Sunday, December 18, 2011
This is the 500th post! I can't believe that this blog has survived so long. Unfortunately, nothing epic is going to happen here (Then again, 500 is only special because we have 2 hands, 5 fingers, and Indian merchants were smart). This is just a test for a web service called "IntenseDebate", which I think seems pretty cool. Really! Nothing much to see here.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
I do hope that overseas Singaporeans stop giving people the impression that Singapore is a dictatorship/totalitarian/authoritarian/despotic state.
What prompted me to write this post is that some of my schoolmates from USA thought that Singapore isn't a democracy - they were genuinely surprised to hear from me that Singapore holds elections at all. When I asked them, "What gave you the impression that Singapore is not a democracy?" The response: "Even the other Singaporeans whom I've talked to don't seem to think that Singapore is a democracy."
I find it rather curious why some people from the US get the impression from Singaporeans that Singapore is some sort of an outright dictatorship. It is a matter of fact that Singapore is a democracy. Leaders are chosen by elections. Leaders are accountable to the people. Citizens have civil rights. What is left as a matter of opinion is the extent to which the above three are true, and whether that means that Singapore is "truly" a democracy.
I cannot generalize this to all overseas Singaporeans, of course, but from the ~5 Singaporeans whom I have encountered describing Singapore to Americans, I get the impression that they tend to be too eager to state why Singapore is not "truly" a democracy, but forget to mention that Singapore is a democracy in the first place. While another Singaporean will understand that Singapore isn't run by Mussolini/Hilter/Mao, someone who hasn't heard much about Singapore might have a different idea in mind when one says, "Well, we don't exactly have free speech, we are known for really strict laws, and the ruling party has been ruling since independence."
Why do we (the ~5 people we have met and admittedly, myself initially) so spontaneously speak of how Singapore isn't "exactly" a democracy before we even state that it is one? My guess is that Singaporeans are used to talking about Singapore-style democracy in the context where they are arguing about the finer points with other Singaporeans, who are well aware of and are used to all the rights that they have in Singapore. The largely pro-government mainstream media wouldn't hesitate to remind us that the government is accountable to the people. The rulers wouldn't hesitate to remind us that they are, after all, chosen by the people fair and square. The truth is not entirely that. Given these information as the basis to agree upon or to critique, New media and coffee-shop talks balance out the dominant influences of public opinion with a primarily anti-government stance to arrive at something that is more accurate.
The effect of this context of pro-government media is that when discussing Singapore politics, a Singaporean subconsciously assumes that the listener already knows some big things about Singapore. We are already used to doing all kinds of things with few state-enforced consequences, the things that we cannot do without consequences are particularly salient. We pretty much take our rights for granted. As such, we are used to talking about the rights we don't have and how elections aren't exactly fair, rather than the rights we do have.
This works fine in Singapore, because everyone lives here and has some intuitive idea of how "oppressed" we are. But when someone who is used to thinking of and talking about Singapore politics this way will be misleading to people who haven't heard much of Singapore. Without the preconception of all the things you can do in Singapore, it gives a rather negative and inaccurate impression.
I cannot prescribe what one should say to others about Singapore. After all, what I say is also mostly my own opinions. But I do hope that when Singaporeans talk to other people about Singapore politics, do consider that people might assume the worst if you only state what is not good.
PS: Another observation is that Malaysians tend to give a more positive portrayal of Singapore than Singaporeans themselves do. Maybe we can learn from them to produce a more balanced "pitch" about Singapore politics.
What prompted me to write this post is that some of my schoolmates from USA thought that Singapore isn't a democracy - they were genuinely surprised to hear from me that Singapore holds elections at all. When I asked them, "What gave you the impression that Singapore is not a democracy?" The response: "Even the other Singaporeans whom I've talked to don't seem to think that Singapore is a democracy."
I find it rather curious why some people from the US get the impression from Singaporeans that Singapore is some sort of an outright dictatorship. It is a matter of fact that Singapore is a democracy. Leaders are chosen by elections. Leaders are accountable to the people. Citizens have civil rights. What is left as a matter of opinion is the extent to which the above three are true, and whether that means that Singapore is "truly" a democracy.
