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Being a Woman in Malaysia

Date: Sunday, 05 May 2013 20:25

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

Still the most nail-head-hitting definition of feminism I know.

This post retells two of the stories I shared on the Malaysian Atheists, Freethinkers and Agnostics (MAFA) Facebook page on the subject of feminism, gender equality and sexism which I encountered in the past few weeks. I wonder if they will make you as angry as they made me.

You see, I always laugh a bitter laugh whenever they tell me that the fight for gender quality is over. We had won the war, they say. Women can now get educated, vote and work. The feminism movement should be put out to pasture to graze on the sweet, sweet grass of women's liberation. Why then, I ask, do the ghosts of inequality still haunt me every day? Why am I still seeing their ghoulish mocking faces, plain as daylight?

Shortly after discovering that my gestating child is a baby boy last month, I started working on his name immediately. Names are something special to me, and even back in my high school days, I wondered why children are expected to carry their father's names. Why is it the cultural standard for my people, the ethnic Chinese, as it is for the Malays, Indians, and the other assorted minorities in Malaysia? Perhaps my fixation on surnames and patronyms stemmed from my history of being teased for mine, which is a homophone for the male organ - I don't know - but it always struck me as very odd that women would be okay with this arrangement.

The nobility of motherhood was deeply impressed upon me by society and school all my young life - y'know, the 9-month-long pregnancies and excruciatingly painful labour that they have to endure to bring every new person into this world. Why is it that as soon as the babies are out, everyone decides that it is fair to stamp these neonates with their father's name? I mean, every single cell, every molecule, in every human being who ever lived were made and assembled entirely in their mother's womb out their mother's flesh and blood. Theoretically, only half the nucleus in one measly cell out of the billion bajillion cells in a newborn came from the father, from that one sperm that could. Even if you take the genetic or "intellectual property" viewpoint that half of the kid's DNA came from dad, it still seem ridiculously unfair to name every single baby after the male parent. It deeply upsets my sense of justice.

Hyphenated surnames are quite unsightly for Chinese names, so I decided that my child will bear his mother's name. I felt a sort of mild gut resistance to that idea initially but then I remember that this decision to allow your child to carry the name of your spouse is readily made every single day by almost every mother in the world in all of time without any fuss. Since, I don't even have to suffer the hardships of carrying our kid to term or experience the agony of bringing him out, why should I feel even a smidgen of entitlement at all? The boy is my son. He is my son no matter what name he bears because half his genes came from me and nothing will ever change that. I am not so insecure as other men that I need him to carry my name to reassure myself of that immutable fact.

The next step I took was phone the Registrar of Births and Deaths' office to find out if it can be done. A female staff member there answered my call and when I put to her my query, she was taken back. She said no one has ever asked her such a thing before. And no, my child cannot carry his mother's surname, she told me. There is actually a rule in the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1957 (Act 299) that does not permit it. Article 13A says,

The surname, if any, to be entered in respect of a legitimate child shall ordinarily be the surname, if any, of the father.

The Man says suck it, Woman.

"Is there any way around it?" I asked the lady.

She thought about it awhile and said, "Well, you can declare the child illegitimate. He or she will then take the mother's name."

Sainted copulating faeces! So, if I name my child after his mom, he is by default illegitimate? Are women considered so lowly in this country that only bastards are allowed to take their mother's name? The fact that a man's privilege to name his offspring after himself is protected by law is indicative of how sexism is legislated in this country. The fact that no one saw any problem with this is evidence of how sexist our culture and society is.

Tomorrow, the 13th General Election of my country and many are hopeful that it will finally turned this leaky, sinking ship of a country around after being helmed for more than half a century by a radically racist, incredibly inept and cartoonishly corrupted government.

If you noticed, that is what today's Google Doodle is celebrating.

... and YouTube too.

One of the most hotly challenged issues is the providence of special rights and privileges for the ethnic Malay majority of this country in our constitution, and we cry so foul because it is racist, it is unfair, it is wrong to be discriminated against for not being Malay. However, we are completely silent when 50% of our population is being discriminated against by law for not being men.

I see this cultural assent of women's inferiority all the time, particularly now that we are expecting. The first thing anyone always ask after finding out that my wife is pregnant is, "Is it a boy or a girl?" We get very hearty congratulations when we tell them that it's a male child. When I share the fact that my wife and I were playfully expecting a girl before we found out, they always ask me why - and not in a curious way either but more in a surprised fashion, as if it is unthinkable why anyone would prefer girls over the clearly superior boys. Last week, one of the medical officers I worked with brought his 3-day-old kid to the nursery for phototherapy because of neonatal jaundice, and I struck up a conversation with him about being new fathers. As expected, he congratulated me for producing a male heir, and when I talked about wanting to have a girl initially and that my wife actually sewed a dress, he asked "Wouldn't you want to get a boy first, and then try for a girl later?"

When I told him that we only want one kid, he asked, incredulous, "You wanted your only child to be a girl?" Mind you that this came from a modern medical doctor, not some peasant from the Tang dynasty.

So women of Malaysia, how do you feel about being considered as being inferior to men before you are even born?

And this ingrained cultural preference for boys is not harmless. Even though Malaysia is nowhere as bad as say, India where it is illegal for doctors to reveal the sex of unborn children for fear of parents aborting female babies, this baseline misogyny have very real and very insidious effects.

Recently, I attended to the Caesarean birth of a baby by an Indonesian woman who married a Malaysian. She had to undergo a Caesarean section because we deemed that her previous Caesarean scar, done less than one year ago, had not healed sufficiently to attempt safe natural birth (or "trial of scar" as we termed it). I did the maths and realised that she conceived just 2 months after her last child was born. Then, we found out that she did not use any contraceptives because her husband forbade her to use any while he refused to use condoms himself. That makes no sense. When we pressed her for the reason, she said it is because her husband wanted a boy as soon as possible, as their first child was a girl.

We generally counsel women to space their pregnancies two years apart, particularly if there is a previous scar that can rupture and kill them with blood loss during subsequent labour. We counselled this woman and her husband previously, so he knew full well he was wagering his wife's life. The last I heard of her (as I was not her primary physician), she was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit for severe postpartum haemorrhage.

But congratu-fucking-lations, he got what he wanted; a teeny tiny baby wang between his second child's legs. The wife's health and safety was clearly secondary to this goal because after all, that's what women are good for, aren't they? Means to an end.

So no, the fight for gender equality is far from over. There are still battles to be fought in the hearts of all Malaysians. There are still unbroken shackles in our minds, legacies of our barbaric ancestry. This is completely arbitrary and personal, but the day I lay down arms is when half of all children born in our country can expect to be named after their mothers, and they will bear their names without any shame.

P.S. Since the wording of article 13A in Act 299 seems to suggest some flexibility in interpretation, I wonder if it can be challenged.

Ironically named feminist,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Occupational Odyssey, Controversially..."

In the Name of Lilith

Date: Tuesday, 09 Apr 2013 03:13

"We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth."

Lilith to Adam
from The Alphabet of Jesus ben Sirach

In the past few days, after I have learned of my unborn son's sex, I had been dreaming of suitable names for him and going online to look up their root languages, origins, literal meanings, and historical significance. I am talking about an English name, of course, since it is the language my brain speaks internally. I wouldn't even know how to begin giving a Chinese name to anyone, so I am going to just not think about it for now with the vague plan of hiring a Taoist priest later to divine one from the entrails of poultry for me. Or something.

So, I had a few in mind and after meticulously agonising on the worth of each, I eventually decided on one. I loved it. I thought it was perfect. For now, that is going to remain a secret between the missus and I until his birth (or until I think of a better one). One day, I will write about that name, but today is not that day.

However, in my quest to name my male child, my mind stalled and idled many times on the alternate reality daydream of having instead a daughter. Perhaps there was an absence of the weight of consequence in a hypothetical scenario, but I find that naming a daughter to be a far easier and more organic experience. There is no contest: she must be called Lilith.

I first came across the name (and the myth) of Lilith in Jewish folklore, from The Alphabet of Ben Sirach in the following passage,

While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone'. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Creator: 'Sovereign of the universe!' he said, 'the woman you gave me has run away.'

We all know how the story supposedly went from this little fan-fiction of the Bible. God would later replace Lilith with Eve, a woman created not from the same dust from whence he came but from his rib. Presumably, Eve had no problem with being on the bottom when the two grind groins.

Lilith was literally demonised in the subsequent parts of the story in Ben Sirach where she was described as a mother of demons who brings sickness to infants and God himself cursed one hundred of her children to die each day - all because she refused Adam's claim to superiority and ditched him because his fragile manhood is threatened when he's not on top when they mash genitals. For centuries this tale served as a cautionary tale for uppity women and warns them of the consequences of disobeying the perpetually insecure patriarchy. Lilith is the archetypal evil feminist and ex-wife.

Lilith, by atheist artist John Collier.

I have seen many cases of expectant parents on the internet who are name-hunting expressing interest in Lilith as a baby name but fear the negative connotations. Me? I think there's nothing negative about it - what is negative are the people who are ruining a perfectly good girl's name by having antiquated ideas about womenfolk. I thought that she should be a role model for girls. She has her own mind and speaks it. She refused to be any man's bitch and rather strike out on her own than to submit to some whiny, entitled jerk-off. She does not even take shit from God. They are all qualities I would love my pretend daughter to have.

The semitic root of the name, L-Y-L (layil) in Hebrew means night. While night can conjure up images of darkness, danger, and devils, it is also a time of serenity and peace, of dreams and inspiration, and of secrecy and mystery. I put to you that have not known true beauty until you have witnessed the infinite star-encrusted dome of the universe in the middle of a desert on a moonless night as I had. Is it not praise to be compared to it? Shakespeare's summer day ain't got a patch on it, I tell you.

~~Unfortunately,~~ I am not expecting a daughter, but to all of you out there who are, seriously consider Lilith - reclaim it from the religious pre-emancipation dumb-masses who consider women with minds of their own to be she-demons. It is a pretty name, and I think it's pretty awesome for a girl's name.

