiree a wee bit late, and I figured that since I didn't inform anyone that I was going to turn up in the first place, I'm allowed to be as tardy as I like. Right before the meet, I had tea with Jen and her man-friend - both of which happen to be non-religious - and I'd love to have them come as well, but I didn't think they are into unholy, godless assemblies as a spectator sport.

I tried to talk Terri into attending too since she is a member of MAFA but she was feeling less than enthusiastic about the proposition. I was hoping she would change her mind since there is always a real famine of the feminine in groups like ours.

Godless sausage fest (pictures courtesy of Ramon Fadli).

The only woman there was Ie Tzan's girlfriend who, as far as I know, isn't a member. The failed atheist meet I organised in Penang last March actually boasted a better girl-to-guy ratio (2:3) even if it didn't have a stellar atheist-to-theist ratio (also 2:3). The deficiency of female participation is a well-known chronic problem of atheist and sceptical societies everywhere in the world, and it have baffled us for decades. While there are no real shortage of women who are critical-thinking, science-minded secularists (no lack of prominent ones either), most don't seem to feel passionate enough take up a more active role for the cause.

The meets held in and around the Klang Valley region almost always command a decent turnout - which makes sense since metropolitan communities have a greater access to information and are consistently better educated, and those social elements correlate well with the rejection of religion and superstitions. Most of us present were either respectable professionals or university students which, to our collective surprise, were quite unlike the debauched, depraved, deceitful, devil-worshipping, baby-devouring criminals that most religious traditions demonised us as. I mean, could the Bible and Qur'an be wrong about us?!

Whoa, we should totally try to be more evil to help them despise us more easily!

About 15 to 20 people showed, coming and leaving in a revolving door fashion so we couldn't feasibly get everybody in the group shot. There are also members who are still "in the closet" for occupational or lawful purposes, so they couldn't be photographed either.

Terence (far left) organised this one.

We do plot and scheme, but being the intellectually independent individuals and unherdable cats we are, it's almost impossible to get us to arrive at any proper consensus. All the agendas proposed were defeated (except our devious plan for more future gatherings and more future beer - that one received unanimous support), but we still had a jolly good time hanging out. It's not often that we find ourselves in the company of literate and lettered people that have a working knowledge of philosophy, theology, cosmology, biology, psychology, ethics and human rights issues. It's almost a necessity for all of us to be well-informed laypeople on these subjects for us to survive one another. Seriously, every time you contribute anything to a discussion between rational, sceptical atheists, you must be prepared to back it up because we really have a very low tolerance for bullshit. Yes, there are irrational, unsceptical atheists as well, but they don't usually last very long.

And yes, as everyone probably suspects, we also swapped stories about our encounters with missionaries and holier-than-thou religious acquaintances who tried to witness to us, and had hearty laughs at their expense. There were some anger as well, since being unjustifiably condemned by most people around us as wicked heathens deserving of eternal torture in hellfire really doesn't do a lot to help our disposition.

As far as I can tell, our goals should be quite agreeable to most people, and it boggles my mind that they aren't universally applauded. We strive for a truly secular government which does not favour any one faith over another; the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion; the upholding of human rights and gender equality; and the promotion of science and critical thinking. In the case of our members who are Muslim only in name, we wish to fight for their right to leave Islam.

Now, it'll be nice if we can just agree on how we are going to achieve all those outstanding objectives.

All dressed up with nowhere to go,

k0k s3n w4i

Starbucks Invents Best Beverage in the Universe

"I hope you don't mind
I hope you don't mind

That I put down in words

How wonderful life is
Now you're in the world"

Your Song (2011) by Ellie Goulding

Yes, I prefer it over Elton John's 1970 original. Bite me.

It's Starbucks' spanking new Black Sesame Green Tea Cream Frappuccino®!

I foresee a future in which I am impoverished but ecstatic.

It's basically just their regular green tea frap with black sesame powder blended in and black sesame sprinkles on top. It was already a delicious drink to begin with but now it's ♪maaagiiicaaal♫

I can't think of a single thing in the world which a liberal application of black sesame wouldn't instantly improve.