I cannot generalize this to all overseas Singaporeans, of course, but from the ~5 Singaporeans whom I have encountered describing Singapore to Americans, I get the impression that they tend to be too eager to state why Singapore is not "truly" a democracy, but forget to mention that Singapore is a democracy in the first place. While another Singaporean will understand that Singapore isn't run by Mussolini/Hilter/Mao, someone who hasn't heard much about Singapore might have a different idea in mind when one says, "Well, we don't exactly have free speech, we are known for really strict laws, and the ruling party has been ruling since independence."
Why do we (the ~5 people we have met and admittedly, myself initially) so spontaneously speak of how Singapore isn't "exactly" a democracy before we even state that it is one? My guess is that Singaporeans are used to talking about Singapore-style democracy in the context where they are arguing about the finer points with other Singaporeans, who are well aware of and are used to all the rights that they have in Singapore. The largely pro-government mainstream media wouldn't hesitate to remind us that the government is accountable to the people. The rulers wouldn't hesitate to remind us that they are, after all, chosen by the people fair and square. The truth is not entirely that. Given these information as the basis to agree upon or to critique, New media and coffee-shop talks balance out the dominant influences of public opinion with a primarily anti-government stance to arrive at something that is more accurate.
The effect of this context of pro-government media is that when discussing Singapore politics, a Singaporean subconsciously assumes that the listener already knows some big things about Singapore. We are already used to doing all kinds of things with few state-enforced consequences, the things that we cannot do without consequences are particularly salient. We pretty much take our rights for granted. As such, we are used to talking about the rights we don't have and how elections aren't exactly fair, rather than the rights we do have.
This works fine in Singapore, because everyone lives here and has some intuitive idea of how "oppressed" we are. But when someone who is used to thinking of and talking about Singapore politics this way will be misleading to people who haven't heard much of Singapore. Without the preconception of all the things you can do in Singapore, it gives a rather negative and inaccurate impression.
I cannot prescribe what one should say to others about Singapore. After all, what I say is also mostly my own opinions. But I do hope that when Singaporeans talk to other people about Singapore politics, do consider that people might assume the worst if you only state what is not good.
PS: Another observation is that Malaysians tend to give a more positive portrayal of Singapore than Singaporeans themselves do. Maybe we can learn from them to produce a more balanced "pitch" about Singapore politics.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Are exclamation marks outdated? CAPS LOCK IS QUITE GOOD AT GIVING THE IMPRESSION OF SHOUTING. In fact, from the first word of the 'capped' sentence that you read, you would already know that there is some shouting going in, whereas if you were reading a sentence that ends with an exclamation mark, you would have no idea that the sentence was meant to be emphasized, leading to only the last couple of marks "sounding louder" in your inner voice!
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Five minutes
Can I summarize each course that I took last year in about five minutes? Let's see.
Classical Mechanics:
- Principle of Least Action is equivalent to Newton's Laws.
- Principle of Least Action goes like this: there is a quantity called "Action", which is a function of a trajectory(real or hypothetical). Only trajectories with an extremum action are physically possible.
- If you have N degrees of freedom, you can use this principle to write N equations of motion. Just plug the Lagrangian into Euler's equation.
- If there are constraint forces, find an excuse to put the constraint into the Langrangian (by adding "zero" times a Langrange multiplier). The magnitude of the Lagrange multiplier give you an idea of how "strong" the constraint force is.
- You can rewrite the Lagrangian in another form. Applying the Legendre transform gives the Hamiltonian. The point of doing this is to make it easier to express equations of motion in terms of momentum. You also get first order differential equations instead of second order ones. (Doesn't make it easier to solve though, since they are typically coupled for non-trivial cases)
- Noether's theorem - the coolest thing of all. "Every symmetry has a corresponding conservation law." It sounds like something that came out of Dao De Jing (ok maybe not that much). E.g., if shifting your setup in the x-direction isn't going to affect its motion, then this means that x-momentum is conserved. So this theorem links every displacement with some kind of momentum. BUT! The weirdest thing is, time is associated with Energy! Really interesting, and this will become significant later.
- Central force motion and Scattering. Some mathematical tricks, many useful formulae that you probably shouldn't try to derive by yourself during a midterm. Landau is brilliant, read each page many times.
