The Poor Palestinians

Have you noticed that a lot of nice Christians become absolutely merciless when it comes to the plight of Palestinians? They will defend Israel to the death no matter what atrocities the country may commit.

Well, Israel just slaughtered 300+ Palestinians in Gaza as punishment for lobbing rockets into the former. And Christians are again vocal in supporting Israel's right to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yes, even Christians in Malaysia!

I guess you have to thank the Old Testament of the Bible for this phenomenon. Here are two interesting passages that mention Gaza and the Philistines who lived there. Gaza is part of the Promised Land the God of the Old Testament set aside for the Jews.

Zephaniah 2:
4 For Gaza will be abandoned And Ashkelon a desolation; Ashdod will be driven out at noon And Ekron will be uprooted.
5 Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, The nation of the Cherethites! The word of the LORD is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines; And I will destroy you So that there will be no inhabitant.

Jeremiah 47:
4 On account of the day that is coming To destroy all the Philistines, To cut off from Tyre and Sidon Every ally that is left; For the LORD is going to destroy the Philistines, The remnant of the coastland of Caphtor.
5 “Baldness has come upon Gaza; Ashkelon has been ruined. O remnant of their valley, How long will you gash yourself?
6 “Ah, sword of the LORD, How long will you not be quiet? Withdraw into your sheath; Be at rest and stay still.
7 “How can it be quiet, When the LORD has given it an order? Against Ashkelon and against the seacoast— There He has assigned it"

The Old Testament God seems to have nothing but hate for the Philistines. The legacy is the present day Christian's contempt of the Palestinians. Why be merciful when God has already ordained that they be slaughtered to make way for the Chosen People, the Jews?















[First image by Carlos Latuff. Second image from stevenfeuerstein.com]

Black Cat, White Cat

As I said, this is not a political blog but let me lay my political beliefs on the table now, so that there are no doubts whatsoever.

Remember what Deng said about cats? "It doesn't matter if the cat is white or black; if it catches mice, it's a good cat."

That's my politics in a nutshell. I'm a pragmatist, like Deng. There are good points and bad points in both capitalism and communism. So why get hung up on ideology? If it works, keep it!

My primary concern is for this country to be able to compete with rising power-houses like China and India. For that to happen, we need unity among the races. If BN wants to keep playing racial games, we should kick the buggers out.

[Picture is from cats-on-tshirts.com]

Why I am NOT a Christian

Do you think kids who are 6 and 8 years old should be made to say grace everyday, dragged to sunday school and camp, and forced to memorise verses from the bible? Well, it's happening to my sons, despite my strong objections. There are even plans to turn my house into a venue for prayer meetings and bible study. My son has just received his first bible. I have been hammering the disciples of scientism. It's about time I say something about christianity.

BBC Focus magazine asked Arthur C Clarke (in Dec 2007 just before his death): What is the greatest threat that we, as a race, are facing?

He replied: Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to delivery morality and spiritual salvation. It's spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all.

According to the bible, Jesus came to save the world. May I ask how many people has he successfully saved so far? And why should the people that he failed to save, burn in hell for eternity? Why should people like my father burn in hell for eternity? What has he ever done to hurt anyone? If my dad is writhing in agony now just because he didn't become a christian, then I'd much rather join him than all the hypocritical christians who are busy having parties while millions are marching daily into hell.

Jesus said that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can move mountains. How many mountains have the Christians moved? Name me one. Jesus said you can walk on water. Show me a few Christains who have walked on water. Need I go on? All I see in church on Sundays are christians who are striving to believe more, trust more, serve more, pray more, give more, sacrifice more, yield more, etc etc. They are basically weekly faith reinforcement sessions. Why is this necessary if God is real for the christian?

Why is the God of christianity so small and weak? I am a Deist and my God is infinitely bigger! So much so that I'm probably presumptuous to call him (or her) Creator. Instead of creating objects like we do he probably willed everything into existence. He is so big that I cannot speak for him. So big that I cannot put him in a box, like some people are so fond of doing.

And why is the christian god so hung up over the Jews that he made them his chosen people? So obsessed that he COMMANDED them to conduct merciless genocide and ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian people in order for the Israelites to reclaim the "Promised Land"? Why is god so utterly heartless that he cannot feel the suffering of the Palestinians? Why is he so petty that he has to focus all his attention on a tiny piece of land in the Middle East when there is infinite space in the awesome universe?