Will open for sesame,

k0k s3n w4i

The Powerlessness of Prayer

"Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence."

Oscar Wilde

In 2006, the largest and most scientifically rigorous study to date investigating the power of prayer was published in the American Heart Journal by Dr Herbert Benson et al. The research efforts were funded and supported by the John Templeton Foundation which, according to their own mission statement, finds its purpose in serving "as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality," whatever the hell that means.

However, if you look into what the foundation's been up to, then you would get a better handle on what they are really trying to do. They have an annual big cash give-out called the Templeton Prize worth $1.5 million which they award to a "living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension" and past recipients include that vile shrivelled fruit bat, Mother Teresa, and anti-Semitic Evangelist Billy Graham. The Foundation also gives out a $100,000 Epiphany Prize for "inspiring movie and TV" but the only winners had been religious (usually Christian) films like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Passion of the Christ.

What I'm trying to say is, the Templeton Foundation is heavily biased towards affirming a spiritual and religious worldview. They funded this study with the expectation that it will prove that prayer works.

So this is how it went down: 1802 patients from six hospitals recovering from coronory bypass surgery were enrolled into this study. They were then divvied into three groups:

• 604 patients received prayer after being informed they may or may not receive prayers.
• 597 patients did not receive prayer after being informed they may or may not receive prayer.
• 601 patients received prayer after being informed they would receive it.

This is my favourite LOLcat.

The members of three separate Christian groups were recruited to provide the prayers. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting on the night before the surgery. The results are as follow:

• In the first two groups which are uncertain whether they would be receiving prayers or not, post-operative complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not. There is no statistically significant difference.
• In the third group which knew that they are being prayed for, 59% (352/601) of them experienced complications.
• Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.

The conclusions of this research paper (and lessons one can learn from it) are:

• Prayer does not affect the course of illnesses. Don't bother praying for sick people.
• If you must pray anyway, don't tell the recipient that you're doing it because the mere knowledge of it can cause them to be worse off.

Quod erat demonstrandum. Now, I can actually advice the loved ones of patients who are undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting to restrain themselves from praying, and it would be the ethical thing to do.

This is my second favourite LOLcat.

No doubt those who want to believe that speaking to God can affect our lives in any tangible ways will have a million rationalisations on the ready to discredit this rather damning study into the futility of their favourite pastime - but I'm just glad that they can't dismiss this as an effort by us wily atheists to discredit Christianity since everyone involved in it actually did believe in the transformative and transcendental power of prayers from the get go.

One of the tritest, ripest bullshit that Christians often offer to explain the obvious failure of prayers is the assertion that God does not give you what you want but rather, what you need. I called bullshit because if you simply look into the Bible at Matthew 21:22, Jesus clearly said, "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." The exact spirit of these words is echoed in Mark 11:24. In context, Jesus said this after cursing a fig tree to wither and die because it wasn't bearing fruits for him (it didn't matter to the Son of God™ that it wasn't the season for figs yet, of course), therefore indicating a comparable miracle is possible through prayer. Jesus also said that you can ask a mountain to throw itself into the sea and it will happen; he was pretty damn unequivocal about that. I like to see the Pope try it - move some mountains - but he seems capable only in moving paedophile priests around so we can't catch them.

The question is, why are modern Christians constantly trying to downplay the impressive effects of prayer which Jesus himself promised and turned it into something wishy-washy and invisible like the granting of strength and wisdom to cope with difficult situations, and the recovery of lost objects? I mean, I get those same boons too even though I've never prayed in my entire life! Doesn't anyone find this highly suspect?

You know what I think? I think it's because Christians themselves know deep down inside that nothing substantial can ever be achieved through prayers.

Another perennial favourite of Christian apologists is the excuse that prayers sometimes aren't answered because it is contrary to God's Ineffable Plan™. It's basically saying no matter what you ask for, things will still happen they way they would have. If that's true, then what's the point of praying in the first place?