Namer of hypothetical daughters,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Thoughts and Other Excrements, Contro..."

Hey There, Little Stranger

Date: Saturday, 06 Apr 2013 18:29

"Everything grows rounder and wider and weirder, and I sit here in the middle of it all and wonder who in the world you will turn out to be."

Carrie Fisher

"It's a baby boy."

The text flashed on my phone and the moment I read it - and in the split second I understood what it meant - is the moment the fetus becomes a real person for me. There is a continuum from the day he was conceived, when he was just one cell silently and rapidly fissioning in my wife's body without either of us realising it until weeks after it had begun, to the very point I learned that he is a boy. Before then, he was more concept than flesh. Now, almost abruptly, he became defined. He is a boy. I do not yet know his gender or his sexuality; I do not know how he will look like, or what his likes and dislikes are; I do not know his hopes and fears and dreams, or even his name because we haven't thought of one yet. Neither does he. This is the beginning of discovery. This is a person whom I love to know more and more of. It's like I have moved past the first chapter of a new book - it took awhile to get going but the story finally had me hooked.

Download in progress... 46% complete.

"It weighs two-hundred plus grams. And it's kicking."

He is slightly heavier than a good-sized orange and is quickly outweighing it as I write these words. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel his weight in my hands. I can feel the unimaginable potential of all he can be, and all that I can be for him resting upon my palms. And he is kicking! I never knew how "alive and kicking" came about as an expression but it felt like it's meant to describe the moment an unborn child test his tiny limbs for the first time, reaching out to its tiny world. My son had arrived. He had made contact with physical reality and touched his mother.

"We made a human being. We made a person," I said to my wife. I am in a state of wonder at the sheer unlikelihood of it all. Our kid made it. I may not know very much about him yet, but I do know that he came from a 3.6 billion years long unbroken chain of life stretching all the way back to the very first ancient cell on primeval Earth. The mitochondria that sustain him, strewn uncountably like stars through the cosmos of his body, are heirlooms from his mother's side - from his greatest and grandest of mothers living more than 1.6 billion years ago. The Y-chromosome he carries in the centre of each and every one of his cells were bequeathed to him, handed down from father to son, by a continuous line of fathers representing more than 160 million years of legacy. He is the distillation of life itself, and - dare I suggest - its meaning. He was born from my love for Cheryl and her love for me, and it is a love that echoes from the past and whispers into the future. I believe that a child is the closest thing two person in love could ever get to become one. That is a scientific fact. Hereafter, every child that is born after us into perpetuity is proof and testament that for a single brilliant moment that belongs to us in the timeline of eternity, there was love and it lives on still.

And this is what makes our baby a real miracle.

Assistant miracle-worker,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "The Fatherhood Files, Je t'aime mon Cher..."

The 25th March 2013 Fire at the Sarawak General Hospital

Date: Saturday, 06 Apr 2013 18:21

"Seems to me the basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur."

Jerry Seinfeld

At 8:27 PM yesterday, one of my colleagues working the night shift in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) texted in our departmental Whatsapp group for house officers,

"Kebakaran!!!" wrote Olivia.

Unlike the cry of "fire" in the English language, the Malay word "kebakaran" specifically carries the meaning of a destructive fire-related event separate from the actual Malay word for fire, which is "api". That is besides the point, I know. I thought it was a joke but she confirmed it,

"Yes, in the hospital. Evacuating patients. LOL." I didn't add that. She really did say LOL.

Another house officer working yesterday night posted the following blurry camera-phone picture,

At the main entrance of the SGH.

And it wasn't a drill. Sarawak General Hospital made like Nero's Rome and burned. It was only successfully doused at about 9:30 PM and from real-time updates provided by my colleagues-on-duty, I assumed that it wasn't too bad because the evacuated patients were later carted back to their respective wards where they can continue dying at their own leisurely pace. Speculations were abound. As the smoke rose from the corner of the main building where the linen department's located, many assumed that someone must have dropped a cigarette butt into a basket of scrubs or something.

I am working tonight but this morning, I had to go to the hospital to give a presentation on vesicoureteric reflux. After that was dealt with, I hotfooted to the linen department and found that business was proceeding as usual there. After exploring the perimeter of the hospital for a couple of minutes, I found the site of interest right outside the west wing of the main hospital block. There were yellow tapes to keep the riffraff out but introducing myself as a doctor working in the PICU, I simply waltzed in and mingled amongst the fire investigators, journalists, and maintenance company reps.

It was the utility shaft.

I spoke to a firefighter on site and he told me that they were currently investigating how the conflagration conflagrated, and were questioning witnesses, taking pictures, looking at schematics, interviewing reps from the company responsible for maintaining the utility hardware and scribbling down notes and schematics - y'know, serious fire-investigating business.

As you can see in the picture above, the two biggest blackened pipes (which seemed to have grown some bumpy warts on them) are part of the air-conditioning system of the hospital and the extreme heat had warped the foam insulation around them. The smaller pipes carry all the other stuff that a hospital needs like water, nitrous oxide, medical air and oxygen. We were very lucky that the medical air and oxygen conduits didn't go kaboom and take half the hospital with it (the PICU, where I am currently posted in, is right above the spot). Those pipes were lined with asbestos. And considering that it happened right outside the Radiology Department, we could have lost our very, very, very expensive scanning equipments - even without the stopping power of a cinematic explosion.

I spoke to an electrician and he told me that the inferno probably started from the high voltage wires that also run in the utility shaft and one of them is a humongous, python-thick cable that supplies our MRI machine. I have no idea how much power is required to keep an MRI machine running but the cost of the maintenance of just one can go into obscene seven digit figures in just one year. He thinks that one of these cables must have overheated and cooked the shaft until it is crispy.

A photographer taking pictures of the exposed MRI power cable.

Here is a closeup.

I am no engineering expert, but having incredibly high voltage cables in the same utility shaft where a large pipeline filled with compressed oxygen also runs sounds stupidly dangerous to me.

And just in case you are interested, the utility shaft runs from here,

The powerhouse of that keeps the hospital running.

To here,

A hospital that is barely running.

While the Radiology Department is still semi-operational, all the MRI scan appointments were diverted to the MRI suite over to our sister hospital, the Heart Centre (PJHUS) and we have no idea when we can start firing up our machine again. Also, only emergency CT scans would be entertained for the day due to a risk of overheating. I heard that they were going to tear up the concrete-entombed part of the utility shaft to investigate further and repair the damage - so it is definitely going to take awhile.

The PICU smelled like people had been barbecuing char siew in there all night long and that made me hungry so I went to have char siew rice for lunch. The air-conditioning seemed to have gone kaput so I am seriously dreading tonight when I have to report for duty. Does it make me evil that a small part of me wish that the PICU was blown to smithereens just so I don't need to go to work? After the very sick children and babies were evacuated, of course. I am not a total monster.

Patients lodging at the billing counters. Photograph courtesy of Nadim Bokhari.

No one died.

Insider source,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Events and the Non-Routine, My Occupatio..."

A Burden of Proof

Date: Thursday, 04 Apr 2013 20:07

"Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat."

Latin legal expression

And it says, "The burden of proof lies with who declares, not who denies."

I lead a rich, colourful second life on the internet, on public fora, social media and behind the curtains of private messages. People might accuse me (and people like me who conducts the bulk of their correspondence in zeroes and ones) as antisocial hermits. Many have lamented the fate of humanity when they see a group of friends all completely absorbed in their smartphones, ignoring one another, while they text rabidly to far away individuals outside the prison of proximity. That is a perplexing a complaint to me because in my opinion, we are communicating far more robustly than we used to. The set of "people in the same room as you are" is too small a sample size to contain many people who you would like to converse with, if there are any at all. That is a statistical fact.

There are many notable exchanges I had in the past but I must quit my full-time job if I want to document every single one of them here but occasionally, I have one which is short, concise and significant enough that is worth writing about.

On Choosing Atheism or Rather, Not Choosing Atheism.

I had one such dialogue recently, and it began when someone who fancies himself as an apologist for Christianity asked me the following question:

"I'm just curious about what made you embrace atheism as your worldview. Was it because you found no evidence for Theism? Or was it because you found atheism more plausible? Hope you don't mind me asking."

Yes, he is the sort of person who capitalises the T in theism.

My answer, to summarise and rephrase, sought to clarify that I did not actually "embrace atheism as my worldview." I just simply ~~don't~~ can't believe it when people claim that their favourite god or gods exist because my threshold for acceptance have not been met - it is not a choice. I cannot accept such extraordinary claims based on no evidence whatsoever. It is like posing the question, "Why don't you eat bananas?" to someone who doesn't have any bananas. Even if I want to, I can't.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about the real meaty part of the discussion.

On the Burden of Proof, and Shifting It.

After a few to-and-fros, he posted the following message to me,

"You seem to be stressing that your atheistic-agnostic worldview doesn't need to have positive arguments because by definition it is a default position. I don't think I will concede that, Dr. Kok. To me, atheism (and agnosticism) is a worldview that claims to be exclusively true while holding every other worldview to be false (kindly correct me if I'm wrong). However, as you put it, it doesn't need to make a positive argument. That is a poor philosophical assumption. Let me ask you a simple question, how do you know atheism (or agnosticism) is true? Is it because all other worldviews are false? I mentioned in my last debate that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is possible to disprove the existence of fairies from a Christian Theistic perspective. Two steps needed:
1. I need to give evidence (positive arguments) for Christian Theism.
2. I need to demonstrate why fairies are incompatible with Christian Theism.
Ergo: It would logically follow that fairies do not exist. If fairy-advocates wish to justify their position, they need to demonstrate that CT is false and then erect positive arguments for the existence of fairies. I cannot just sit back and tell people that just because fairy-proponents are unable to provide sufficient evidence that they are therefore false. It would be absolutely arrogant to do so."