Sorry to say this, but the Gospel to me is like mouldy bread that the Western world has already rejected and is now gobbled up hungrily by the rest of the world, who seems to think it's a panacea for all their problems.

[The image above is from theleftcoaster.com]

RPK!

This is not a political blog but RPK is one guy I really respect.

I'll leave you to find out why. :-)

This photo was taken at the PJ Civic Centre on 7 Dec 2008.

Reason

I love the book Ideas That Changed the World by Felipe Armesto. (See earlier post for a review.) It has taught me so many things.

Here's an interesting passage from the chapter "The Idea That Numbers are Real":

Once it became entrenched in the learned tradition of the Western world, most people believed in - or simply accepted - the reality of numbers. It enabled them to accept that reality can be invisible, untouchable and yet still accessible to reason. This deduction paved the way for an alliance between science, reason and religion that has lasted until our own times.

I googled the words science and reason and discovered that most people seem to consider the two words synonymous. As if all scientists are reasonable and all reasonable people are scientists. But to Felipe, the words science, reason and religion mean quite different things altogether. We need reason to deal with things that are invisible and untouchable (or cannot be measured scientifically). Things like God and numbers, for example. You can say belief in God is unscientific but you can't say belief in God is unreasonable.

Which brings me to Deism. I was a church-goer for 10 years and got totally disillusioned. I decided to cast all previous religious knowledge of God aside and start from scratch. I was thinking like a Deist before I even knew the word existed. Deists stand apart from both science and religion. So does Reason.

Felipe: Yet reason has helped to temper or restrain rival approaches to regulating the world such as systems founded on dogma or charisma or emotion or naked power. Alongside science, tradition and intuition, reason has been part of our essential tool kid for discovering truths.

Amen.

[Clip art from http://estabrook.ci.lexington.ma.us]

Mr Natural Selection

Why are scientists so fond of contradicting themselves? Scientists like to believe they are the most logical people on earth but time and time again I find them trying to rationalise their own preconceived notions. I love reading science magazines but I find this dishonesty or blindness very frustrating. Sometimes I think I’m more scientific than the scientists!

Here’s something from Isaac Asimov.

Indeed, humans, as creatures who behave in a purposeful, motivated way, naturally tend to attribute purpose even to inanimate nature. Scientists call this attitude teleological, and try to avoid such a way of thinking and speaking as much as they can. But in describing the results of evolution, it is so convenient to speak in terms of development toward more efficient ends that even among scientists all but the most fanatical purists occasionally lapse into teleology. Let us however try to avoid teleology in considering the development of the nervous system and the brain. Nature did not design the brain, it came about as the result of a long series of evolutionary accidents, so to speak, which happened to produce helpful features that at each stage gave an advantage to organisms possessing them. In the fight for survival, an animal that was more sensitive to changes in the environment than its competitors, and could respond to them faster, would be favored by natural selection. If, for instance, an animal happened to possess some spot on its body that was exceptionally sensitive to light, the advantage would be so great that evolution of eye spots, and eventually of eyes, would follow almost inevitably. [Asimov’s New Guide to Science (Revised Edition) 1987.]

First, Asimov said everything happened by accident. No design, no guide, no aim, no purpose whatsoever. He called the human brain the most complex object in the known universe, but we got that purely by a happy series of meaningless events. (By the way, the brain is so complex scientists today are still struggling to figure out how it works.)

Right after that, he brought up “natural selection”. So there is a purpose after all - survival! For some strange reason, all life is fighting to survive. That is the standard or benchmark all living organisms aim for. And the guy who set the criteria is a chap called Natural Selection. Whatever he is, all scientists agree that he is NOT God! Call him Mother Nature or Mr Evolution, but never never Creator! That’s a sin that will get you excommunicated from the Church of Scientism!

So there are two things all good scientists accept without a hint of irony:
1) There is no God because we can’t prove there is no God.
2) Everything happened by accident but guided by natural selection.
Amazing mental gymnastics, if you ask me.

Here’s another passage I came across recently.

Piet immediately suggested a design for multiply nested binary star graphstellation that would have the delightful technical designation “hyper-super-duper double-star system”: a pair of a pair of a pair of double stars. 16 total. This configuration would be stable and unlikely to interact with nearby stars. It also would do no harm to the solar system or life on Earth, should we end up as part of the formation. The set-up phase would coax pairs of stars into headings destined to bring them into mutual embrace in such a way that the pairings would eventually pair as well, and so on. Such a structure would be vanishingly unlikely to come about naturally, and it would be recognizable at a great distance. An alien observer wouldn’t have to be able to discern all the individual stars in order to notice that something funny was going on; the alien would only have to note subtle changes in the qualities of the light, wobbles in the position, and other clues. [Jaron Lanier; Discover; February 2008.]