Never mind that the very idea of speaking to an omnipotent, omniscient superbeing is absurd to begin with - even after it's scientifically proven that prayer is useless, most Christians will never be intellectually honest enough to admit that they got it wrong. Had the Templeton Foundation's study into intercessory prayer turned up a positive result, they would have shouted it from every pulpit in the world as proof of the truth of Christianity.

Unfortunately, it disagrees with the a priori beliefs they hold, so the eyes of Christendom do not see it; its ears do not hear. Its mouths, however, will continue to whisper to a God that either doesn't care or isn't there.



P.S. I do wonder why knowing that people are praying for you can have a detrimental effect. I had initially thought that the reverse is true, but I stand corrected now.

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer

Largest Study of Third-Party Prayer Suggests Such Prayer Not Effective In Reducing Complications Following Heart Surgery

Has a special relationship with reality,

k0k s3n w4i

Attack the Block: A Review

"That's an alien, bruv, believe it."

Pest in Attack the Block (2011)

I'm absolutely convinced that London is the seediest, most dangerous place on the face of the planet. It seems to me that it's populated almost exclusively by feral chavs, neo-Nazis, migrant jihadists, and gangbangers drowning in inner city desperation and pulling everyone else down with them. That is, if British films like Harry Brown, Fish Tank, Four Lions, and KiDULTHOOD are any indication. Now, we have Attack the Block which opened up with a quintet of teenage chavs on BMX bikes mugging a defenceless nurse.

I say we should just nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

The film looks nothing like this.

Attack the Block is the directorial debut of Joe Cornish, friend of the terrific trio of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost (who has a very minor supporting role here) and it's B-grade alien invasion chavsploitation flick. If that premise interests you even the least bit, then you might want to check it out.

This film only has a budget of £8 million, and having no conception of how expensive making a film of this calibre can be, I think it looks frightfully cheap and schlocky. It also has absolutely star power to speak of (with Nick Frost being the only talent with any name at all) so it must have saved lots on the actors' paychecks as well. So, I had to wonder: Why do the alien beings featured in Attack of the Block look like animated two-dimensional silhouettes of gorillas that a sleep-deprived amateur animator can whip up it in a single day on his laptop? Seriously, the creatures were essentially walking furry black holes which no light can escape from but unlike blackholes, they have no weight to speak of and therefore feel like they don't even exist within the scenes.

I'm guessing the creature design was a cheat - y'know, to get away from animating convincing-looking fur and sinews. Since the events of the film took place at night rendering it impossible for anyone to see the aliens at all, they added blue glowing fangs as a workaround.

I'm also not a fan of the shaky cam used to shoot many of the action sequences in this movie, and I'm speaking as someone who didn't even notice that Paul Greengrass was using that same technique in the Bourne films until someone told me it made them queasy. The camera frequently move far, far too close in proximity to the actors and the epileptic cuts all combined to make a lot of scenes incomprehensible.

From left to right: Jerome (Leonn Jones), Biggz (Simon Howard),
Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail) and Dennis (Franz Drameh)

It says a lot for the rest of the film that I ended up enjoying it ultimately. The dialogues were amusing triffles one would expect from the mouth of stupid teenage hoodlums but made all the more amusing with by their British street slang. And since I don't really like any of them, I could happily enjoy seeing them getting eviscerated graphically one by one by the alien creatures.

They tried to create a bit of a redemptive character arc for Moses, the head of his ragtag bunch of chavs, but it ultimately didn't really work for me. Since I've been beaten up once by a pair of youths robbing me on the streets at night before (one of them kicked me in the teeth), I find it quite impossible to summon any sympathy for juvenile delinquents anymore.

I'm going to divulge a bit of spoilers in the next paragraph. Just skip to the last paragraph if you haven't seen the movie.

Ron (Nick Frost) and Brewis (Luke Treadaway).

An astrobiologist watching Attack the Block will probably cry angry tears because the alien invasion makes no damn scientific or logical sense at all. How did the complex organisms survive entry into our atmosphere sans spacecraft without being completely fried to tarry balls of crisps by air compression? And if they can survive that, how can they be killed by something as relatively inconsequential as a gas explosion? I have a really high threshold for the suspension of disbelief, but the least I ask of any work of speculative fiction is that they remain internally consistent. I was actually expecting Moses' plan to fail hilariously and for the creatures to tear him into tiny bite-sized pieces of chav meat, and was quite disappointed when it didn't happen.

