Colin's Journal

4:37pm: Obama '08?

I have nothing to add that hasn't been said by pundits who have followed this presidential race more closely than me, but goddamned if this isn't a great speech. Move aside, Martin Luther.

9:22pm: Terms of ContraDiction
Yifan: the newspaper wrote about ContraDiction.
Yifan: and they phrased it... very strategically. obviously careful planning had gone into it.
Yifan: it's now an event about "gender and sexuality".
Yifan: they did mention that Alfian (gay), Cyril (also gay) and Yi Sheng (also gay) would be there.
Yifan: but they didn't say anything about the gay part. =p
Colin: heh. because it would be redundant, like, how many famous local poets are straight.

ContraDiction
organised by Ng Yi-Sheng

An evening of queer writing - including poetry, drama, blog entries and songs. Readers will include Ng Yi-Sheng, Teng Qian Xi, Chan Sze-Wei, Zhuang Yisa and Maia Lee, with original music composed and performed by Iris Judotter and Yak Aik Wee. (Licence from MDA approved. Rated R18.)

Date: Sunday, 12 August 2007
Time: 7:30 - 9:30 pm
Venue: 72-13

8:54pm: Peculiar Chris
I missed the chance to borrow Peculiar Chris again this weekend! Pelangi Pride Centre has three copies but it opens on Saturdays at 4-8 pm, which is a tiny window to squeeze through for a student like me. The National Library catalogue shows that it's missing a few copies, and I wonder why. Flushed down the library toilet by homophobes? Nicked by queers hoping to keep a small piece of themselves, since the book's no longer in print?

After catching Asian Boys Vol. 3: Happy Endings (quite the misnomer of a play) I've needed to read this book. The best stories make you wish that their characters had existed, so that you would know they had once been real. For we should not break our hearts for those who have lived only in them; and playwright Alfian Sa'at, in the first half, recreated the characters of Peculiar Chris with startling realism. At least his own brand of it, where he would take caricatures and slowly knead their complexity into being. I felt for Ken, his fears and yearnings made palpable in a quiet rendition of Ralph McTell's Streets of London; and I felt for Chris, a teen forced into a grown man's choice, and who picked wisely but wrongly.

(Hilariously, in one scene Ken played Romeo and Chris' girlfriend played Juliet, as Chris watched. A later play on "Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" was ripe for the picking, though it was passed by the playwright -- yet does it not boil down to that, when love is found in the right soul but wrong person?)

The second half veered into didacticism and "happy endings" that it did not earn, and I was left with the emotional tatters of the first. I need Peculiar Chris then, to exorcise these unhappy shadows. The woes of prelims and my KI paper do not compare.

11:09pm: Battling ignorance in a tiny way
( Is there a place for God in public morals debate? )

***

God has a place in public morals debate

I REFER to the recent Straits Times article entitled 'Is there a place for God in public morals debate?' by Senior Writer Chua Mui Hoong (ST, May 18). My view is that God cannot be excluded in public morals debate. It is not a matter of willingness.

God is the author of morality in human history. In other words, moral standards and moral values originate from God, in monotheism the Supreme Being and in polytheism, the Supreme Beings, who transcend human beings. Be it Confucianism which is strictly a value system, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism, et cetera, all religious faiths that believe in an absolute Supreme Being or absolute Supreme Beings share the common values about sex, family life and procreation, and are against homosexual sex.

There are many other common values shared by different religious faiths. For example, Buddhism stresses the importance of cause-and-effect relationship in a human life. Likewise, in Christianity, there is this natural law known as 'you reap what you sow'. If we sow the seed of approval for homosexuality, we are going to reap the grave consequences of it in due course.

Medical science cannot offer solutions to all human problems as it deals with only one aspect, the physical aspect, of human life. We humans are not merely physical beings. There is a soul - intellect, emotion and will - and many believe that there is a spirit within us. They cannot be seen under the microscope. However, just because we cannot prove their tangibility does not deny their existence. Regardless of whether we like it or not and whether or not we have a religion, we are moral beings as we are born with moral instinct, a sense of propriety, known as conscience.

There is such a thing called guilt, which is not imaginary. When one violates his/her moral instinct, one feels guilty about it. Nevertheless, conscience can be distorted if it is given in to depravity of the mind and rationalisation. Therefore, to people of different religious faiths, to debate and discuss moral issues and morality without God is akin to a little child who wants to be independently responsible for his/her own life and behaviour without the care and constraints of his/her parent(s); no matter how sophisticated and how impressive the arguments may be. Public laws should not violate the common values of different religious faiths of its people.