What this guy is proposing is to adjust the positions of nearby stars using the gravitational pull of space crafts so that aliens from outer space can detect our presence. Which begs my question, if we can look at the human brain and say it was created by a series of accidents over millions of years, why should an alien look at our “graphstellation” and conclude it’s man-made?

Enough said!

[Image from crystalinks.com]

Book Review

The Nature of Science: A - Z Guide to the Laws & Principles Governing the Universe
By James Trefil
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 433 pages
ISBN 0-618-31938-7

My dear sons,

We all miss your grandpa dearly. Once in a while I still “talk“ to him during contemplative moments. Is he able to “hear” me from where he is right now? Has he traveled to another world - a different dimension or parallel universe, perhaps? I’d like to think he is in a place that is free of suffering and is “interceding” for us poor mortals here on earth.

The religious may call such a place “heaven“, but it is not totally alien to science. Theoretical physicists have postulated that there may be up to 26 spatial dimensions! An English astronomer (Martin Rees) coined the term “multiverse” to suggest many universes, co-existing independently but able to interact with one another. Do you find that a bit mind-boggling? Arthur Eddington, a British physicist, once said: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Take a God‘s-eye-view of the Universe. The sun, which we wake up to every morning, is 1,000,000 bigger than planet earth. But our sun is just one star among 200 billion stars in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone! That gives us 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You can see how utterly and insignificantly microscopic we are relative to the size of the universe! I often think that God may well assume, for all intents and purposes, that we don’t exist!

The great physicist Isaac Newton likened his life’s work to that of a boy discovering pretty shells on the beach when “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him. As you can imagine, there is still so much we don’t know about what‘s out there, despite the huge strides made by science so far. What then is science, you ask? Well, it began fundamentally with human curiosity. We have all asked questions like why is the sky blue or grass green? As Socrates rightly said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Science offers one way to inspect this life of ours. It is a quest for knowledge using a certain set of accepted and rational procedures.

The book I am reading now, The Nature of Science by James Trefil, has a good description of the scientific methodology. There are two approaches, basically - observation and experiment. The first is by simply looking at the objects around and noting their behaviour under different circumstances. The second is to conduct experiments in a controlled environment and recording the results.

From the data we then try to determine the rationale behind the observation. This is known as a scientific theory - an explanation that best fits the data. When a better explanation comes along the old one is discarded. You should remember that words like “theory“, “principle“, “effect” and “law” are often interchangeably and imprecisely used by the scientific community. There are no hard and fast rules that all scientists adhere to.

Collecting the data is the easy part. It was the interpretation of the information that made scientific superstars out of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Newton showed in detail that the fall of an apple and the precise motions of the planets could be explained by the universal force of gravitation. Einstein demonstrated that time and space curved around massive objects with his theory of relativity.

Trefil’s book is in essence a compilation of all the major rules and regulations governing nature discovered up to the start of the 21st century. The topics are sorted into 8 categories: astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, life sciences, mathematics, miscellany, physics and rear window. There is enough information on each area for a young person contemplating a career in science to be able to gauge where his or her interests lie.

There are some 250 such topics covered by the book, ranging from the well-known to the obscure. Moore’s Law (Every index of computer performance improves by a factor of two every two years) is in there and so is Murphy’s Law (If something can go wrong, it will go wrong). Also included are ideas with intriguing names such as the Chandrasekhar Limit (A white dwarf star can be no more than 1.4 times as massive as the Sun), the Chronology Protection Conjecture (There is an as yet undiscovered law of nature that forbids time travel), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (The position and velocity of a quantum particle cannot both be known with absolute accuracy at the same time), Maxwell’s Demon (Can the second law of thermodynamics be violated?) and the Beauty Criterion (Scientific theories are judged on aesthetics as well as on pragmatic criteria …).

Incidentally, “Miscellany” contains concepts that don’t belong in any particular group, such as Occam’s Razor (The simplest explanation is likely to be the right one) and the Turing Test (If computers can act in such a way that human beings cannot tell if they are interacting with a machine or with a person, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test). “Rear view mirror” looks at ideas that have been discredited, such as Spontaneous Generation (Living things arise spontaneously from inorganic material) and Perpetual Motion (It is possible to make a machine that will run forever or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy).