- Oscillations with driving forces, damping forces and coupling. Driving forces - use Fourier transformation for periodic driving forces, use Green's function for the general case, Laplace transform works well too. Damping forces - memorize/refer to solutions of this kind of second order ODE, and be comfortable with complex exponents, trig functions and hyperbolic trig functions. Coupling - make small oscillation approximations, dump it into a matrix and solve the eigenvalue/eigenfunction problem. Maple/Mathematica is your friend. If coupling is weak, approximate generously.
- Non-intertial frames and rigid body motion. Nightmare fuel. Remember Euler's equations, remember how to use them. Developing an intuition, while not wholly rigorous, helps to prevent sign errors and saves time. There's also a magical equation, "d/dt|_inertial = d/dt|_body - omega cross", which nobody seems to know how to derive but somehow works marvelously well.
- Special relativity. The relativistic Lagrangian is -gamma mc^2. You can obtain it by doing a Legendre transform on total relativistic energy. All the above tricks apply, except that rigid bodies aren't so rigid anymore.
Multivariable Calc:
- Langrage multipliers are cool.
- The Hessian determinant is useful for checking whether a stationary point is max, min, saddle, or degenerate. Take note of boundary points.
- The Jacobian determinant is useful for doing multiple integrals. It's important to set the integral up properly.
- Line integrals - find a new parameter to describe the line, and integrate along it. Remember to take the dot product.
- Surface integrals - find two parameters to describe the surface, and integrate along them. Remember to take the cross product. Be careful with the orientation, or use intuition to check the answer and reverse-engineer the sign.
- Curl of grad is zero, div of curl is zero.
- There are three different manifestations of the "fundamental theorem of calculus" - a relationship between differentiation and integration. 1) If the vector field has zero curl, it's possible to express it as a grad of some scalar field. It's the relationship between gradient and line integral. 2) Divergence theorem expresses the relationship between divergence and volume integral. 3) Stokes' theorem expresses the relationship between curl and surface integral.
Social Psych:
- There are different ways of doing social psych research - typically analyzing data and doing experiments. There are advantages and limitations to all approaches. Note experimental biases, cultural differences, observer effects. Studies may be value-laden. They might also be conducted in unethical ways. Most studies quoted in this course are done in the US, so what is true there might not be true elsewhere.
- The "self" is a more fluid construct with East Asians than it is with Americans - i.e., different situations, different "self".
- Many biases - "Better than average" phenomenon is one of them. Tendency to warp perception/interpretation of reality to make oneself feel better.
- Situational influence -> Mechanism --> Phenomenon --> Effect. Two common mechanisms are arousal and rationalization.
- Attitudes influence behaviour, but behaviour can also influence attitudes. Some powerful persuasion techniques make use of this.
- Persuasion could take central route or peripheral route. Which route works better depends on a number of factors.
- Conformity and Obedience - [Asch, Milgram expt] Most people can be made to conform under the right circumstances (though there is always some who don't conform). A few factors that affect the degree of conformity/obedience have been found.
- Attraction - people are typically more attracted to those they meet more often and that they are more similar to.
- People form groups quite easily, and tend to bias against the outgroup.
- Stereotypes influence people's perceptions unconsciously but significantly. Approaches have been found to reduce this.
General computer science(Java)
A bit of the following:
- Elementary types and operations, Arrays, If else, loops, methods and arguments, recursion, classes and objects, scope and encapsulation, using data types, creating data types, linked lists, using interfaces, order of growth(time/resources), insertion sort vs mergesort, computability, tractability, P versus NP.
Writing seminar
- UNCLEAR THESIS/MOTIVE WILL BREAK AN ESSAY
- Read the source before critiquing it (instead of referring to someone else's critique)
- There are ways to twist a quotation to suit your purpose.
- Sometimes there's just no correct answer.
- Good stitching helps to make a essay more "flowy", which is good.
(To be continued)
Can I summarize each course that I took last year in about five minutes? Let's see.
Classical Mechanics:
- Principle of Least Action is equivalent to Newton's Laws.
- Principle of Least Action goes like this: there is a quantity called "Action", which is a function of a trajectory(real or hypothetical). Only trajectories with an extremum action are physically possible.
- If you have N degrees of freedom, you can use this principle to write N equations of motion. Just plug the Lagrangian into Euler's equation.
- If there are constraint forces, find an excuse to put the constraint into the Langrangian (by adding "zero" times a Langrange multiplier). The magnitude of the Lagrange multiplier give you an idea of how "strong" the constraint force is.