Esther Chan Nek Fa (Ms)

***

Invoking God does not advance the public morals debate (link)

I REFER to the letter 'God has a place in public morals debate' by Ms Esther Chan Nek Fa (ST Online Forum, May 26). While Ms Chan notes that some people need the concept of a supreme being to validate their moral values, it is untrue that this must be the case for everyone, or that all theistic religions share the same moral values as Ms Chan claims. Ultimately, the reasons why God should be excluded from the public morals debate still hold.

Not all members of our society believe that a supreme being is needed for moral values to exist. Most agnostics and atheists have moral values that they hold dear, yet they do not require the concept of a supreme being. In fact, Ms Chan raises Confucianism as an instance of a value system, even though Confucianism posits no supreme being to justify the moral values that it promotes.

Furthermore, Ms Chan is wrong to say that all religions that posit a supreme being share the same values, not even in sex, family life, procreation and homosexuality. Monogamy as central to Christianity is not shared by Islam, where a man can have up to four wives. Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism tend to refrain from making judgements on homosexuality, where Judaism and Islam are more vocal. Indeed, it must be noted that moral values are not fixed within each religion itself, let alone across all of them. For instance, various schools of Christianity are divided on issues such as contraception, homosexuality and divorce.

Ms Chan's example of how different religious faiths share other moral values is also bewildering. She claims that Buddhism stresses cause-and-effect relations in one's life, while Christianity holds a natural law that 'you reap what you sow'. Yet I do not think that anyone, religious or not, would deny that all our actions have consequences. Not only does this principle not show that approving homosexuality will have 'grave' consequences, Ms Chan does not concede to some obvious differences in moral values between religions. For instance, controversies over the wearing of headscarfs have erupted largely in Islam; few other religions have been as strict about modesty in dress.

Ultimately, the problem with invoking God in the public morals debate is that it does not help in guiding us to a reasonable conclusion. The idea of a supreme being does not inherently contain any specific moral values. If all parties were to start with the assumption that a supreme being has validated their own particular values, then the public morals debate would be fruitless, as there is no way to reconcile such dogmatic assumptions.

This is why Senior Writer Chua Mui Hoong found it important to exclude God from the public morals debate. By appealing to the common ground between ourselves and those of different faiths, we can allow others to better understand with our position [sic]. Indeed, Ms Chan follows this principle herself at one point, when she mentions that we are all moral beings 'whether or not we have a religion'. It would serve us well if we followed this principle as the debate continues.

Colin Low Yu Cong

***

Post-mortem

1. The Straits Times' online readers must have ADD or something. The editor chopped my above six paragraphs into 20, most of them a single sentence.

2. The appalling part is that the editor added "also" and "but" to "Ms Chan does not concede", giving "but Ms Chan also does not concede". Yet he did not remove "with" from "understand with our position"!

9:12pm:

11:17pm: By the eastern coast
Yesterday morning I lay half-asleep as my family drove to Changi Village. We planned to visit the boardwalk that rims the eastern coast; it stretches from the village to the Aloha Changi resorts. Before that we headed to the hawker centre for breakfast, and I spotted my KI teacher at a Indian coffee stall. It jars somehow, Mr Lim in a casual shirt with azure sleeves, his wife sitting at the table on a windy Saturday morning; like a circus clown removing his makeup, his movements unadorned, the illusion of a caricature rendered complex. How does one slice a life, when doling time to different people?

ME: Hello Mr Lim!
MR LIM: Oh, hi! Are these your folks?
ME: Yeah.
(They exchange handshakes.)
MR LIM: You guys live around here?
DAD/MUM: No, no, we live in Ang Mo Kio.
MR LIM: Wow, that's quite far.
DAD/MUM: Yeah, we're just coming here for a walk.
MR LIM: Ah, part of your family routine?
DAD/MUM: Yes.
MR LIM: Oh, good, good.
DAD/MUM: So, you live around here?
MR LIM: (sheepish) Naah, Hougang.
ME: ...
MR LIM: Colin is a very articulate student.
DAD/MUM: Oh, good, good. Must be thanks to your guidance!
MR LIM: Naah, it's because of upbringing!
ME: (thinking) ... kill me now.