What the Apologist did, in so many words, was play a game called Shifting the Burden of Proof and calling me arrogant in the process, but let us ignore the obvious hypocrisy of it for a moment. To expand on my earlier clarification that atheism is not a worldview I have chosen, atheism is a reaction to the claim that God exist. If no one in the history of mankind have conceived of the idea of God, then atheism cannot exist. Atheism is not a claim or even a counter-claim. It is the rejection of a claim.

Now, the Apologist basically wants me to prove that there is no God. To demonstrate how crazy and illogical that is, consider the following picture,

Yeah, that is how theists who ask me to prove the non-existence of God sound to me.

In a court of law, one of the manifestations of the burden of proof is the presumption of innocence - or as it is popularly expressed, "innocent until proven guilty". If you want to accuse someone of committing a crime, you must furnish the proof. The defendant is assumed to be innocent until you can prove him or her otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.

Moving out of law and into science, there is a concept known as the null hypothesis - something I picked up in from my statistics, research and journal-writing lectures in med school. So what is it? Let's pretend we are running a scientific experiment to investigate if being Christian affects a person's susceptibility to catch HIV. So, we will get a bunch of people, divide them into non-Christians and Christians, and then test them for HIV. There can be two possible inferences or outcomes,

There is a relationship between being Christian and the susceptibility of catching HIV.
There is NO relationship between being Christian and the susceptibility of catching HIV.

The first one is what we call the alternative hypothesis, or the claim we are really testing for. The second one is our null hypothesis, which is the default or negative statement. Experimenters with try to disprove the null hypothesis and an experiment can only reject the null hypothesis, or fail to reject it. So, drawing from the example above, if we cannot find evidence that being Christian is correlated with HIV infection, then we would have failed to reject the null hypothesis. To bring it to a real world example, in a drug trial which fails to reject the null hypothesis, we would consider that the drug is useless for what it was tested for.

Anyone with half a brain can immediately see the parallel between this and the god question, which can be formulated as the following hypotheses,

God exists.
God does not exist.

If we cannot prove God's existence, then we would have failed to reject the null hypothesis of "God does not exist." And therefore, we should assume the agnostic atheistic position until proven otherwise. After all, we aren't going to take a drug that failed to show any evidence that it works.

In all aspects of life, we expect the burden of proof to fall upon the claimant. In court, a person is innocent until proven guilty. In science, we assume the null hypothesis until the alternative hypothesis is proven true. If someone tells you that he had seen Batman, you wouldn't believe him until he proves to you that he did, right?

Only when it comes to God do theists like the Apologist ask for special treatment for their personal beliefs. They want you to prove that there is no God. You know why? It is because they have utterly failed to prove that God exists, and all they can do is muddy the issue and try to shift the burden of proof when it is really their burden to bear.

On Realising When the Burden of Proof is Being Shifted.

"I am not arrogant. It is just that you are crazy for asking me to prove that ~~you don't have a baseball~~ God doesn't exist," I told the Apologist, which elicited the following response from him,

"You are right about one thing - that namely we are innocent until positive proof of guilt can be found. Atheism claims that all worldviews are guilty of falsehood and yet promptly denies the responsibility of providing positive arguments in its favor. I guess that's supposed to be a logical proposition to you. Anyhow I want to suspend this conversation with you because I think when intelligent arguments fails and name-calling emerges there can be no decent outcome. Thank you though for engaging in dialogue."

Bitch please, I was right about everything.

See what I mean about apologists trying to muddy the issue and stealthily attempting to pass off baloney as logic? To repeat myself, atheism is the denial of a claim, the DIRECT OPPOSITE a claim. He disingenously re-characterised the atheistic position as one that claims that all other theistic worldviews are false, essentially turning rewording atheism to make it sound like a positive claim, a worldview comparable to Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and other such fairytales. Forgive me if I remain unimpressed at this cheap syntactic trick that essentially tries to say that blue is really red. That is theistic logic for you.

Remember, I never said "There is no God." I am always asking, "Where is the proof of God."

Incidentally, this is also what we call building a strawman, and if you can picture a man made out of straw, you'd see it as something that superficially resembles a man (but isn't one) which is flimsy and could easily be knocked down. Likewise, the Apologist's description of atheism is one that only superficially resembles atheism (but isn't), so he gives the appearance of having refuted my argument, while slyly avoiding the substance of my argument. However, I am too experienced in spotting logical fallacies to let this one slip by me.

You have to wake up way earlier than that to sneak one past me.

Besides, characterising atheism as a worldview comparable to any number of theistic beliefs smells of that tired "atheism is a religion" canard oft-repeated by theists. Saying atheism is a religion is like saying not-collecting stamp is a hobby, that baldness is a hair colour, or that unemployment is a job - further demonstrating the Apologist's poor grasp of informal logic.

He also tries to sit in the admittedly very cushy chair of being "innocent until proven guilty" in his reversal of the courtroom analogy. To read between the lines, he is basically saying God exists until you prove he doesn't. He had come full circle and assumed the role of the stickman in the comic above who claim he has a baseball, and when asked to produce said baseball, announced indignantly that no one can prove he doesn't have a baseball. Even if we search every crag and crevice in the entire universe to look for this elusive baseball of his, he could still claim that his baseball is invisible and lies outside of time and space. Sound familiar? Using this strategy, anyone can claim that anything exists on the virtue that it has not been disproven. Like Delos Banning McKown said, "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." My money is on non-existent.

As you can see, the Apologist also chose to end the discourse because he thought I was insulting him by calling him crazy. What a hypocrite, I thought to myself. He had the cheek to call me arrogant first and then got his panties all in a bunch when I responded in kind. Why, his absent God's book has something to say about that in Romans 2:3,

"And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?"

Judging from this one specimen I interacted with, I am starting to see why they have chosen to call themselves apologists. They seem like a sorry bunch to me.

Burden police,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Controversially Me"

The Fates of Babes

Date: Monday, 18 Mar 2013 01:18

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Frederick Douglass

I feel that the very centre of my being beats the heart of a storyteller. It is the reason why I write. I consider everything that happens around me to be unformed and untold stories, and it is my responsibility to drag them out of the chaotic neverending narrative that is reality, and define them. Every story that gets washed away in the currents, distorted by time and diluted to oblivion by amnesia is as good as if it never happened at all. When I write a story down, it lives on in words.

I have been in the Department of Paediatrics for about a month now and while there are many stories I wish to tell, none is quite worth the telling as much as the one I am about to tell you. This is a true story, and rumour has it that there is nothing quite as strange as the truth.

There is an infant about a year old who was recently admitted to my ward with the startling diagnosis of kwashiokor - startling in the sense that it is the sort of thing one would encounter in the hungry depths of most wretched Africa, not in bounteous Malaysia. Kwashiokor is a form of malnutrition where a child is disproportionately starved of protein in his or her diet, while receiving a relatively high amount of carbs. Protein is Very Important, as you can imagine and it is needed in a lot of essential bodily processes. It is needed to make antibodies, so a kwashiokor child is often susceptible to serious infections. It is needed for growth, so that child will fail to grow and thrive. A kwashiokor child is often identified by his grossly bloated belly and general swelling of his entire body - because one of the things protein does is keep water in your blood vessels. When you are deficient of protein, it allows plasma (the watery bit of your blood) to leak out into all your other tissues. This is a simplified explanation of what kwashiokor is because I am telling a story, not teaching a class. Anyhow, I am sure that all of you have an image of that stereotypical starving Somali kid with an upsettingly large belly in your minds.

Upsetting right?

The kwashiokor baby in my ward was bloated and weak. His teeth were all rotten and brown. He was developmentally retarded. He lies on his back like an upturned French bulldog puppy all day long unable to turn himself, being irritable and miserable, when infants his age are taking their first steps. Have you seen babies taking their first steps? They have that huge goofy ecstatically surprised grin on their face that seems to say, "I IS WALKING! OMG OMG OMG!" Jesus walking on water is a cool story. This is a real everyday miracle.

The mother is young, uneducated and impoverished, and the baby probably ended up this way due to her deficient understanding of nutrition or the need for a balanced diet. It made me angry. It made me think that there should a competency test for anyone who wants to be a parent because as she had proven beyond reasonable doubt, it is in fact possible for a person to be too stupid to mother. Then, I felt angry for the conditions that nurtured her ignorance, her lack of access to sound education (even though she is younger than I am).

But this is not the story I want to tell.

A couple of days ago, the police brought an Iban child in and put him under our care. He seems to be about four years old but there was really no way to be sure short of cleaving him apart and counting his rings. This very young child was found loitering at the Bormill Estate outside a coffee shop with nothing more than a cheap backpack on his back. The passerby who brought him to the police station said he was left there by his parents. Having no identification on him, there was no way of finding out who his parents are. He was dirty. There were scabs on his scalp. Coincidentally, he was then placed in a cot beside the one occupied by the kwashiokor baby and his mother - possibly because the universe remembers how misery loves company.

The first day he was in the ward, he wouldn't talk to anyone and was going through cycles of crying, sleeping and then crying again. During our clinical rounds, after failing to console the boy, the mother of the kwashiokor baby looked over to his cot and started chastising him in his native tongue, to our surprise. She seemed to know this child so I asked.

"This boy is my brother," she answered.

She went on to explain that her father had left her mother and went on to start another family with another woman - and this presumably abandoned child is really her half-brother. Whoa, I really didn't see this coming!

What is the chance that this kid would be abandoned by his parents at about the same time as the kwashiokor baby was brought in? What then is the chance that they would be admitted in the same ward and placed in cots beside one another? I am not a mathematician so I don't know the answer to those questions but I am sure "damn hell improbable" is only knocking on the door of describing how unlikely this is. Anyhow, that made tracking down the kid's parents a cinch rather than the citywide needle-hunt it would have demanded. Suddenly it made a little more sense why the kwashiokor baby's mother was so neglectful - she learned parenting from the bloke who misplaced this other child.