James Trefil is an American educator and a passionate promoter of scientific literacy. He believes that every person ought to have enough knowledge to be able to form informed opinions about issues that affect the modern world, from cloning to global warming. He has authored more than 30 books and writes in a readable down-to-earth style that makes scientific concepts accessible to laypeople like you and me. Such motivation is admirable, in my opinion. You know I believe in the democratization of ideas. Scientific literacy equips the citizens of a nation to compete in the global environment. I am all for it.

My only quarrel with scientists in general is the tendency to get a little presumptuous when it comes to matters beyond the realm of science. Take the following sentence from the book: "Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science … because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong."

That does not necessarily make creation science wrong, does it? You cannot declare that something is wrong just because you can’t prove it wrong! That won’t hold up in court and is an argument based on flawed logic. Science has no monopoly on knowledge, as far as I‘m concerned. Anyone who believes otherwise is worshiping a religion called Scientism.

Isaac Asimov called the human brain “the most magnificently organized lump of matter in the known universe”. If we can believe in an architect for the Taj Mahal, why can’t we do the same for the brain, which is so much more complex? To really understand the true nature of science we need to identify the limits of scientific methodology. Science can give us a lot of answers but not all of them.

Coming back to your grandpa, I suppose the quickest way to know his present whereabouts is to go there myself. Science may one day allow us to communicate with other worlds, but it’ll surely not be within my lifetime.

Meanwhile, let me leave you with a few puzzles from the book to tickle your grey cells. Have you ever wondered why the sky is dark at night when there are so many stars producing light? (This is called Olbers’ Paradox.) If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, why have we not received signals from it or detected evidence of it? (Fermi’s Paradox.) And if, in order to cross a room, we must first cross half, then half of what’s left, then half of that, then half of that …, doesn’t that make motion impossible? (Zeno’s Paradox).

Read the book, don’t wait for the movie!

Dad

How Scientists Made God Disappear!

Guess what? I’ve solved another magic trick all by myself! I’ve finally found out how scientists made God disappear! I’ve cracked it and I’m so happy I feel like Isaac Newton! Hahaha!

I came across this amazing sentence in the book “The Nature of Science”:

“Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science, supposedly based on the biblical Book of Genesis, because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong.”

Therefore it’s wrong.

Get it?

So scientists are basically saying that it’s wrong because they can’t prove it’s wrong!

Isn’t that absolutely mind-boggling logic? Can something like that hold up in court? You’re guilty because there is no way we can prove you’re guilty?

Here‘s how the magic trick works. Let me distil it like a good scientist would into the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Demonstrate that since there is no way to prove or disprove God using science, therefore God is beyond the realm of science.

Step 2: Get the audience to agree that since God is beyond science, the subject is therefore “not science” or “unscientific”.

Step 3: Glorify the word “science” and stigmatise the word “unscientific”, making it indistinguishable from words like stupid, ignorant, uninformed, uneducated, irrational, brainless, idiotic, etc.

Voila! In 3 simple steps, you’ve turned every believer into an imbecile and wiped God off the face of the universe! So simple and yet so utterly effective! It’s one of the most impressive magic tricks I’ve ever seen and has fooled literally millions around the world!

The title of the book is really apt. I have finally discovered the nature of the beast they call science!

[Graphic is from gif.com]

Fun With Leeches

Question: How do you get rid of a leech without salt or fire?

I took the kids to Sungai Congkat this morning. It has a fast flowing stream with clear icy waters that is very popular over the weekends. It was deserted on a Friday morning. We were about to step into the water when my son found two small leeches on his leg. Now I have no experience with handling leeches. I had no salt and no fire. So we tried to drown them by keeping his feet under the cold waters. But they remained firmly stuck. I had another idea. You know how leeches walk - head over feet over head. When my son took his foot out of the water they started moving. It's very difficult to remove a leech when its head is stuck to your flesh. So I waited for the precise moment when the head was up to brush it off. It worked! But somehow it ended up next to my son's crotch! And it was inching closer and closer to his nuts!

My son, of course, was going crazy, yelling and screaming! Fortunately he was wearing swimming trunks. So I pressed his trunks to his flesh so the leech wouldn't go under. The leech got on top of his trunks and my son pulled them off frantically. I then got the leech off his swimming trunks with a stick. We tried the same technique with the other leech and it came off as well. It must be a truly memorable experience for my son. Hahaha!