- You can rewrite the Lagrangian in another form. Applying the Legendre transform gives the Hamiltonian. The point of doing this is to make it easier to express equations of motion in terms of momentum. You also get first order differential equations instead of second order ones. (Doesn't make it easier to solve though, since they are typically coupled for non-trivial cases)
- Noether's theorem - the coolest thing of all. "Every symmetry has a corresponding conservation law." It sounds like something that came out of Dao De Jing (ok maybe not that much). E.g., if shifting your setup in the x-direction isn't going to affect its motion, then this means that x-momentum is conserved. So this theorem links every displacement with some kind of momentum. BUT! The weirdest thing is, time is associated with Energy! Really interesting, and this will become significant later.
- Central force motion and Scattering. Some mathematical tricks, many useful formulae that you probably shouldn't try to derive by yourself during a midterm. Landau is brilliant, read each page many times.
- Oscillations with driving forces, damping forces and coupling. Driving forces - use Fourier transformation for periodic driving forces, use Green's function for the general case, Laplace transform works well too. Damping forces - memorize/refer to solutions of this kind of second order ODE, and be comfortable with complex exponents, trig functions and hyperbolic trig functions. Coupling - make small oscillation approximations, dump it into a matrix and solve the eigenvalue/eigenfunction problem. Maple/Mathematica is your friend. If coupling is weak, approximate generously.
- Non-intertial frames and rigid body motion. Nightmare fuel. Remember Euler's equations, remember how to use them. Developing an intuition, while not wholly rigorous, helps to prevent sign errors and saves time. There's also a magical equation, "d/dt|_inertial = d/dt|_body - omega cross", which nobody seems to know how to derive but somehow works marvelously well.
- Special relativity. The relativistic Lagrangian is -gamma mc^2. You can obtain it by doing a Legendre transform on total relativistic energy. All the above tricks apply, except that rigid bodies aren't so rigid anymore.
Multivariable Calc:
- Langrage multipliers are cool.
- The Hessian determinant is useful for checking whether a stationary point is max, min, saddle, or degenerate. Take note of boundary points.
- The Jacobian determinant is useful for doing multiple integrals. It's important to set the integral up properly.
- Line integrals - find a new parameter to describe the line, and integrate along it. Remember to take the dot product.
- Surface integrals - find two parameters to describe the surface, and integrate along them. Remember to take the cross product. Be careful with the orientation, or use intuition to check the answer and reverse-engineer the sign.
- Curl of grad is zero, div of curl is zero.
- There are three different manifestations of the "fundamental theorem of calculus" - a relationship between differentiation and integration. 1) If the vector field has zero curl, it's possible to express it as a grad of some scalar field. It's the relationship between gradient and line integral. 2) Divergence theorem expresses the relationship between divergence and volume integral. 3) Stokes' theorem expresses the relationship between curl and surface integral.
Social Psych:
- There are different ways of doing social psych research - typically analyzing data and doing experiments. There are advantages and limitations to all approaches. Note experimental biases, cultural differences, observer effects. Studies may be value-laden. They might also be conducted in unethical ways. Most studies quoted in this course are done in the US, so what is true there might not be true elsewhere.
- The "self" is a more fluid construct with East Asians than it is with Americans - i.e., different situations, different "self".
- Many biases - "Better than average" phenomenon is one of them. Tendency to warp perception/interpretation of reality to make oneself feel better.
- Situational influence -> Mechanism --> Phenomenon --> Effect. Two common mechanisms are arousal and rationalization.
- Attitudes influence behaviour, but behaviour can also influence attitudes. Some powerful persuasion techniques make use of this.
- Persuasion could take central route or peripheral route. Which route works better depends on a number of factors.
- Conformity and Obedience - [Asch, Milgram expt] Most people can be made to conform under the right circumstances (though there is always some who don't conform). A few factors that affect the degree of conformity/obedience have been found.
- Attraction - people are typically more attracted to those they meet more often and that they are more similar to.
- People form groups quite easily, and tend to bias against the outgroup.
- Stereotypes influence people's perceptions unconsciously but significantly. Approaches have been found to reduce this.
General computer science(Java)
A bit of the following:
- Elementary types and operations, Arrays, If else, loops, methods and arguments, recursion, classes and objects, scope and encapsulation, using data types, creating data types, linked lists, using interfaces, order of growth(time/resources), insertion sort vs mergesort, computability, tractability, P versus NP.