Being ditched by your parents when you are just a teeny tiny kid must have sucked, so I bought the kid a lollipop to cheer him up. He greedily took it and started gnawing on it with a ferocity that made me flinch. I tried to mime how one would typically consume a lollipop but to no avail. I quickly stopped because I realised that it also looked like an overly obscene gesture to do to a young child.

And a cup of Nini peanut butter dipsticks. I loved that shit as a kid.

One of the custodial staff members, a middle aged woman, sort of took a special interest in the kid and brought him more snack, as did other parents in the ward. I guess they took pity on the boy because he was always in his cot alone, while all the other children in the ward were accompanied by their mothers or fathers around the clock.

Now, at the time of writing this, the child is waiting for a representative of the child protective services to review his case and presumably, ensure that the kid gets taken care of one way or another. Anyway, I wanted to tell this story because of two reasons. The first is because it's an amazing coincidence, and that is always worth telling. The second is because I need to remember what having a child means. It means being responsible for the life, happiness and ultimate destiny of a helpless little individual that needs you to always do the right thing. And I want to.

Lollipop dispenser,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Occupational Odyssey, Life's Little T..."

This is Where I Am

Date: Friday, 08 Mar 2013 13:03

"It's a question of discipline," the little prince told me later on. "When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet."

The Little Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I am not dead yet.

To bring everyone up to the breakneck speed by which I am moving, I am now married, expecting my firstborn's arrival and looking to relocate to Penang (where my wife had bought our first home) before the end of 2013. If you tell me in the beginning of 2012 that this is what my life would be like after just one year, I would sooner believe in the existence of God than believe you. I thought I would never be married. I was sure I wouldn't have a kid. Now, I did both those things earlier than any of my you-will-eat-your-words friends have.

I apologise for being away for so very long but I doubt there is any of you left to apologise to.

Marriage, as I have always suspected, is a very complicated and difficult thing. I have been humbled and no longer thinks that it is merely just a romantic relationship plus certification - it is not "just a piece of paper" as I have often called it dismissively. It is, to some degree, the extinction of the self. Never before in all my previous relationships do I feel the urgent need to think in terms of "us" instead of "me me me" as per my normal, pre-matrimonial self. Every decision I make now affects two - no, three lives (or twenty one, if you count our two cats). I can no longer just live in the moment but instead, somewhere south of at least twenty years into the future. Being the egocentric selfish jerk that I am accustomed to being all my life, this is not at all an easy transformation.

Being married also made me realise that I am in no way an adult just because I graduated, started practicing as a doctor and became financially independent. I am still learning to wrestle with adult responsibilities like car insurance, taxes, investments and housing loans; stuff which my wife is way more capable at dealing than I am. It is sobering to realise that no matter how intelligent or smart I am, I would probably not do very well without her help in handling all these earthier but ultimately more essential concerns. Being married to an adolescent so out of touch with reality must be terrifying for her. She likes to call it my "bubble" of idealism and ignorance - I have an idea of how the world should work and that idea somehow repels reality. I like to think of it as a forcefield of denial. For her sake (and our kid's and cats' sakes), I must deny it no further.

She is the first woman I have met who makes me want to be a better man.

This is why I was gone for so long. I had a lot of growing up to do. After all, I got to be adult enough in time to be a father.

Manning up,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Thoughts and Other Excrements, Je t'a..."

How Do You See Time?

Date: Tuesday, 25 Dec 2012 20:46

"Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them."

Dion Boucicault

I just thought of something pretty neat.

Now, our brains are poorly wired to understand the concept of time, and we often associate the "flow" of time with Euclidean vectors and shapes. We then break time into discrete absolute units like years and then break those years into days, hours, minutes and seconds - but if Einstein's anyone to go by (and you can bet he is), time is a relative creature.

Most people in the world visualise the hours of a day (or rather, a half day) with a clockwise cyclical circle. This is most certainly a conditioned mental image because most of us grew up telling time using an analogue clock. So if I am to make an educated guess, I'd say that a person who grew up without ever seeing that iconic 12-hour face would see a wholly different shape of his day in his head. If I ever produce a kid, I'd try teaching him to tell the time using sundials and see how his mind's eye perceive the daily hours - among other messed-up, nurture-type psych experiments I've thought up over the years. This is also why I shouldn't be allowed to procreate.

Then, there are time units which are much less ubiquitously and graphically represented and thus, would figure very differently in different individuals. Take the 7-day week, for example. This is how I see the week in my mind,

I consider Monday the first day of the week. The weekdays are arranged in a horizontal row from left to right, bowing slightly upwards. My Saturday and Sunday are "situated" below them, swinging from right to left in the curve of a smile. It's a bit like a semicircle, looping back again and again on itself.

The girlfriend sees her entire week in a straight horizontal line running from Monday to Sunday which rewinds back to the start of every new week.

Let's scale it up to a month, shall we? Phoebs' month has its days arranged in rows of seven. The days in each row runs from left to right and subsequent rows are placed below the preceding ones. The leftover days of every month (except non-leap year Februaries) would form the fifth and final row. It's essentially how a calendar page is configured.

Me? This is how my month looks like,

I visualise the progression from one month to the next as a "step" up from left to right, with the previous month vaporising away as soon as the transition is complete. I also break every month into two parts: the first 19 days being one bit and all the remaining days being the second. There's also a "step" to climb between day 19 and day 20. Do not ask me why I think this way because I haven't a fucking clue. It just feels right.

Anyway, when I zoom out to the scale of a year, the stepladder effect disappears and I get a smooth, flat line heading eastward,

My vision of time itself is also a left-to-right horizontal line. I fancy that this is probably the influence of how historical and scientific timelines are traditionally depicted. Unlike mine, Phoebs' year is oriented vertically from up to down. And she envisions the concept of time as going forward, with the past positioned behind her. Her predilection might have been persuaded by the English language (the tongue she thinks in) which does in fact assign such arbitrary prepositions to the the past and future.

And I've even heard of a guy who sees the months of a year as points on an analemma. What a nerd.

I don't know about you but I find this to be fascinating stuff. All my life, it never occurred to me until now that all of us perceive time in different fashions. Knowing how someone would process time feels a bit like taking a tiny glimpse into how his or her mind operates. It might not be terribly informative, I know, but it's still pretty damn cool.

So how do you see time? Describe your week, month or year here. Enquiring minds want to know!

P.S. One of the tags for this post is "Phoebe Days". This is the first time it's meant so literally.

A step from December,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Thoughts and Other Excrements"

I Have a Personality Disorder

Date: Tuesday, 25 Dec 2012 20:45

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis

Damn straight.

As I was swotting on Sunday night at the 24-hours McDonald's for Monday's Psychiatry paper, I got a bit of a jolt from the notes. In the section about personality disorders, there was a description of one that read like 20 seconds summary of my personal psyche. Damn, I have actually heard friends of mine describe me this way to other people about me using the exactly same words!

"Hey, this one really sounds like me," I said to some of my friends, who was there with me that night. I remember when I started out doing that - studying in McD's - I was pretty much alone. Now it had become the in-thing to do, apparently.

Lai Yin, who was also there at the time said, "Yeah, I thought of you too when I first read that! I memorise the personality disorders using our some of our batchmates as examples for each. That was yours."

Okay, if the smartest girl in class uses me as a mnemonic device for it, I thought, that pretty much clinches it, right?

I think I have Schizoid Personality Disorder.

According to the ICD-10 (id est, the 10th edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems manual), I have to fulfill 3 of the following criteria in order to qualify for a diagnosis,

Emotional coldness, detachment or reduced affection (I pretty much embody this when it comes to family members).
Limited capacity to express either positive or negative emotions towards others.
Consistent preference for solitary activities (I love reading and spending ALL my waking hours on the internet - with very little use of any social or networking tools - and prefer to eat and watch movies at the theatre alone).
Very few, if any, close friends or relationships, and a lack of desire for such (I have a girlfriend, one genuinely close friend aaand... shit, that's it).
Indifference to either praise or criticism.
Taking pleasure in few, if any, activities.
Indifference to social norms and conventions (So much so that I go out of my way to defy them repeatedly - I've been called a contrarian because of that).
Preoccupation with fantasy and introspection (Too easy... Next!).
Lack of desire for sexual experiences with another person (Alright, before anyone says anything, I like sex, alright... I just don't like it as much as, um, some other things).

I bag six out of the above nine. Six! With a slightly more liberal interpretation, I can make that seven.

Now, according to the DSM-IV (the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) which I feel to be the more authoritative text on such matters, I need to fulfill 4 out of 7 similar-sounding criteria which are worded slightly differently from those in the ICD-10. I score a five, and I think I fit them better than I did with the ICD-10 ones. To avoid the personality quiz fallacy, I took pains to research the specific meanings behind those criteria. So yeah; I wasn't cheating or anything.

Other scoring systems I've managed to dug up on the disorder also include stuff like avoidance of competitive relationships, over-sensitivity, eccentricity, tendency to daydream, introversion, in possession of a sense of superiority (in spades, according to Phoebe), and self-sufficiency (a Christian actually accused me once of being so deluded by my self-sufficiency that I am unable to surrender to God). I got all of 'em.

It's official: I'm schizoid. And I'm okay with it.

Coincidentally, I also read that a diagnosed schizoid will not give a fuck if other people see him or her as having a mental disorder. Funny.

Anyway, according to Disorders of the Self by James F. Masterton and Ralph Klein, I'm more correctly classified as a "secret schizoid" - which does not mean I'm hiding it from anyone, no. It just says that I may appear social or engaged superficially, but in actuality, remain aloof and emotionally distant. Influential and famous dead psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964) said that the schizoid individual is able to express quite a lot of feeling and to make what appear to be impressive social contacts but in reality giving nothing and losing nothing, because since he is only playing a part. This cuts eerily close to something one of my ex-girlfriends said about me once.

