This is in response to alwyn's response to my response to his response to my response to his blog.
Firstly, I am confident of the human race. I believe(and in a sense, assume) that there are no stupid people in the world. There are careless people, there are ignorant people, there are stubborn people, there are unthinking people, but there are no stupid people.

If people read up, spend some time thinking, take note of their actions, and keep an open mind, then we will not have a problem with stupidity, but rather, propaganda. Religious conflicts are caused and maintained by propaganda. (interesting read: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/strife.php)

If the cause of one religion is to stamp out another, it would not be possible to bring so many religions and philosophies in Singapore without a massive conflict. People are clever enough to think for themselves what they want out of a religion. Example: tudung issue. Many muslims are willing to sacrifice some of the beliefs which they feel is not that vital to the goal of islam, and are willing to follow the government's policies on "equality and harmony" in education, for the greater good. It is not correct to say that religion cause people to care more for their god than mankind.

The reason why Singapore and Malaysia is able to bring about racial harmony, I feel that it is not that Singapore and Malaysia have different religions from those in the places where "interreligious" conflicts occur, rather, there difference is that the different religions are exposed to different sources of information. The Singapore government would not tolerate it if Mediacorp's news content in suria is drastically different from channel 8, and the society is generally intolerant to racist acts.

In summary, the 'members' of religions can think for themselves if what they are doing is correct; religions do not turn people into unthinking soldiers and resistance against science, but propaganda can.

In Singapore, we are rather lucky that we are shown "the two sides of the coin" when we look at an international conflict (not involving our countries interest), but do notice that our media also portrays Singapore is right and Malaysia is wrong during the water issue, and that China is right and Taiwan is wrong in the taiwan independence issue. On my on stand, I would not make any conclusions, as i admit that it is much easier for me to strong points in the arguments that the media wants to put forward, and i am unlikely to make an unbiased judgement. Nevertheless, the judgement that the government wants us to make would be in the interests of the country, if the government is a good one, and i would like to believe so.

With regard to the issue that there is no basis for religion, i beg to differ.

Consider the following argument:
Careless student says:
a=1. b=2 therefore a+b=3. hmm...and a+4=6(oops)

what a minute. does a even exist? How do you know it does? you are only assuming that there is something called a, can you prove it exists? If you can't prove it exists, it does not. Look: my equation shows that a=3 and i have concrete proof, so you are wrong, a does not exist. you don't even need a or b to solve the equation, 1+2= works fine too. and haha look, a+4=6...wtf man a is illogical! 1+4 is fucking 5, not 6! and also, in primary school we can score 100% with arithmethic, but we can only score 80+% in alegebra! therefore, a does not exist, it does not need to exist, its existence only causes trouble and confusion, and we should stick to arithmetic.

We don't need to believe in the presence of an omni-potent being to keep us moving. But some people prefer to do things this way.
We don't need algebra, but some people prefer doing things this way.
The fact that some people misunderstand other religions and use that as a justification to murder does not mean that religion is a fundamentally flawed concept.
The fact that some people make mistakes in their algebraic problems and hence are unable to get correct results for their experiments does not justify that algebra is fundamentally flawed.

That said, I summarise the points in my above analogy:
The fact that something cannot to proven to exist does not mean it does not exist.
Something does not need to be proven to exist for it to work.
The fact that something can cause problems if in the wrong hands does not mean it is a fundamentally flawed concept.
The fact that people can use something to prevent another more noble cause from being fulfilled does not mean that that thing causes nothing but harm.
The fact that there is an alternative to something does not mean that that thing is redundant.

Therefore, religion cannot be said to be a fundamentally flawed concept just because what they base their beliefs on cannot be proven to exist.

I am not against science, but I feel that science should not be considered a gauge of the development of human race. Just because science is the correct way to explain things, science does not come first, because science cannot make things work; we need the infrastructure first.

I am also not saying that we all need a religion, i am just saying that there is nothing wrong with any religion. Religions do not cause problems, they help in maintaining social cohesion, and just because blindly following a religion can prevent a certain aspect of science to be recognised does not mean there cannot be religion if one wants science.

Science and religions are not mutually exclusive. There will come a time when people use science to dismiss certain parts in religions, and religions do nothing more than their desired purpose. Despite the Inquisition, we now know that the earth goes around the sun, and many of us have heard of the theory of evolution. People can think, if it is within reason they will eventually accept it. That is why science has triumphed.

Religions cannot hinder people from thinking for themselves, that is why we have so many Christian, Jewish, Muslim and (alright alwyn,) Hindu scientists. If religion and science is mutually exclusive, then the human race would not have progressed till now. Interests that are mutually exclusive always lead to a conflict solvable only by annihilation of one of them, but currently i do not see an unresolvable "Scientific Ideal" vs "Religious Ideal" conflict. If it is resolvable by understanding, then it means that they are not mutually exclusive, but instead the conflict is caused by misunderstanding in the first place. It did not take the annihilation of the Roman Catholic Church to have Catholics believe that the earth goes around the sun. It just shows that the people controlling it misunderstand either the religion or the science to think that they are mutually exclusive and hence oppress Galileo's works.

Scienific progress and religion have coexisted for a long time in human history, and they can continue to do so. However, the root cause of the "conflicts" between different religions and science is ignorance, and large scale ignorance caused by propaganda leads to large scale conflicts. These "conflicts" can be solved by understanding of each other on both sides.