Writing seminar
- UNCLEAR THESIS/MOTIVE WILL BREAK AN ESSAY
- Read the source before critiquing it (instead of referring to someone else's critique)
- There are ways to twist a quotation to suit your purpose.
- Sometimes there's just no correct answer.
- Good stitching helps to make a essay more "flowy", which is good.
(To be continued)
Monday, April 18, 2011
I am not a Christian. But out of curiosity, I have taken a class on the new testament this semester. Since it was a class that focuses on historical analysis, a recurring theme was how problematic the pieces that make up the new testament are as historical sources. The analysis treated the gospels as documents written by people for certain purposes, and not necessarily as faithful depictions of past events. This view leads biblical scholars to make some surprising conclusions - their dominant view now is that the gospel according to Matthew is a document that champions a Jewish sectarian movement led by Jesus. The thing, though, is that historical analysis is not what Christians do all the time when they read the bible. One biblical scholar even said that based on their methodology of historical analysis, they are not allowed to treat the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event - all they can say is that followers of the Jesus movement from around 30 CE onwards strongly believed that it happened. The "rules of the game" do not allow them to treat accounts of miracles as fact. Christians in this class are forced to read and think about the new testament in a new way.
While the methodologies prescribed by historical analysis allow for an atheistic explanation of why the text in new testament is the way it is, it gives the impression that Christians are believing in something that did not happen. So, a thing that I couldn't help but wonder is, "Do Christians really believe that these things happened? Why do so many people put their faith in something so unlikely to have happened?"
After discussing what I've "learnt" from my class with my preceptor, Peter (a classmate) and Daniel (Lo and Sim), it appears to me that Christians do not usually read the bible "to the letter" - in our class we scrutinize the differences between two different accounts of the same "event" and try to make sense of those differences in terms of the aims and biases of the different authors, but it seems to me this is not what Christians usually do when they read the bible. The Christians I have asked about this (four so far) get some recurring themes that pervade the bible, and apply it to their lives (kinda like the difference between pure math and engineering, I think). Also, assuming that the accounts in the bible really happened in the past does allow one to explain away some of its strangeness and apparent inconsistencies. What I got out of the discussion was that their faith does not lead them (i.e., these four people) to do things that I think are bad. I was glad that it was so, because I had always imagined some irreconcilable difference between Christians and atheists which would prevent us from have open discussions about important issues without evoking strong emotions.
Just yesterday, someone invited me to a Christian fellowship meeting. I sat through the prayers and songs and observed. They sang a couple of songs, and the songs made it very easy to join in. The melodies were catchy, the tunes were easy to sing and the lyrics had a lot of repetition. Nothing was really unexpected or remarkable, but there was nothing that made complete sense to me either, because they were mostly about the greatness of God/Jesus, which I wouldn't assume to be true. But what impressed me was the lecture given by the director (it was a non-denominational fellowship, so not everyone addressed him the same way, but the director had a title of "Reverend") - he taught about humility and appreciation of grace. These were things that I believed in, and I was glad that he was teaching things that would lead to behavior that I believe are good. At the same time, though, he also said that doing good should ultimately be for extending the grace of God (or something like that) instead of doing it to feel good about oneself. I didn't agree with him on that, so I went to look for him at the end of the meeting.
(Note to reader: the following account would appear biased against him, because I only remembered the most surprising things he said, and even those things I did not remember very clearly. In the actual conversation, he sounded a lot more confident. But I pretty much stopped listening whenever he started talking about God, so what he said would appear a lot more fragmentary.)
I asked him, "Do you think that there are right and wrong reasons for good behavior?" He said something which I interpreted as meaning that the only right reason for good behavior is extending the effect of the grace of God, which triumphs even doing good for the benefit of society, or a sense of good that comes from within. I questioned him on that. He said that while doing good for the benefit for society is a reason, it is not a sufficient condition for being righteous with God. So I asked, "Would you make a distinction between a Christian and a non-believer who do the same things?" He said that he would not be able to make a distinction, but God's judgment would make a distinction between believers and non-believers (which also include Christians who do not really believe), and non-believers would be sent to a place called hell ("which is a real place", he assured me) devoid of God's grace.