Also, for a long time now, I kept saying "I think I work best in a long distance relationship," over and over again without knowing why, and have thought at length about how odd that is. Philip Manfield, in his book Split Self/Split Object, affirms that in my case. He said that people who have schizoid personality disorder are happiest when they are in a relationship in which the partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them, as it is not people as such that they want to avoid, but both negative and positive emotions, emotional intimacy, and self disclosure.

Most importantly, this helps to explain why my previous relationship was such a catastrophic train-wreck. You'd be hard-pressed to find an uglier breakup than that.

Then regarding the schizoid profile on sexuality... let's just say that it hits very close to home. Some of my... "proclivities" have been troubling me a bloody lot. And no, I don't I want to reveal what they are on a publicly accessible online journal, thank you very much. Don't bother trying to read about it because there are more than one sexual spectrum ascribed to the schizoid personality, and I only fit one of them (though I fit it very, very much). Unless I've confided into you about this before, there's no way you can possibly guess which one it is.

Anyway, I've got to wrap this up now even though I would very much like to continue oh-my-goshing over several more of my revelations regarding my personality. Maybe some other time, eh. I have to go get Phoebe from KL tomorrow (YES, SHE'S BACK!) and bring her down to Malacca for a 3-day-stay. The entire year through, everywhere I go, I have been mentally scouting out potential dating loci I want to bring Phoebe to in my town - it's like, I could be sitting in a cafe or walking down a nice street and suddenly think, "I wish Phoebs can be here." Three days aren't a lot, I know, but it's all we have to spend together this entire 6 months. I'm going to make each second count.

Good night, people-with-regular-personalities.

Schizoid,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Anecdotes of Medical Academia, My Though..."

The Present State of My Life with Cheryl and Cats

Date: Friday, 26 Oct 2012 12:32

"And I'm gonna ride this feeling as far as it goes
I'm gonna ride this feeling
I don't know, I don't know
Whether I'm flying or falling
But I'm gonna ride this feeling"

Ride This Feeling (2012) by Kate Miller-Heidke

I can't sleep, so here I am.

Yesterday was a few hours ago and she is currently sleeping soundly under a very substantial amount of fabric, just several feet away from where I sit. We were at a vegetarian restaurant earlier where we had a large salad of a delicious fern the locals call "midin" and batter-fried butter mushrooms. Then, we paid a visit to my go-to booze guy and got ourselves a Chardonnay and a Riesling. We plan to keep the Chardonnay for the 5th of November but we opened the Riesling as soon as we had it chilled. It was very quaffable and we had it over the second half of Sideways (she fell asleep halfway through it the night before) and for all of Jiro Dreams of Sushi - all while cuddling on our extra-wide new slipper chair which we bought for movie nights. For weeks, we were out hunting for a nice small-sized settee but when we saw this slipper chair at Courts - and having test-driven it - we fell in love with it and gave it a home.

The Loveseat™.

Last week, Cheryl moved her whole life and her two cats from Singapore to come live with me in Kuching. She left her job and said goodbye to all her friends, and it felt simultaneously gratifying and terrifying that I am worth that much to her. In just the last few days, she managed to transform our glorified bachelor pad into a home (it has a shoe-rack and everything now), making me realise just how empty and frigid the house really was.

Sophie (right) is a red classic tabby Maine Coon. Mikey (left) is half Ragdoll, half rug.

Her cats, Mikey and Sophie, faced a month-long sentence at the state quarantine centre for the crime of being flown in from Singapore but I somehow managed to arrange for home quarantine for them after a few calls to the vice director of the veterinary department - I am always surprised with what you can get if you take the time to talk to the right people. They are gorgeous, her kitties, and she loves them like a mother.

I have always talked about getting a cat. Now, I have two. It's like all my dreams are coming true.

Taken on the evening of her bachelorette party. Hence the fluffy tiara.

Am I happy? Yes. Yes yes yes. I have never felt more loved than right now, and I wish I can make her feel just as adored, wanted and needed. In a few minutes, I am going to crawl under the covers and hold my fiancée close to me, a rehearsal for all the nights to come for the rest of our lives. I just picked up my new identity card from the office of the National Regitration Department and it has three notable changes from the old card. One, it has a more recent picture of me. Two, instead of Buddhism in the religion field, I am now officially an atheist. Three, it sports my new address in Kuching. Cheryl's new identity card carries the same address, and with them, we can now be married in this city.

That will happen in less than two weeks. Remember, remember, the 5th of November and all that. There was a time when I cannot imagine myself marrying anyone. Tonight, I cannot imagine not marrying Cheryl.

Mikey and I.

Mikey winking.

Mikey, who had fallen asleep while pole-dancing.

Fiancé,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "The Kuching Khronikles, Je t'aime mon Ch..."

My First Bible

Date: Monday, 01 Oct 2012 23:42

"I'm sorry I have to say it but you look like you're sad
Your smile is gone; I've noticed it bad
The cure is if you let in just a little more love
I promise you this, a little's enough"

A Little's Enough (2006) by Angels & Airwaves

I knew two boys in Primary School, both named Chiew. They were best friends and I would later go to the same high school with the pair. They were also the first two Protestant Christians I have ever encountered in my life. For the ease of narration, I shall call one of them Chiew One and the other Chiew Two, and while I never learned very much about what Christians actually believe in back in those days of yore, my interactions with the two of them was what kindled an interest in me for this offshoot cult of Judaism which, at the risk of understating it, got massively out of hand.

When I was either fourteen or fifteen, the Chiews invited me to some kind of a nighttime Christian meet held on the quad of another high school - and since that high school was within biking distance from where I live, I went. At that point in time, the only thing I knew about Christianity was that it's all about some beardy chap called Jesus who was born of a virgin. That was it. I did not even know Christians believe that the man died for the sins of humanity and then came back to life! I attended because the Chiews were performing and I wanted to go show my support. Also, I wanted to meet girls because I was a teenager.

Chiew One played God and from what I could tell, he was refereeing a kung fu showdown between Jesus and Satan (who was portrayed by some Indian guy dressed in all black and that's totally not racist). My memory is a bit fuzzy here but Chiew Two was either the messiah or an extra in the Devil's posse. I did remember that the referee was totally playing favourites and gave Jesus an extra life when his white-clad ass got got handed to him by Satan and his crew. And since I knew next to nothing about the Christian mythos and did not understand the context of the skit, it felt a bit wrong to me when everyone cheered at Jesus' eventual victory after the referee's unfair intervention in reviving Jesus. Err, guys? The whole fight was rigged!

After the bit and many others I have now completely forgotten, Chiew Two approached me at the end of the night and asked me what I thought about the show. I do not remember what I said but I do remember shamelessly asking him if he would give me a Bible. Maybe I wanted to know more about Jesus and Satan. Or maybe I wanted to see if there was really kung fu in the Bible - I don't know.

"Promise me you would take good care of this," he told me as he placed a Gideon Bible with golden covers into my hands. "Do not deface it. Do not tear it or burn it or throw it away."

I tried to read it but the first few pages of Genesis was so blah that I put it away for years before opening it again. But I kept my promise to my friend who made a gift of his faith to me - I never mistreated the book.

Chiew Two would leave in the middle of high school to study in Singapore as an ASEAN scholar while the more intelligent Chiew One (who had always beaten his same-named pal in class ranking) stayed on. With his bestie gone, I became Chiew One's new best friend, and we stayed that way until one day, I let slip to a whole lot of people that he wore hand-me-down undies from his elder brother because I was a moron and a bad friend. We never quite recovered from that, he and I. Now, there is not a lot I can recall about him but I do remember that he became the president of the Christian Fellowship in my school. One day, while we were sitting in class, he said this to me,

"Mary was as virgin as my mother."

Yes, the president of the Christian Fellowship in my school was secretly a blasphemer, and possibly a closeted unbeliever but I did not think very much about it at the time. Three years later after I enrolled in med school, I started reading the Bible in earnest - the very same one that Chiew Two gave me. I had brought it with me to India with me and it came in handy when I began to question my own faith in Buddhism, and wanted to explore what other religions have to offer. I finished reading the Old Testament, feeling uncomfortable with a lot of things it said what they mean, and I was reading the New Testament, thinking how incongruous it was compared to the older books when his words echoed to me from that classroom, ringing out as clear as the day he said it,

"Mary was as virgin as my mother."

And just like that, I realised a very simple and useful truth: I don't have to believe. And that had made all the difference in my life.

P.S. I still have that gold-covered Gideon Bible.

Changed his mind,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "My Thoughts and Other Excrements, Contro..."

A Portrait of Christian Evil

Date: Friday, 28 Sep 2012 19:44

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Steven Weinberg

This story originally had another title. It was "One Week with a Preacher-Nephrologist" and I meant it to be a humorous account of my short stint in the Nephrology Department working under the tutelage of an unlikely mentor: a skeletal, bespectacled Christian gentleman who is the picture of frugality and modesty. For the purpose of this piece, I shall refer to him as Dr K. Before this, I have known him as a deeply religious Christian man who runs a cell group that meets every Friday down at the OB/GYN clinic and prays with Christian patients by their bedsides. I spent a week this man, and what I learnt about him thoroughly rearranged my impression of him, and this story turned out darker and more disturbing than I expected.

The Beginning

Day one. I met him at the Haemodialysis Unit where he was looking at a patient's case note and then remarking to a nearby Medical Assistant, "This patient's name is Musa. Did you know that the Nabi Musa of the Qur'an is the same person as Moses in the Bible?"

When I introduced myself as the House Officer who would be tagging along with him for the week, his first question to me was, "Have you come to know the Lord, Jesus?"

Mental note: this is a man so immured in his faith for Jesus that he filters the entire world through it, every second of the day.

"I have been to church when I was in med school. And I've read the Bible," I said guardedly. I imagined that if I sprung the 'A' word on him, I would probably be on the receiving end of yet another sales pitch of the Good News (for the bajillionth time). That is thoroughly unacceptable, especially on a Monday morning.

"So which denomination do you belong to?" he pressed on cheerily. Crap.

