Category Archives: Religion

The Sanctity of Symbols

Just a quick post to draw attention to a recent blog post by PZ Myers that’s been making the rounds lately. Here’s a summary of the story so far:

A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, attended a Catholic Mass on the 29th June, and after accepting a Communion wafer, believed by Catholics to be sacred and a piece of the flesh of Jesus Christ after being consecrated, pocketed it instead of consuming it immediately as he was required to do under the usual rules. His claimed reason for doing so was so that he could show the wafer to a friend.

This relatively innocuous action managed to turn into a huge firestorm, with Catholics calling on him to be expelled. In response, PZ Myers posted in his blog that he would desecrate a wafer, and he did so, by nailing a cross on it to a stack of pages from the Qu’ran and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and then throwing the whole thing into the trash. The point of including Dawkins’ book is of course to demonstrate that nothing is sacred. It’s just a cracker and the pages are just papers, but as PZ Myers learned and as you can read in his blog, that’s enough provocation for some people to threaten to kill Myers’ son as well as Myers himself.

Prince Caspian and the Fickleness of Deities

My wife’s first reaction as we walked out the cinema after watching Prince Caspian was “Aslan is such an asshole.” Indeed he is, and in the same way, so is the personage after whom Aslan was clearly modelled, Jesus Christ and the Christian God.

This second installment of the Narnia series based on the novels by C.S. Lewis has been marketed as a harmless, big budget, family-friendly, action adventure fantasy flick. So harmless and family-friendly that no blood whatsoever is shown on screen even as Gentle Queen Susan perforates countless enemies with her arrows and Magnificent King Peter hacks and bashes his way through the Conquistador-like opposition. But I can’t help but wonder how many of my fellow Malaysians who sat with me in the same cinema were aware of the Christian agenda behind the novels and the films it has inspired. In a country so paranoid about religious sensibilities that The Passion of the Christ was banned in cinemas and the word Allah was, initially anyway, forbidden to be used by a local Christian newspaper to describe the Christian God, it’s a wonder that Prince Caspian is being shown on Malaysian cinemas with an “Umum” rating.

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Fitna: Is Islam a Violent Religion?

So this video has been spreading around the Internet with astonishing speed. What really surprised me was when one of my housemates here in the Solomon Islands wanted to show me this video, even though I don’t think that she’s normally very politically conscious. I’d already read about it in Jed Yoong’s blog and had a bit of a spat over it there, so my post here is something of an elaboration of what I’ve already posted as comments over there.

First of all, I think that the short film is woefully amateurish. Collating video footage of the gory aftermath of terrorist attacks interweaved with quotations from the Quran and speeches by firebrand Islamist leaders does not a solid argument make. It’s a blatant attempt to arouse an emotional reaction in viewers instead of attempting to advance a reasoned argument and as such isn’t really worth watching at all.

Second, even if we were to take the central premise of the film seriously, the correct question isn’t whether or not Islam is a violent religion, it’s whether or not Islam is any more violent than the other great religions. Christianity makes for a good point of comparison. It’s shares the same fundamental roots as Islam, and yet is mostly accepted around the world as a peaceful, safe and moderate religion nowadays.

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New Deadly Sins

Most people willl be familiar be the seven deadly sins in Christianity: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride. If you’re not, just go watch David Fincher’s Seven. In an effort to keep up with globalization and the modern world, the Vatican has apparently decided to add a bunch new sins to the old list including drug abuse, polluting the environment, genetic manipulation and contributing to widening the divide between the rich and the poor.

Now the original seven sins never did make much logical sense, for example, you could argue that Lust, Gluttony and Envy are all variations of Greed, but at least they have a sort of poetic resonance. You can’t really say the same for these new ones and isn’t worrying about the divide between the rich and the poor yet another variation on the Greed theme? Besides, by explicitly condemning genetic manipulation as being inherently sinful, the Vatican will be contributing to the rising tide of anti-science protesters around the world and making it harder to bring the benefits of the technology to the world. Is genetically manipulating bacteria to create synthetic versions of fossil fuels sinful for example?

The irony here is that without genetic manipulation, humanity wouldn’t be what it is today. Civilization was built by early human hunter gatherers settling down to become farmers and in order to do that, they had to selectively choose animals and plants to breed in such a way as to reinforce the desirable traits in them and to reduce undesirable ones. In this way, wolves were tamed to become work dogs, wild plants were cultivated to become reliable food crops and the fearsome aurochs of our ancestors’ time have been turned into the placid cows of today. Humans took what they found in nature and manipulated their breeding across generations so that their descendants would better serve our needs. All of that counts as genetic manipulation even if it wasn’t done by men in white lab coats.

Sharia Law in Great Britain

I’m a little slow on this issue but I felt that this article in the Asia Times is well worth pointing out. On February 7, Archbishop Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican church, made a speech in which he predicted that sharia law would inevitably be accepted in Great Britain. This article is one of many others written in protest against the speech.

There are plenty of reasons to be dismayed by the U.K. granting legal recognition to sharia law alongside with its own national laws including what many commentators have already described as a means of appeasing fundamentalist Muslims, even if it means sacrificing the liberal values that flow naturally from a recognition of universal and inviolable human rights.

Personally, I must also confess that I find the issue of sharia law itself uncomfortable. Inasmuch as sharia covers areas such as marriage, or food preparation standards or finance in which all of the participants voluntarily agree to have any disputes be arbitrated under it, I, of course, have no objections. But since sharia is supposed to apply to Muslims only, it seems more than a little unfair that Muslims who change their minds and renounce Islam find it hard to do so and hence are still subject to sharia against their will.

Books: His Dark Materials

“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn from by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

– Phillip Pullman in The Subtle Knife

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(Normally I try to keep my book reviews relatively free of spoilers so that readers can choose to read the books themselves and still enjoy them after having read my review. However, to do the same for these books would prevent me from saying what I want to say about them, so instead of a review, this post should really be thought of as a kind of analysis. As such, be warned that further reading will spoil the books for you.)

It’s not hard to imagine what went through the minds of the executives at New Line Cinema when they greenlighted the movie version of The Golden Compass that was released late last year. Their film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings had proved to be a tremendous commercial success. Walt Disney Pictures had The Chronicles of Narnia series going for them and Warner Bros. had the goldmine that is the Harry Potter series. The movie-going public clearly has an appetite for the fantasy genre, especially for films adapted from children’s books, so what could be better than the new and popular His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman?

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“Three Little Pigs” Offensive

BBC News has an article on a ebook retelling of the classic “Three Little Pigs” children’s story meant for primary school children being turned down for a government award on the grounds that some might find it offensive. The judges thought that the ebook which was distributed on a CD-ROM might offend not only Muslims due to its use of pigs as characters but also construction labourers since, well, the pigs in the story build houses.

Needless to say, I find this to be an example of political correctness at its most ridiculous. Sometimes a pig is just a pig.