I was slightly disappointed at how someone who taught the good things he taught just a moment ago would also believe in such strange things. So I offered my point of view. I told him that I do not agree with him that righteousness can only be found through God. In fact, the concept of righteousness would have existed even before the bible, and if there were some book that advocated a concept of righteousness radically different from people's internal sense of right and wrong, it could not have been as pervasive as the bible today, and therefore, in an indirect way, the bible's concept of righteousness was selected based on people's internal sense of right and wrong.
Then he asked, "And how is that working out for you?" I was stumped. For the previous hour, I was observing a practice based on a somewhat coherent world view, with a venue for people to find emotional support at a time when they needed it the most. I watched it as a spectator, as the stereotypically smug "anthropologist visiting a tribe" observing a case study in social psychology for what people can believe when they are placed in large groups. I saw they had an answer that I believed was wrong. But I hadn't realized that I didn't have a clear answer myself.
He threw in a few more questions, "What is your world view?" I stammered my way through a couple of concepts that I used to think about when I was more melancholic - materialism, utilitarianism and some pop psychology (which led me right into the problem of consciousness). "So your world view is incoherence?" After some struggle, I was greatly troubled and I said that I don't know. "What would it take for you to believe that there is a god?" Someone had asked me this question before, and it was a hard question, because the lack of an answer would indicate that I am not as open-minded as I would like myself to be. It is still a hard question. I didn't answer. "Do you believe that anything controls something?" This was related to the problem of consciousness as well, so I didn't have a good answer. "Why do you think that across cultures, humans seek to worship something?" No good answer. Then he told me that it's okay not to have an answer, since many people are looking for an answer as well. He also advised me to come back again and ask more questions.
Shaken by the tough questions, I walked out and met two people I knew, and we started discussing about our world view. It turns out, that the mind-body problem is a hard problem for them. One of them was a recent convert, and he understood how out-of-place I felt being there, with all the songs and prayers and people who believed strongly in something I didn't. But at the same time, it seemed like such a nice and friendly environment where I can talk about the things that I might not be as inclined to talk about over a meal. At the same time, seeing how open seven out of the seven Christians I chose to talk to were, I felt free to argue against a Christian world view. It was a shaking yet interesting experience.
I was weak last night because I was not prepared to answer such hard questions. But now, I offer my defense.
Someone has once asked me, "How can you possibly believe in the Big Bang?" I did not have a good answer then, but my answer now is, I don't believe in the Big Bang the same way Christians believe that God created everything. My confidence in my belief of the Big Bang theory does not come from my own observation, models, and reasoning, but the confidence in scientists who came up with it. I have not worked through the data and math myself, so I would quite happy to discard this belief if many scientists were to tell me otherwise. I would also be happy to flip back to believing in Big Bang theory if it more scientists were to later proclaim the Big Bang theory to be superior. I do not have the time/expertise/interest to verify everything personally, so I take their word for it. Now I would say to him, "What would it take, then, for you to stop believing in God?"
There isn't any coherent world view that can account for everything with certainty, because once we invoke Descartes' dream/brain in a vat/malicious demon argument against it, we would need to somehow account for the existence of everything except our own consciousness. This means that if we only allow for things that people are certain of, any conscious being would have lots of gaps in their world view. As far as I am aware of, there are two ways to fix this: one is to take a leap of faith and fill in the gaps where necessary. Another way, which I prefer, is to take in any information, but tag on to each piece of information my confidence in it being true. Ideally, I would allow any of my beliefs to be questioned and changed. Rather than taking a leap of faith which adds new unquestionable beliefs, my gaps of uncertainty are instead filled with multiple beliefs with varying degrees of confidence, and if someone asks me what I believe, I would tell them the one that I am most confident of being true. Admittedly, I do not do this all the time - the sleeper effect makes this difficult to maintain, but a guard against this would be to be skeptical of a belief unless I can recall the source and see that it is reliable.
I am not only skeptical against believing in God, I am also skeptical of any belief that requires me not to doubt it. Suppose I take everything that belief in a Christian God entails and replace it with something else, but keep the belief that you MUST believe it or else bad things happen to you, I would still end up with another coherent world view, because I can discard everything that is inconsistent with it. With this formula, I can conveniently replace the stuff in Christianity that make Christians do things that we universally acknowledge to be good with stuff that make people do bad things, and end up with a coherent world view that make its believers do bad things. Suppose I am required to ignore my internal moral compass in my judgment of which one to believe in - the Christian God or the bad God, I would not be able to choose.