Despite my negativity, I did have a good time with Attack the Block. What I don't get is the 89% rating it garnered on Rotten Tomatoes. It's really not that good, folks, but if you're a Mat Rempit, I can see how you would dig the hell out of this film. The ones in my cinema certainly did.

Don't like chavs,

k0k s3n w4i

The Genitalia of Hindu Worship

"Religion is like a penis.

It's fine to have one.

It's fine to be proud of it.

But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around,

And please don't try to shove it down my children's throats."

Seen on a T-shirt

Addendum: Yours isn't better than everyone else's, regardless of what you may think.

One of my earliest primers in comparative religion came from a large, hardcover book called Myths and Legends by Bellingham, Whittaker and Grant which I bought when I was in high school because I was such a huge mythology junkie back then. It is essentially a complete idiot's guide to Norse, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Indian stories of divinity with lots of excellent colour photographs of religious relics and arts in it. However, it is by no means encyclopaedic as it left out Middle Eastern mythoi such as Christianity and Islam, which are the two most popular superstitious belief systems in the world today.

I brought this up because pretty much everything I know about Hinduism came from between the pages of that book. In it, I first learned about Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance and the Paragon of Paradoxes, which I still consider one of the coolest gods ever conceived by the minds of humankind. However, in my readings, I also found out some stuff about Shaivistic worship which are downright goofy.

Highlighted text reads: "But Shiva is most often worshipped as the
lingam. The lingam is usually a cylinder of dark, shiny stone with a curved
top set in a circular receptacle, or yoni, the symbol of female sexuality."

Page 152 of my copy of Myths and Legends says: "Shiva is a very ancient god. He is still extremely popular today and is often worshipped in the form of a lingam, a stone phallus."

Alongside the androgynous Ardhanarishvara (the Lord who is half-woman), the lingam is an iconograph of Shiva I have always kept an eye out for. It supposedly represents his awesome "male creative energy", which is an euphemism if I ever seen one. When I was in Shiv-Bhumi, the earthly Abode of Shiva in Bharmour, I was seeing lingams everywhere in the Chaurasi Temple complex which boasts no less than 84 of Shiva's godly tallywhacker littering the compound. It made me feel slightly violated, like I was being spiritually bukkake-ta the whole time I was there.

The most impressive shrine in the compound is the 6th century Manimahesh temple...

The tinsel streamers undulating in the breeze like sperms weren't helping to put me at ease at all.

... which houses Shiva's thick black lingam.

"Kneel and worship my monolithic ebony rod, mortals!"

Come to think of it, even the stone Śikhara-style temple is shaped like a mega-sized rock-solid schlong.

And what more, it's ribbed for her pleasure.

Look at how wide its corona, I mean, roof is. And it's so long tall that it's almost a skyraper. Skyscraper! I meant to say skyscraper!

Okay, moving on.

The iconographical counterpart of the lingam is the yoni, which is the Sanskrit word for the female genitalia, and it is thought to be a symbol for the divine feminine, the source of all that exists, and it looks like a minimalistic square womb with a vaginal passage leading out of it (if you remember, I have actually mentioned the yoni in passing in one of my older posts about the Jesus Fish). When the source of existence, yoni, is conjugalated with the creative force, lingam, it becomes the abstract symbol of creation itself: the linga-yoni.

Here's one I found in the same temple courtyard,

Um, that is NOT how sex works, kids.

The orange stuff covering Shiva's rigid manhood is kumkum, a powder used for social and religious markings in Hindu culture. Devotees would rub the lingam and then anoint their foreheads with their kumkum-stained fingers, making a mark called a tilaka. I don't even need to try - the jokes practically write themselves now.

And thus concludes today's lesson on the beliefs and practices of a major world religion. Isn't learning fun?

For the post describing my thrilling trip to Bharmour, follow this link: Landslides! Rockfalls! And the Road to Bharmour.

An avid 'Where's Willy?' player,
k0k s3n w4i