"None," I admitted. "I have not accepted Jesus. I went to church and read the Bible because I was seeking for truth in religion in my younger days - I investigated Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - but decided that none of it is really suitable for me."

There was a beat, possibly imagined, before he said, "Praise the Lord! A young man in search of the Truth! Did you know that in the Qur'an, in Surat An-Nisā' verse 171, Jesus was referred to as 'kalimatullah', the Word of God, in agreement with the Bible?" I recognised that this is an opening strategy often used by missionaries in attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity by elevating Jesus from prophethood to some suggestion of divinity - so I don't know why he brought it up to me. Anyhow, I know the counterargument by Muslims but I fact-checked it on the web through my phone just to be sure. The Arabic interpretation of the An-Nisā' verse is that Nabi Isa or Jesus is a word (or message) from Allah, rather than The Word of Allah or God, and that John the Baptist is also known as a word from Allah (Surat 'Āli `Imrān verse 39), so there was really nothing special about the reference. What I find even more ridiculous about this is that the verse in An-Nisā' is actually a very specific caution to Muslims against thinking that Jesus is the son of God: "Indeed, Allah is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son."

"Oh, I see your problem there. It's lodged in your frontal cortex."

Addendum to mental note: the Christian lens by which he filters reality also distorts it to fit his worldview.

By the time I looked it up, he had moved on to some other point. He was telling me an anecdote thirteen years ago about how he, back when he was just a Medical Officer, had a teenage patient who tried to commit suicide by drinking the Paraquat (a herbicide) due to relationship woes.

"She had a very severe case of ARDS on top of other organ failures, and she could not possibly have survived it," he said. "If you have read the literature on Paraquat poisoning, you'd know that no one recovers from this level of morbidity. She was struggling with every breath and I went to her and told her she had three choices: she could give her life for her boyfriend for whom she had attempted suicide, her grieving parents, or Jesus Christ. She nodded 'yes' for Jesus and I prayed with her. The next day, her lungs miraculously cleared up and she could breath freely without oxygen support! And this is not the only time this had happened."

"Wow," I said, avoiding from questioning his then-clinical impression of the case. "If this sort of recovery was never recorded to happen, did you write it up as a case study and publish it so it can be discussed?"

"No, I never thought of doing that."

Addendum #2 to mental note: He is unaware of confirmation bias. He accepts the answers he likes, and automatically rejects all other possibilities.

This is going to be a very long week.

The Daily Routine

"Puji Tuhan" or "Praise the Lord" is a phrase which he punctuates almost every one of his sentences with. Every morning, I would meet him at the Haemodialysis Unit (or the HDU as it is facetiously called, because our hospital doesn't actually own a High Dependency Unit) where he would give me some Young Earth Creationist material to read. This started after he discovered that I subscribe to the theory of evolution alongside the overwhelming majority of the scientific community (more on that later).

"You must have a personal relationship with Jesus," he repeatedly told me. He would say it randomly during conversations, sometimes as an orphaned remark to break lulls in our conversations while we are walking along some corridor or riding the elevator. Another thing he liked to say was, "I am not going to be able to teach you much about Nephrology - you can learn that from anyone or any book. I feel I can teach you more about Jesus."

He also told me on many occasions - usually when I question an assertion he makes or raise contrary evidence to his Young Earth Creatinism worldview - that I would "make a very good Christian," presumably because he had misappropriated interest in science and scepticism as descriptors for the sheeps of Christendom. This had happened to me multiple times before and it always annoyed me. There was one time when he discussed about early church history with a Christian patient and was telling her that their religion rose to prominence under the patronage of a Roman emperor whose name he had trouble remembering.

"Constantine," I volunteered. He beamed at me and praised my knowledge.

"Are you a Christian too?" the woman asked.

"No," I said.

Anyway, after the daily morning meeting in the "HDU", we would head for our morning clinical rounds in the wards where we would review patients and plan their treatment course. He would ask new patients referred to us if they know Jesus, and if they say yes, he would always spend a minute by their bedside holding their hands and praying for them while I stood silently by, watching, fact-checking some creationist claim he lobbed at me that morning, or texting my fiancée in Singapore. There was this one patient in particular who was admitted because of a leg infection causing a state of shock and that had injured his kidneys. The patient was well on the road to recovery. Even though he still needed to be hooked up to a respirator, his kidney functions were improving day by day and every morning, when I read to Dr K the latest lab results, he would remarked joyously: "Praise the Lord!" and pray with that patient some more.

One morning, we found another patient in his bed, and learned that he had expired overnight from respiratory failure. I suspect that this is one patient that Dr K will not remember, alongside the countless others for whom his prayers have failed.

His Young Earth Creationism

"Did you know the Earth is only 6000 years old?" he told me when he discovered my love for science, referencing the Ussher chronology which calculated the age of the Earth based on Biblical genealogy because he is a Biblical literalist who holds the book as a completely factual document, talking snakes and all. He believes that True Science™ agrees with the Bible and like many creationists, he would try to overwhelm me with a continuous stream of claims contradicting the modern scientific view that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, dinosaurs roamed the Earth more than 200 million years ago, and that evolution theory is well-supported by multiple lines of evidence. He was a full course dinner of pseudoscience: the catastrophic flood causing the apparent fossilisation of prehistoric creatures, an inconsistent atmospheric composition caused by Noah's flood rendering radiometric dating unreliable, evolution violating the third law of thermodynamics, et ceteras.

My strategy is to firmly stop him after he had presented one claim and tell him that I need to investigate and read up on it first before he throws me another claim to deal with. I have a healthy respect for the limitations of my knowledge and I always look shit up, particularly if it involves a field I am not trained in.

One of the things he brought up was that dinosaur DNA had been retrieved from fossils as evidence that dinos couldn't possibly have lived millions of years ago because DNA would have broken down over that period of time and the retrieval of ancient DNA (or aDNA) is only feasible up to an upper limit of 1 million years ago. He also mentioned an experiment where an ancient bacteria, supposedly hundreds of million years old, was resurrected. His argument is that if the Earth is young, there couldn't possibly be enough time for significant evolution to happen.

So, I went home, trawled the internet for everything I can find on aDNA and discovered that Dr K's claim that dinosaur DNA had been recovered from fossils is a lie. The closest science papers I can find relating to the subject is Schweitzer et al's discovery of soft tissue preservation in a fossilised bit of a T. rex, supposedly gender-specific tissue that supports the relatedness of dinosaurs to birds, and sequenced proteins from mammoth and T. rex fossils - but no DNA. Previous claims of dinosaur DNA retrieval could not be replicated and were most likely contaminations. When researching Dr K's ancient bacteria resurrection claim, I got an even better insight into his mental processes. The original paper by Kaçar and Gaucher described how they spliced a 500 million year old gene (Elongation Factor Tu, or EF Tu) into a modern E. coli's genome, and the ancient gene was actually was actually reconstructed via phylogenetic analysis, rather than something they found in a glacier somewhere. Dr K likely got his information from second hand sources with a creationist bias, probab'y misinterpreted by overzealous non-scientists and mangled by hearsay. This is why one should always read science, and not read about science.

I confronted him the next day with all these references loaded up into my phone, and after showing him how he got this wrong, he simply shrugged, conceded dismissively that the dinosaur DNA he read about could really just be modern contamination, and immediately tried to unload another wagon-ful of creationist claims on me. The fact that something he told me the day before with so much conviction was shown to be wrong did not faze him one bit. Being in error did nothing to make him question his sources of information, or re-examine the veracity of his other strongly held convictions because - it's obvious, isn't it? - he only wanted to turn me to his worldview. I would go on to refute several other claims of his (each time after diligent research) but to no avail.

Addendum #3 to my mental picture of this man: He refuses to question his own beliefs, even in the face of disconfirming evidence.

His intellectual dishonesty eventually got to a point of laughable obviousness. There was an instant where I told him that I had looked up a point he made and said that what he claimed was inaccurate - his immediate reaction was to explain how I had gotten it wrong instead and by reflex, I whipped out my phone from my pocket to check for bullshit. That simple action was enough to instantly make him change his tune; admitting that I was correct before I could even prove him wrong.

On the last day of I worked with Dr K, finally having enough, I decided to go on the offensive for the first time. I asked him if dinosaur fossils are created by rapid sedimentation due to the Flood, why are the different species organised neatly by geological layers e.g. you won't find human remains in a deeper strata than a velociraptor's bones? How can you explain the genetic diversity within individual species in modern times when only seven of every clean animal and two of every unclean animals were rescued on board the ark? How did plant life survived 40 days and 40 nights submerged under water, and what did the herbivores ate when they left the ark? Why are kangaroos and koalas only found in Australia, and how did they even crossed the sea to get there? I just dumped an avalanche of blatant logical inconsistencies evident within the Flood myth onto him, and he could not address any of them satisfactorily.

One of the most hilarious claims he made was based on Genesis 1:6-7 which described water above and water below, separated by the "firmament", as an explanation for why the lifespans of human beings before Flood would last for many hundreds of years - because the water in the sky is blocking more of the deadly radiation from space compared to modern times.

"As in, there were more clouds back then?" I asked.

"No, there was a layer of water in the sky," he answered.

"You mean there was a sea of liquid water suspended in mid air? Defying gravity?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Yes," he said, without any trace of irony whatsoever. "The Bible is truth. Creation science is bound by what the Bible says. We simply cannot have explanations which contradict it."

Finally, I wearily explained to him how unacceptable that is to me - how it flies in the face of scientific integrity to simply assume that the Bible is accurate and truthful, and decide that you would only accept evidence which fits the Biblical stories. That is a clear bias. "Supposing," I say, "that Muslims decide that scientific evidence should only be researched and interpreted through the verses in the Qur'an, which they consider to be absolutely true, what do you say to that then?"

He thought about it and sheepishly admitted that Creation science "is a matter of faith."

I took that as a victory.