I think that the saving grace in the world is mankind's internal moral compass - people prefer not to believe in things that make them do evil, even if they are not allowed to question it, and that is why people who choose to believe in a God that advocates good behavior. On the other hand, telling people not to doubt something allows one to construct a coherent world view that contains anything. Hence, while I do not like the idea of not having a coherent world view, I cannot bring myself to adopt a world view that does not allow me to question. And I would say, my world view is incoherent, I am unsure, and I do not have answers, but that's okay for me.
While the methodologies prescribed by historical analysis allow for an atheistic explanation of why the text in new testament is the way it is, it gives the impression that Christians are believing in something that did not happen. So, a thing that I couldn't help but wonder is, "Do Christians really believe that these things happened? Why do so many people put their faith in something so unlikely to have happened?"
After discussing what I've "learnt" from my class with my preceptor, Peter (a classmate) and Daniel (Lo and Sim), it appears to me that Christians do not usually read the bible "to the letter" - in our class we scrutinize the differences between two different accounts of the same "event" and try to make sense of those differences in terms of the aims and biases of the different authors, but it seems to me this is not what Christians usually do when they read the bible. The Christians I have asked about this (four so far) get some recurring themes that pervade the bible, and apply it to their lives (kinda like the difference between pure math and engineering, I think). Also, assuming that the accounts in the bible really happened in the past does allow one to explain away some of its strangeness and apparent inconsistencies. What I got out of the discussion was that their faith does not lead them (i.e., these four people) to do things that I think are bad. I was glad that it was so, because I had always imagined some irreconcilable difference between Christians and atheists which would prevent us from have open discussions about important issues without evoking strong emotions.
Just yesterday, someone invited me to a Christian fellowship meeting. I sat through the prayers and songs and observed. They sang a couple of songs, and the songs made it very easy to join in. The melodies were catchy, the tunes were easy to sing and the lyrics had a lot of repetition. Nothing was really unexpected or remarkable, but there was nothing that made complete sense to me either, because they were mostly about the greatness of God/Jesus, which I wouldn't assume to be true. But what impressed me was the lecture given by the director (it was a non-denominational fellowship, so not everyone addressed him the same way, but the director had a title of "Reverend") - he taught about humility and appreciation of grace. These were things that I believed in, and I was glad that he was teaching things that would lead to behavior that I believe are good. At the same time, though, he also said that doing good should ultimately be for extending the grace of God (or something like that) instead of doing it to feel good about oneself. I didn't agree with him on that, so I went to look for him at the end of the meeting.
(Note to reader: the following account would appear biased against him, because I only remembered the most surprising things he said, and even those things I did not remember very clearly. In the actual conversation, he sounded a lot more confident. But I pretty much stopped listening whenever he started talking about God, so what he said would appear a lot more fragmentary.)
I asked him, "Do you think that there are right and wrong reasons for good behavior?" He said something which I interpreted as meaning that the only right reason for good behavior is extending the effect of the grace of God, which triumphs even doing good for the benefit of society, or a sense of good that comes from within. I questioned him on that. He said that while doing good for the benefit for society is a reason, it is not a sufficient condition for being righteous with God. So I asked, "Would you make a distinction between a Christian and a non-believer who do the same things?" He said that he would not be able to make a distinction, but God's judgment would make a distinction between believers and non-believers (which also include Christians who do not really believe), and non-believers would be sent to a place called hell ("which is a real place", he assured me) devoid of God's grace.
I was slightly disappointed at how someone who taught the good things he taught just a moment ago would also believe in such strange things. So I offered my point of view. I told him that I do not agree with him that righteousness can only be found through God. In fact, the concept of righteousness would have existed even before the bible, and if there were some book that advocated a concept of righteousness radically different from people's internal sense of right and wrong, it could not have been as pervasive as the bible today, and therefore, in an indirect way, the bible's concept of righteousness was selected based on people's internal sense of right and wrong.
Then he asked, "And how is that working out for you?" I was stumped. For the previous hour, I was observing a practice based on a somewhat coherent world view, with a venue for people to find emotional support at a time when they needed it the most. I watched it as a spectator, as the stereotypically smug "anthropologist visiting a tribe" observing a case study in social psychology for what people can believe when they are placed in large groups. I saw they had an answer that I believed was wrong. But I hadn't realized that I didn't have a clear answer myself.