The boardwalk conjured memories of the last time I was there: mid-June last year, flanked by our wordless reconciliation and his confession on MSN five days later. This was the only time we'd met in person between the two episodes, at a chalet gathering, the air simmering with quiet anticipation. We helped to prepare corn for the grill. One peeled the husks, relieving the kernels of the sinews stuck between them; the other took over and rolled them in butter. When we'd finished wrapping them in foil we headed out for a walk.

The rain had stopped. Near the forest that bracketed the chalet, we listened for birdcalls. Later we crossed a field of tall grasses -- children played soccer there, the grasses beneath their feet yielding into patches of mud -- and struck out to the shore. The tide was low, revealing a spare section of beach that linked two sections of the boardwalk. Amidst the rusty boats beached upshore, the mosquito bites, crickets and lazy breeze was a comforting sense of the familiar. No depth of hurt can drive two years' worth of friendship into amnesia, it seems.

I grew restive as the month of August drew near. An ocean had lay between us through July, his stint in a science camp at MIT, my daily grind in school. Yarn noticed my edginess and asked if anything had changed since last year. I said yes; with him I had grown older, happier, sadder, wiser. "This will end in tears," said the prophet.

More had changed than this prophet knew -- before then, my answer would not have been "okay". True or not, his words did not doomsay; they were merely life.

6:20pm: A spot of meme solution!
Here is my (long-overdue) solution to the twenty-things meme! I'm clearing my backlog for the new year. =p

1. I fully support the legalisation of gay marriage, even if it's generally speaking and not in Singapore.
   False. The primary function of marriage is to bind couples in mutual guardianship, fostering economic and social stability. (Raising children is a narrow and outmoded reason for wedlock.) The case for gay marriage hinges on this function, not any others -- love may sustain a marriage, but love is not itself an end; likewise for individual rights. However, I have grown increasingly convinced that marriage needs to be revised altogether to fit this social purpose, for which it has grown ever more inefficient.


2. For each year from nursery to kindergarten 2nd year, I jumped ship from one school to another.
   True. I switched to Ang Mo Kio Methodist Church Kindergarten after my parents found Kinderland too expensive, and settled finally at Barker Road Methodist Church Kindergarten.


3. I have climbed under a bed, shoving it until it collapsed on me. This fractured my right thumb.
   True. The bed board was a solid wood piece that fell sideways from the frame, sending the mattress and occupant hurtling down on me. My thumb bore the brunt of the impact, and my mother brought me to a Chinese physician to have it bruised and plastered with a horrid-smelling black paste. When it still hurt after a week, we visited the doctor. He chided us for delaying proper treatment, and referred me to a hospital -- the X-ray revealed a tissue fracture. I had to wear a metal splint across my thumb for three weeks.


4. Having returned from camp with no money for a bus, and refusing to beg for it, I walked 20 km home from school.
   True. Dropped off at school after Athena camp, I was fuming over some cretin who stuck her nose into a discussion (where we had agreed to disagree) and decided who had "won". Having neither money nor the confidence that I wouldn't snap at someone if I talked to them, I skipped public transport and tramped my way home.


5. I used to practise martial arts, and scored 8.2/10 in a national competition.
   True. I retain some basics of how to use a scimitar and spear, but the routine I learnt for the competition, changquan, I have forgotten entirely. (I recall the violent nanquan better, though I've never been taught it.)


6. I believe that Jesus lived and performed the miracles of the Bible, even if I don't worship him.
   True. Tracing a three-year-old lead found me Lee Strobel's summary of The Case for Christ. It had compelling evidence for the truth in accounts of Jesus' life (as reflected in the gospels) -- the church would have been exposed for lies at the time, the disciplines likely wrote in earnest, and the variations between accounts are negligible, among others. Yet this does not validate the Bible or its slavish morality, nor impel me to worship Jesus. For he was wise, not impeccable. Damning unbelievers to eternal hellfire, withering an off-season tree for lacking the fruit to sate his hunger -- he abuses his power, and I cannot worship him who lapses into irrational tyranny.


7. Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple (Agatha Christie's detectives) are more ingenious to me than any other fictional sleuths I have come across.
   False. Miss Marple is a crime against detective fiction. Her contrived guesswork pales against the steps Poirot takes to his logical conclusion. (One of her revelations: "As I suspected, it was simply the husband. So many men murder their wives...") Poirot remains my pet detective -- his triumphs in Murder on the Orient Express and The ABC Murders are unrivalled and elegant. Many modern writers cop out with "It was the kid who cameoed in one scene of the book!" Hello, Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) and Tess Gerritsen (Body Double).


8. I firmly want to be a waiter at a deli where you have to sing/dance when they tip, at some point.
   True. I'm not thrilled by minimum wage, but I like the idea of being paid to be cheery -- though most fellow employees would ruin the fun.


9. I have managed to get eblouissante stuffed into a cardboard box, wrapped in aluminium foil.
   True. Back in primary school, I penned many lame-humour skits. For eblouissante, I wrote the part of the Grammar Machine -- a shiny box, with two human arms sticking out the sides, that explained gender and collective nouns to animals. ("You are a buck, and you are a drake!")


10. I have illegally hiked along an expressway in broad daylight, with cars whooshing past me.
    True. To earn the President's Scout honour, one must hike across the country with two juniors in tow, planning a route to hit all the checkpoints. The aspiring President Scout (to whom we were attached) drew a route that ran along what we later found to be the Pan-Island Expressway. There were no pavements on either side, so we had to follow the road shoulder. The drivers that berthed us must have called the police; another hiking group, walking a few miles ahead of us, got sent home. We escaped that fate by breaking the rules of the hike, and hitching a ride off the expressway.


11. Blackadder and Fawlty Towers are more funny to me than Friends.
    False. These gems of British humour show a wisecracker making fun of bigger imbeciles, but I prefer the more empathic comedy of Friends (at least the early seasons). The best Brit humour and the worst American humour (e.g. rubberface Jim Carrey) make me sad for humanity and its interminable stupidity. Friends has some of that, but it doesn't shy from admitting it, appears to be vaguely normal behaviour, and as a lesson is more insightful. An early side-character rants, "It's quite... typical behaviour when you have this kind of dysfunctional group dynamic. Y'know, this kind of co-dependent, emotionally stunted, sitting in your stupid coffee house with your stupid big cups which, I'm sorry, might as well have nipples on them, and you're all, like, 'Oh, define me! Define me! Love me, I need love!'"


12. I first stumbled across porn while researching for a debate in primary school. The debate motion did not involve porn, incidentally, but it pertained to my discovery.
    True. The motion was "corporal punishment should be banned from schools". Go figure.


13. I have prepared a fork with the intention of stabbing a baby. At the time, depression convinced me that it was the root of my troubles.
    True. I grew obsessed with the belief that my math teacher's pregnancy was making her cranky, and me a target of her venting. At the time, I had collapsed into major depression due to troubles with religion, sexuality and identity, all intertwined. Of course, the truth was that the depression had paralysed me from doing homework, but depressives are experts at rationalising (especially when they retain some of their Methodist ways).


14. My first sexual crush was on a girl, at least that I knew of then. In retrospect, I had sexual crushes on boys before that.
    False. I have never harboured sexual feelings for a girl. One must discern between this and noticing a girl's attractiveness, which I can.


15. I have had a guy hit on me without noticing it before, until somebody pointed it out to me.
    True. My gaydar is pathetic. dementist_xer0x tipped me off about this, to the nods of those present (barring my surprised self). He might have been kidding, since he picked this as a false statement, but after his tip-off I picked up all the signs (though it might have been due to confirmation bias).


16. My thumbs can bend backwards, forming the McDonald's logo when pressed together. Friends claim this is creepy.
    True. They can form acute angles, despite hongyu's cheys since he could do that too! (He couldn't.)


17. Once I was a Christian fundamentalist, and believed the Harry Potter books were Satanic.
    True. Though I enjoyed the books and felt them harmless, the insistence of my Sunday school preachers made me believe otherwise. From this I learnt how Christians like myself could deviate from Jesus' teachings without knowing it; I left the church when that irony hit me fully.


18. In a span of two years, Physics has transformed from being my most reviled subject to that in which I want to major and teach in future.
    False. My physics olympiad score of zero confirmed my disinterest in higher-level physics, as calculus encroaches ever more on the subject. I have found I still prefer the writing disciplines, and would like to major in one of them.