The Subtle Evil of Faith

In the afternoons, he would be working in the HDU, doing paperwork, seeing patients or downloading more creationist material to drown me with. I walked in one day and found him speaking earnestly to a Chinese man, an end stage renal failure patient on dialysis, while illustrating the content of his speech on a piece of notepaper. I listened in on their Mandarin conversation as I helped Dr K with data collation for his Paraquat poisoning study. When they concluded the consultation, Dr K gave the patient the piece of paper he had been doodling on. I excused myself and exited the room right after the patient left, finding him in the waiting area. Quietly, I asked to take a photograph of the note Dr K gave him.

I have totally seen that diagram before back when door-to-door
Christians visited me in my hostel room in college.

On the paper was that popular diagram which Christian proselytisers like to use to illustrate their religion: the image of a river of sin separating man from God, with Jesus on the Cross as the only way bridging the divorce. The sentences below the diagram can be translated as such,

"Jesus: I am the way.
Jesus, ah! I admit my sins. Thank you for your holy blood which cleanses my sins. Please bless me. Amen."

He had told the patient to recite it (and the patient, in typical Malaysian Chinaman fashion, asked how many times he should chant the lines). Dr K was attempting to convert his patients to his religion - people who typically live on the lifeline of regular dialysis, when nothing short of a kidney transplant gives them any chance of recovery. Is it not unethical to target patients who are suffering and perhaps, grasping at straws? Isn't it no better than deathbed conversions? I asked for the opinion of a Christian colleague of mine: he believes that it is not wrong for Dr K to offer spiritual comfort to his patients.

During Wednesday clinic, I noticed that he would ask some of the patients who see him there if they had given any thought about what he told them about Jesus in previous consultations - and most of them would just awkwardly laugh it off before asking him actually pertinent questions about their conditions. I learnt then that he was not just offering an option of spiritual comfort to his patient; he was actively badgering them about converting! Even when they are fine with whatever religious beliefs they hold and wasn't looking for an alternative! This revelation soured my impression of him completely, and stripped whatever modicum of respect he still commanded in my eyes. But it gets worse.

On Friday, I accompanied him to the Intensive Care Unit where he was seeing a young Muslim teenage boy who was very ill from yes, Paraquat poisoning.

"I asked him if he would give himself freely into the arms Jesus," he told me. "The boy nodded yes, and I prayed with him."

This is a despicable act and it breaches any standard of professionalism and ethics that medical practitioners are expected to uphold. He had, without the consent or knowledge of the boy's Muslim parents, opportunistically approached a dying child and converted him to Christianity. This is when the final realisation hit me: his conviction that he is right, that his faith is the only "true" faith and that he is performing God's bidding was what made him feel righteous even when he acted so disgracefully and ignominiously - for what is mundane, mortal morality when compared to the will of the divine? Isn't he, a servant of God, above it all?

I saw it and recognised that it's the same mad certitude in the smile of a Muslim terrorist when he flew a passenger plane full of innocent men, women and children into a skyscraper filled with even more innocent men, women and children, believing in his dying breath that he did what his deity wanted him to do. The true face of evil does not look into a mirror and see evil reflected within, but see instead the face of a saint, a martyr, the proverbial man of God. Dr K had succeeded in convincing me that I would never ever want anything to do with faith or his Jesus Motherfucking Christ.

Last Wednesday, on the 12th of September, 2012, the boy died.

The Nephrologist will tell future House Officers apprenticed to him the story about a young person dying from Paraquat poisoning and how his faith and prayers miraculously saved her, thirteen years ago.

Saw the pavement stones on the road to hell,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Oh My Science, My Thoughts and Other Exc..."

The First Ever Atheist Versus Christian Debate in Malaysia

Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2012 23:40

"I treated the Bible not as the word of God. I treated the Bible as a historical book, not just claiming that everything it says is accurate - although I do believe it."

Samuel Nesan, Supervising Manager
and Debate/Dialogue Representative
of the Young Apologist group

On the 25th of August 2012, two unprecedented and minimally historical things happened for the freethinking community of Malaysia. One, this is the first time we have come out to debate a theistic believer on question of God's existence. Two, this is the largest meeting of atheists to date in our country, which is not saying a whole lot since past secular soirees were typically held in places where alcohol floweth freely and attendance were in the range of about two dozen atheists, tops. It was jointly organised by the Young Apologist group (an organisation that seeks to explain the Christian God through logic and evidence) and the Malaysian Atheists, which I represented in a managerial capacity - which is to say that Chan Ju Ping hooked up with them and then left me to liaise with the Christian side as he go traipsing through some Sarawakian forest on a research trip. The bulk of the heavy lifting were done by the Christian side though since they had to arrange for the venue of the debate, provide the sound system, and supply a moderator slash timekeeper - but hey, they challenged us to debate in the first place, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Me? I just had to round up fifty atheists and get them to go to a... church. Yeah.

Incidentally, the video recording of the event (sans the introductory statement I gave) just hit YouTube earlier this week. The debaters were,

Mr Samuel Nesan, a Christian apologist with a Bachelor in Theology from the Bible College of Malaysia.

Mr Willie Poh, an atheist lecturer at the Multimedia University with a B.IT (Hons) Software Engineering, whatever that is.

The motion of the debate was worded simply: Does God Really Exist? "God" in this context, is defined as the Christian God as described by the Bible. The format of the debate was arranged thus,

Opening statements from Sam and then Willie. Here they lay out their arguments.
Rebuttals from Sam, followed by Willie's. Here they poop on each other's arguments.
Cross examination, where they asks each other questions to clarify or to obfuscate each others' positions.
Response segment, where they "respond" to the cross-examination they received, after they have already answered the questions during the cross examination itself. Yeah, I don't get this either.
Summaries from Sam. Willie got the last word.
The Q&A round, where written questions from the audience were collected and vetted by representatives from either side of the debate. I was the guy from our side, and I chose questions which were coherent and those which brought up issues not addressed within the debate proper.

The video recording were divvied by segments into ten easy-to-digest bits. The video quality is a bit iffy but the audio can be understood (depending on how tolerant you are of the Malaysian accent, of course). You may notice that the speakers repeatedly references "Dr Kok". That would be me.

So, since my opinion was repeatedly sought after during the debate, I will be writing short bit of commentary for each part, bringing up some highlights, and breaking Mr Samuel's arguments down into chewy bite-sized pieces.

Part 1: Opening Statement by Samuel Nesan

Okay. He brought up four arguments for the existence of the Christian God.

Argument from (Messianic) Prophecies: God as described by the Bible is real because it made predictions about the coming of Jesus; prophecies which are later corroborated within the same book.

This is circular reasoning because you are using the Bible to prove the Bible to be true. There is also a major unstated premise built within it assuming the Bible to be a reliable record of such prophecies and their subsequent alleged fruition without providing any proof or evidence in support of that premise, therefore begging the question. This is the same book that talks about talking snakes and a guy who can turn water into wine, mind you. If it's published today, you'd ask if J. K. Rowling wrote it.

Argument from the Limits of Science: God is spirit and exists outside of space and time, so science can't be used to investigate the claims of God's existence.

This is not so much an argument for the existence of God as it is saying you can't prove he doesn't. This is true. But then again, science can't prove the existence or non-existence of anything if you claim it lies outside of the material world. I can tell you that Batman exists but he lies outside of space-time too - does it automatically make his existence more plausible? Nope. This is also an example of Samuel trying to have his cake and eat it too as Christians also claims that their God physically flooded the whole damn world at some point. You'd think that that would leave a lot of indisputable evidence but modern geology have completely ruled out all possibilities of a global flood. And if you have trouble understanding geology, ask yourself this: how did the koalas and kangaroos knew they were suppose to live only in Australia - and no where else - after they disembarked from the ark? Why did all the polar bears go north while all the penguins go south? And if we can't find evidence for one of the most awesome of God's physical miracles in our material world (but instead find evidence against the events described within the Bible), then we must be honest and admit that the Bible is not a completely factual document and this should throw all of claims of Jesus' alleged miracles into the same sceptical light (to go back to Sam's first argument and kick it between the legs).

Argument from Experientialism: I feel God is real.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Okay. Willie's response to this is eloquent and elegant - or at least it would be eloquent and elegant if he actually finished his point before his time ran out during his turn to rebut so I'll reproduce it here. He told a story about how he, after watching a horror flick like Paranormal Activity, would be afraid of the dark and would feel a presence behind him when he's in bed. Does it mean that there was really a ghost or spirit behind him just because he felt it there? And why did the spook only started haunting him after he just saw a scary movie? Likewise, when a Christian says he or she feels God presence or love, does it mean that this God they describe necessarily exist? And why do they only have this feelings after reading the Bible? What about people who don't feel Jesus but feels the spirit of another deity from another religion instead? What about people like me who feels that God doesn't exist?

Argument from You-Can-Feel-God-Too: If you are truly sincere in accepting him into your heart!

When I was in med school, I went to church for a bit. I read the Bible and tried inviting Jesus into my life sincerely as advised by my Christian friends. I felt nothing. Okay, that's not strictly true because I felt stupid doing that. So, if Samuel can use his experience as evidence, I can too.

Part 2: Opening Statement by Willie Poh

Part 3: Rebuttals by Samuel Nesan

He brought up the fine-tuned universe argument and argument from morality but since he did not go into them, I shall not either. Here are the most egregious points he did make,

According to Genesis 3:1-24, man had fallen and therefore cannot see God even if he's in front of our eyes.

Yeap, this is a prime specimen of argument from scripture. This is only a valid argument if you can prove that the scripture you are referencing to be a reliable source of information which, as the Flood story showed, it is not. Can Samuel show us evidence that the events described in Genesis 3 really happened? Show us one talking snake, will you?

I can't believe we have to argue that there's no such things as talking snakes to grownups.

Hell is just a place of eternal separation from God, not really a hellish torture chamber as depicted in medieval arts.

Revelations 21:8 describes hell as a "lake which burneth with fire and brimstone". Matthew 13:49-50 says hell is "the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth". Revelations 14:11 claims people who have rejected Christ would be "tormented with fire and brimstone" and that "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night". I don't know about you but hell sure doesn't sound like a day at the spa to me.