He threw in a few more questions, "What is your world view?" I stammered my way through a couple of concepts that I used to think about when I was more melancholic - materialism, utilitarianism and some pop psychology (which led me right into the problem of consciousness). "So your world view is incoherence?" After some struggle, I was greatly troubled and I said that I don't know. "What would it take for you to believe that there is a god?" Someone had asked me this question before, and it was a hard question, because the lack of an answer would indicate that I am not as open-minded as I would like myself to be. It is still a hard question. I didn't answer. "Do you believe that anything controls something?" This was related to the problem of consciousness as well, so I didn't have a good answer. "Why do you think that across cultures, humans seek to worship something?" No good answer. Then he told me that it's okay not to have an answer, since many people are looking for an answer as well. He also advised me to come back again and ask more questions.
Shaken by the tough questions, I walked out and met two people I knew, and we started discussing about our world view. It turns out, that the mind-body problem is a hard problem for them. One of them was a recent convert, and he understood how out-of-place I felt being there, with all the songs and prayers and people who believed strongly in something I didn't. But at the same time, it seemed like such a nice and friendly environment where I can talk about the things that I might not be as inclined to talk about over a meal. At the same time, seeing how open seven out of the seven Christians I chose to talk to were, I felt free to argue against a Christian world view. It was a shaking yet interesting experience.
I was weak last night because I was not prepared to answer such hard questions. But now, I offer my defense.
Someone has once asked me, "How can you possibly believe in the Big Bang?" I did not have a good answer then, but my answer now is, I don't believe in the Big Bang the same way Christians believe that God created everything. My confidence in my belief of the Big Bang theory does not come from my own observation, models, and reasoning, but the confidence in scientists who came up with it. I have not worked through the data and math myself, so I would quite happy to discard this belief if many scientists were to tell me otherwise. I would also be happy to flip back to believing in Big Bang theory if it more scientists were to later proclaim the Big Bang theory to be superior. I do not have the time/expertise/interest to verify everything personally, so I take their word for it. Now I would say to him, "What would it take, then, for you to stop believing in God?"
There isn't any coherent world view that can account for everything with certainty, because once we invoke Descartes' dream/brain in a vat/malicious demon argument against it, we would need to somehow account for the existence of everything except our own consciousness. This means that if we only allow for things that people are certain of, any conscious being would have lots of gaps in their world view. As far as I am aware of, there are two ways to fix this: one is to take a leap of faith and fill in the gaps where necessary. Another way, which I prefer, is to take in any information, but tag on to each piece of information my confidence in it being true. Ideally, I would allow any of my beliefs to be questioned and changed. Rather than taking a leap of faith which adds new unquestionable beliefs, my gaps of uncertainty are instead filled with multiple beliefs with varying degrees of confidence, and if someone asks me what I believe, I would tell them the one that I am most confident of being true. Admittedly, I do not do this all the time - the sleeper effect makes this difficult to maintain, but a guard against this would be to be skeptical of a belief unless I can recall the source and see that it is reliable.
I am not only skeptical against believing in God, I am also skeptical of any belief that requires me not to doubt it. Suppose I take everything that belief in a Christian God entails and replace it with something else, but keep the belief that you MUST believe it or else bad things happen to you, I would still end up with another coherent world view, because I can discard everything that is inconsistent with it. With this formula, I can conveniently replace the stuff in Christianity that make Christians do things that we universally acknowledge to be good with stuff that make people do bad things, and end up with a coherent world view that make its believers do bad things. Suppose I am required to ignore my internal moral compass in my judgment of which one to believe in - the Christian God or the bad God, I would not be able to choose.
I think that the saving grace in the world is mankind's internal moral compass - people prefer not to believe in things that make them do evil, even if they are not allowed to question it, and that is why people who choose to believe in a God that advocates good behavior. On the other hand, telling people not to doubt something allows one to construct a coherent world view that contains anything. Hence, while I do not like the idea of not having a coherent world view, I cannot bring myself to adopt a world view that does not allow me to question. And I would say, my world view is incoherent, I am unsure, and I do not have answers, but that's okay for me.
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