19. While reading on the balcony, I have twiddled a bamboo pole with my toes, and sent it plunging fifteen storeys by accident.
    True. I lay on my chest to read, clasping a bamboo pole (one of those used for hanging clothes to dry) with my toes and sliding it back and forth through the bars of my balcony. Suddenly, the feeling of girth between my toes was gone, and I heard a distant clickety-clack. No one was hurt; when I went downstairs to inspect the pole, only its plastic wrapping had cracked open.


20. I have paced inside our high school pond, soaking my shoes and socks, and gotten a senior in trouble for it.
    True, but my phrasing was insidious. It was the senior scout who ordered us into the pond for pushups, in the wee hours of morning during camp, before having us run along its length. Naturally he got into trouble for it.

Scoreboard:
5 -
4 -
3 -
2 - Chunhao
1 - Boon Gan, Joe Chee, Elaina, Jez, Seng, Charm, Celine, Edmund Neo, Adeline
0 - Hongyu, Geordie, Jianhui, Ryan Chan, Ervin, Yarn, dr Hoh

8:18pm: A midautumn night's dream
Who should have graced this night but the white orb
That haze obscured? Beside me, my friends lay;
"I see it," they cried. I joined them, and found
You sat still, yearning for a time to come.

I asked what you could not answer; you shrugged
And stared ahead. The moon, cloaked in the red
Of a tear-weary eye, hung in silence.

But if it woke, would it forget this haze
Or recall it, and cherish the difference
As lovers pranced under the light that bears
Its being? I know not, but I hope it does.

7:53pm: To our skyscraper-lined T-shirts (and minds), which never really caught on
The suspicion began when Miss Letchmi popped up on MSN Messenger, asking for "feedback from ex-iSpark boys". iSpark was our high school's name for the gifted education programme (GEP), a nationwide model that bundled "intellectually gifted" kids in classes and expanded their curriculum. Its aims were to deter these kids from mediocrity, indifference or disruptiveness in a normal class (where they lacked mental stimulation); and nurture them as "resources" for Singapore.

When I complied, she told me that the Ministry of Education would use the feedback to get a sense of the chances for interaction between gifted and normal kids. I smelt a rat – the harmless façade of an MSN conversation had roots in the ministry? The topic of choice signalled (to my paranoid self, at least) that the ministry wanted a reason to wipe out the GEP, and if the lack of interaction with other students was that, it would take it.

After all, this was the programme that sparked a furore in the Today newspaper forum over the elitism and ostracism it encouraged. With the advent of the Integrated Programme, that allows entire schools to bypass the O-level exams (but raises the selectiveness of these schools), I expected that the elitism of the GEP would be replaced by this other. I was right.

The GEP is dead.

I have qualms about having told her that I hardly interacted with mainstream kids in high school, and liked things that way. The GEP kept me in a bubble for seven years, and fed my belief that the world loved quirks and intelligence. I don't think this elitism was a bad thing, for the reverse made humanity bleaker and far more depressing. Cast into the mainsteam in junior college (where no GEP exists), and noticing a stark difference in talent between ex-gifted kids and the rest, proved this. Getting shunted to the top of the class killed my motivation, since I had always had someone to aspire to, but was left suddenly with nothing. In the GEP, the cream of the crop bested themselves. Outside it, they were always "good enough".

At one point, I became so desperate that I flirted with dropping physics (a subject that I was secure in) for the humanities programme (HP) classes, in a bid for the same atmosphere that filled the GEP. For the HP is similar to the GEP, more than any other programme in junior college. For one, it is isolated from the cohort – where most classes settle on benches, leaving their bags there during breaks, the HP classes are given an air-con room each – much like how our GEP classrooms were rarely in the same building as the mainstream classes. For another, the people are much the same, having hailed from the GEP in high school, and they seemed to have imported the lively and charismatic mood, and that sense of challenge. They were ostracised, but that I could handle, having dealt with coming out to myself in secondary two. The GEP, for one, bonded more strongly due to it, like soldiers against an unjust commander. Still, the decision would have been wrong, but that illustrates further how addicted I was to that environment.

A case could be made that the GEP was a drug – intense and fleeting, but unhealthy – and that I shouldn't escape the humdrum of reality. Yet the more books I read, films I watch, and plays I see, the more I find this conception of the world as a boring place is narrow and wrong. The world holds genius, and the GEP was only the tip of that iceberg – and maybe not even that. Singaporean students need to try harder, and we needn't bend for them.

Thankfully, I settled for a better place, in my present knowledge and inquiry (KI) class. KI is a mixture of philosophy and critical thinking, and at times, lessons rage with heated debates over the veracity of one argument over another. Already it has taught me a clearer sense of structure, and with The Economist it has encouraged the cleanliness of my style and speech. Impressive for only the first year of its execution. Ironic that, in two years, we should have to witness an execution of a different type.

I can't believe I told Miss Letchmi that the GEP should be removed in name, if for the prejudice that surrounds the label alone. It pleads blindness to the differences that separate us, and that would be wrong. I should know that, being part of a minority group. Miss Letchmi did mention how we should not ignore Indians by pretending they don't exist. Yet is that analogy proper? I told her, then, that it didn't mean we should segregate the Indians from other races if we noticed they differed. Truth is, I don't know if the GEP was for better or worse. But I care for what it stood for.

Now in junior college, I seek comfort in KI. Back in high school, iSpark may be affected minimally, since it is school-based and out of the ministry's reach. Yet this new phase of education in Singapore will chug on, leaving the GEP behind. And I can't help but feel that a piece of history will be missed.



Follow-up

9:51pm: A spot of meme
One: Come up with fifteen true statements about yourself.
Two: Come up with five false statements about yourself, while keeping them believable.
Three: List them in any order.
Four: Post them and let people guess which the five false ones are.

1. I fully support the legalisation of gay marriage, even if it's generally speaking and not in Singapore.


2. For each year from nursery to kindergarten 2nd year, I jumped ship from one school to another.


3. I have climbed under a bed, shoving it until it collapsed on me. This fractured my right thumb.


4. Having returned from camp with no money for a bus, and refusing to beg for it, I walked 20 km home from school.


5. I used to practise martial arts, and scored 8.2/10 in a national competition.


6. I believe that Jesus lived and performed the miracles of the Bible, even if I don't worship him.


7. Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple (Agatha Christie's detectives) are more ingenious to me than any other fictional sleuths I have come across.


8. I firmly want to be a waiter at a deli where you have to sing/dance when they tip, at some point.


9. I have managed to get eblouissante stuffed into a cardboard box, wrapped in aluminium foil.


10. I have illegally hiked along an expressway in broad daylight, with cars whooshing past me.


11. Blackadder and Fawlty Towers are more funny to me than Friends.


12. I first stumbled across porn while researching for a debate in primary school. The debate motion did not involve porn, incidentally, but it pertained to my discovery.


13. I have prepared a fork with the intention of stabbing a baby. At the time, depression convinced me that it was the root of my troubles.


14. My first sexual crush was on a girl, at least that I knew of then. In retrospect, I had sexual crushes on boys before that.


15. I have had a guy hit on me without noticing it before, until somebody pointed it out to me.


16. My thumbs can bend backwards, forming the McDonald's logo when pressed together. Friends claim this is creepy.


17. Once I was a Christian fundamentalist, and believed the Harry Potter books were Satanic.


18. In a span of two years, Physics has transformed from being my most reviled subject to that in which I want to major and teach in future.


19. While reading on the balcony, I have twiddled a bamboo pole with my toes, and sent it plunging fifteen storeys by accident.


20. I have paced inside our high school pond, soaking my shoes and socks, and gotten a senior in trouble for it.

4:51pm: How to end the world
I can't wait to see the hilarious uproar when our Media Development Authority, whose definition of media development is censorship, gets its hands on Snakes on a Plane and cuts Samuel Jackson's line: "I've had it with these muthafuckin snakes on this muthafuckin plane!"

Alternatively, J.K. Rowling wields the possibility of world war or peace: all she needs is to distribute the unnumbered pages of Harry Potter Book Seven around the globe.

Oh, yes. I can't wait.

11:09pm: National day celebrations 2006
Arriving in school, I saw everyone decked in red and khaki to celebrate our nation's independence. It stirred mixed feelings in me, since we hadn't wanted it when the opportunity first arose. When Singapore announced its separation from Malaysia in 1965, then-PM Lee Kuan Yew publicly broke down on television. "My whole adult life, I believed in merger and unity of the two territories," he'd said. Having been borne of unwilling expulsion, not liberation, I was uneasy that Singapore's later outstripping of Malaysia made every National Day seem like a sigh of relief, perhaps a puerile ha-boo-sucks-to-you to our disgruntled sister state.

Later in the morning, the harmonica club was performing an interlude between the four faculty musicals. On the left balcony above us, several girls had their hands clapped over their mouths, as though horrified by the sight of something. Glancing downwards, it appeared that others were doing the same. The teachers fanned their pamphlets furiously, their noses wrinkled in disgust.

And then it hit: a stench of shit, so vile that I gagged into my shirt. The wretched students on the left side of the hall, where the stench was most foul, evacuated the hall in droves. As it turned out, a sewage truck had chosen this time to clear the plumbing. We were exposed to the existence of all that shit in our system, and I thought it befitting that this would happen during the National Day celebrations. Our school administration soon dispatched the truck, however, and the programme continued as if nothing had happened.

Typical.

When the time came to sing the community songs, my patience had worn thin. Heading downstairs, I came to a stop on the mezzanine. Overlooking the canteen, I saw the Christian band that had performed earlier taking their rest there. Their frontman was strumming a guitar. Quietly, I heard him sing: "I'm in a place called vertigo..."

Above us, a chorus of voices swelled. "We are Singapore," it sang. "Singaporeans!"

1:17pm: Our inevitable faith
I believe that we accept the use of reason by faith, following an hour's discussion with dnwq yesterday. My justification is thus:

1. Were we guided by reason alone, we would believe all propositions we felt justified, and disbelieve all propositions we felt unjustified.


2. There are some propositions that we believe, despite them being unjustified. Since this is not guided by reason, the only explanation for belief in these unjustified propositions is that we accept them by faith.


3. The proposition "reason works" cannot be justified, since in attempting to prove the proposition, we would be assuming that reason works. Such an assumption is a fallacy, and rejected by reason.


4. Since the proposition "reason works" cannot be justified, but we believe it, the only explanation is that we accept it by faith.

dnwq points out that this conclusion may have some difficult implications: Does reason or faith have primacy? For example, can we accept a proposition that contradicts the belief "reason works" by faith? I don't think so - my assertion is that faith aids our belief in those propositions that we wish could be justified, but they somehow cannot.

The question, then, is why we would want to believe some things when reason fails to affirm them. Perhaps, in this way, we are subservient to human nature - and thus favour instances of order, elegance, and hope.

8:27pm: A meme (ganked from jez_hex)
Comment on this entry and:

1. I'll respond with something random about you
2. I'll challenge you to try something
3. I'll pick a colour that I associate with you
4. I'll tell you something I like about you
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of
7. I'll ask you something I've always wanted to ask you
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your blog

10:50pm: Second coming (or: whoo, how long since I last posted?)
On the Dear Abby column, a priest in Ohio complains that churchgoers have become too casual in their attire, and that "the lack of respect and reverence to worship is disgusting". The basic argument draws an analogy between worship and other formal situations, citing the consensus for strict dress codes for going to work or gracing the President.

A few of Abby's readers defended this trend, citing the importance of attending worship over our clothes. That's a poor assertion to make, since the two options don't exclude each other - I don't see how forcing people into formal wear inhibits their desire for worship, and if it does, I'm not sure that allowing them casual attire would bring them closer to God, even if they were in church.

Nevertheless, I'm glad that the priest had cause for complaint, and hope that many churches will encounter the same. My beef with the priest's argument is that the setting of dress codes formalises worship, when worship shouldn't be formal. It solidifies an undesirable dichotomy between our interaction with God and our personal life. It's much harder to live our lives as God would have it when we're used to putting them on hold before thinking of Him.

Furthermore, under the systems of belief that view God as omnipresent, the argument that we should dress up for God is patently ridiculous, unless it follows that we must deck ourselves in suits all the time. Dressing in casual wear keeps our mind in the context that worship is part of the everyday, and that's a better rule to follow if only to keep God's teachings in mind (since there's an ostensible lack of it in our daily lives, but that's a whole other quibble).

This is part of my wider point, about the need for greater decentralisation of God from the church. However much individual Christians may see the flaws in the cultivation of formal worship (as some have noted, when I knew them back in my churchgoing days), they will tend towards it anyway. This is because many Christians lack confidence that their actions will have considerable impact, and see the church as the only visible face of their religion. All that results is the breeding of hypocrisy, as churchgoers are led to complacency, and have God in their lives for only a few hours each week. The sooner we can acknowledge that God lives within us, the sooner we can eradicate this dissolute trend.