The universe is unimaginably vast and old even though he only needed one planet and a few thousand years for his purpose because God is fucking powerful and he can do whatever weird thing he wants that makes no sense.

This is basically the "God works in mysterious ways" gambit.

God does not break the laws of physics but intervenes through the laws of physics.

Matthew 14:25 had Jesus walking on water. In Exodus 14:21-22, God had more fun messing about with fluid physics by parting a damn sea. Jesus totally violated the conservation of mass when he multiplied the bread and fishes in Mark 6:41-44. Between this and the hell thing, I am starting to really wonder if Samuel have even read the Bible.

Evolution is not provable.

E. coli is a bacteria and one of its defining characteristic, differentiating it from the pathogenic Salmonella, is its inability to utilise citrate as a source of energy under oxic condition. However, after growing more than 30,000 generations of these bacteria on a medium that is citrate-rich, they evolved the ability to do what they couldn't. Evolution is proven. In a lab. On a petri dish. And in my line of work, I fight the evolutionary progress of bacteria daily as they evolve resistance to the antibiotics I prescribe for my patients. Just to put it into perspective, this is what we all learnt in med school: In the 1930's, Neisseria gonorrhoeae was treated using sulfa drugs, which it quickly developed resistance to. In the '40s, penicillin became the drug of choice but doses had to be continually increased in order to remain effective. In the '70s, penicillin and tetracycline-resistant gonorrhea emerged and fluoroquinolones were then used - but soon, resistance to this antibiotic emerged as well. Since 2007, we've been using third-generation cephalosporins, (i.e. ceftriaxone) and reports of a cephalosporin-resistant strain had emerged as well. Evolution is not only provable, it is an everyday problem for me.

I believe in microevolution, not macroevolution.

Microevolution is basically the changes in gene frequencies within a species or population while macroevolution occurs at the level of species or above it, resulting new species. What evolution-denialists like Samuel Nesan do not understand is that microevolution occurring over vast amounts of time results in macroevolution. Francis Collins, American physician-geneticist, head of the Human Genome Project and the current Director of the National Institutes of Health, said: "Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things." He is also an Evangelical Christian.

One of the most dramatic examples of evolution in the fossil records is the Archaeopteryx, which was caught in the dramatic act of evolving from theropod dinosaurs into birds. My favourite example of evolution is how dog-like terrestrial hoofed carnivores called Pakicetids evolved into the modern whale. If you're interested, I have written about the evolution of the human appendix to bookmark the first successful appendicectomy I performed: The Most Dangerous of Worms.

Part 4: Rebuttals by Willie Poh

Part 5: Cross Examination of Willie by Samuel, and Vice Versa

In this segment, Samuel gets to ask Willie the hardest questions he know on the atheistic and scientific worldview we hold,

Question 1: Samuel brings up his beef with "macroevolution" by asking how life comes from non-life.

This illustrates perfectly how little Samuel understood about the theory of evolution. The theory explains the complexity and diversity of life, but makes no statement on how life began so his question, while being an important one, is irrelevant to his objection to evolution - something I felt Willie should have highlighted to avoid perpetuating that misconception in his audiences' minds. The study of the origins of life is called abiogenesis and as Willie pointed out, the correct answer is "I don't know" and not "Goddidit". Willie referenced - though he did not name - the Miller-Urey experiment where replicating the conditions of early Earth, they were able to create amino acids (organic compounds) from inorganic compounds. In fact, they were able to synthesise more types of amino acids that the original twenty that all life on Earth requires. Joan Oró found that through a similar experiment, he could synthesise adenine from inorganic material - and this is a big deal because adenine is one of the 4 nucleotide bases that makes up RNA and DNA (the molecular genetic code of all life), and forms adenosine triphosphate (the energy currency of all life). As for how all these organised themselves into the first organisms, I would give a better answer than Willie's: We are working on it.

Question 2: How do you explain hauntings, demonic possessions, exorcism, shamanism, voodoo and other claptraps that I also believe in besides Jesus?

Even if all these things are true, it still doesn't mean that God exists. It's baffling that Samuel would even bring all these up. Fact is, all these are claims. All we have to show for it are eyewitness accounts, crappy video and audio recordings, and a whole fat lot of non-reproducibility. As Willie said, many have tried their luck with James Randi's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge and could not even past preliminary testings once the confounding factors were removed. What we sceptics are saying is this: please prove to us that there is even a consistent, reproducible, unexplained phenomenon happening before asking science to describe and explain it.

Question 3: Are you saying that I - a believer of a cosmic superbeing out of space and time who impregnated a virgin Jewish girl in order to be born to get himself killed in order to forgive me of my sins which was caused by ancestors of mine ate a fruit after being duped by a talking snake - am delusional?

Unfortunately, I can't medically say that Samuel is delusional. The psychiatric definition of a delusion is an unshakeable and irrational belief in something untrue which defy normal reasoning even when overwhelming proof is presented to dispute it, with the caveat that that belief is not something cultural or religious which may be seen as untrue by outsiders. One thing that struck me in Psychiatry 101 back in my med school days is that a religious belief is virtually indistinguishable from a delusion, and it's only excluded because a person's surrounding community believes in the same thing too.

Question 4: Is atheism scientific?

Willie said yes. I say it can be. Atheism is statement of disbelief in a god or gods. If you are an agnostic atheist like me who recognise that the existence of an omnipotent creator outside of space and time is an unfalsifiable claim (and is therefore a claim that cannot be proved or disproved by science), the only logical and honest position you can assume towards it is one of agnosticism. But I am also an atheist because I don't believe that there is such a being due to the lack of good evidence or reason to do so. In this case, I am also being a sceptic and scepticism is scientific.

The second half of this video is Willie turning the tables in Samuel with some cross examination of his own. Here are Willie's questions, Samuel's answers, and my critique of his answers,

Why are the awesome miracles only found during Old Testamental time, while modern alleged miracles are low-key and easily disputable? Samuel said miracles now are still awesome, by his standards, and that money-grabbing televangelists are a proof (haha) of that.

Samuel essentially evaded Willie's question completely by applying his own definition of awesome to Willie's question, after Willie specifically defined awesome as the amount of physical effect a miracle has on the material world. If you like, here's a diagram I drew to illustrate how descriptions of miracles tended to be more epic in the past than they do now, and this is because you can make claims of anything happening in the past and if it happened far enough back in time, you can avoid pesky sceptics like me investigating that claim effectively.

And just to bury Samuel's point further, I present to you the case of Peter Popoff, a once famous Christian faith healer who was making 4 million dollars a year healing people on TV - he was utterly dethroned by James Randi when his seeming-ability to guess people's personal info and even their illnesses came from a radio feed from his wife, the transmission of which was intercepted by Randi and recorded. You see, Popoff's wife and her aides gather information about audience members from conversations and prayer request cards filled out before service, and then beam them into Popoff's ear by radio. Other tricks he pulled including seating audience members who can actually walk (albeit with minimal aid) in wheelchairs, giving the illusion that he can make wheelchair bound individuals walk again. These are simple cons, but Christians' credulity, as demonstrated by Samuel in referencing the powers of televangelists, predisposes them to simply believe in such claims of miracles unsceptically and indiscriminately. Samuel asked at some point during the debate: How much evidence would be enough? And my answer is: definitely waaay more than what Samuel considers to be enough.

Jesus appeared to Paul in a blinding flash of light and he allowed Doubting Thomas to feel his wounds in order to prove to them he is God, so why can't don't we modern sceptics get the same evidence from Jesus? Samuel said that even if Jesus appears to us, we would not be able to see him because of The Fall™.

It was a spectacular act of Samuel shooting himself in the foot and demonstrates how muddled his internal logic is regarding Biblical non-explanations. Both Paul and Thomas were "fallen" too. They too are mortals on Earth who lived long after mankind's alleged fall from grace. So were Moses, Abraham, Lot and all the Old Testament prophets who had dealings with God or his agents.

If you pray and it changes God's mind, then he is not omniscient. If you can't change God's mind, then why bother with intercessory prayers? Samuel said you shouldn't ask for stuff when you pray but instead say "God, let your will be done."

Here is a further example of Samuel's incoherent and inconsistent faith. One moment, he said you shouldn't ask God to do things for you in your prayer but when Willie asked if he would pray to God to save his loved ones, he suddenly said he would. Also, to dispute Samuel's initial point using the Bible, Matthew 22:21 had Jesus saying, "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." Jesus said you can totally ask for any stuff ("all things") and you shall get it ("ye shall receive") so long as you have faith ("believing"). However, that itself is its own little problem and you can read more about it here in this short piece titled: The Problem with Matthew 22:21.

Why choose Christianity and not other faith? How vigorously have you sought out other faiths? Samuel said Christianity is truer than the other religions, and that came from him pursuing a Masters in Comparative Theology.

From Seminari Theoloji Malaysia, an interdenominational Protestant seminary. Yeah, those guys are totally going to be impartial. Also, Christianity is truthier than other faiths? Citations please.

Part 6: Samuel's Response to the Cross Examination

Here, Samuel responds to the answers given by Willie to his questions and in doing so, he made a few points, which I'll get cracking on,

Atheists have double standards for expecting Christians to shoulder the burden of proof from the Christian God's existence.

Duh. You claim God exists, you prove it. If I claim an invisible STD fairy is the entity that causes the herpes, and then you'd expect me to prove its existence, wouldn't you? And if you can't prove that the STD fairy doesn't exist, does it mean that claims of its existence automatically has validity?

The film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is fact. A girl died from demonic possesion.

No, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a movie loosely based on Anneliese Michel, who died from malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while the rites of exorcism were performed - one or two sessions each week, lasting up to four hours, over about ten months in 1975 and 1976. Her story is actually a cautionary tale against trusting in the supernatural. Here is a list of accounts of more than a thousand human beings harmed (with more being unreported, I'm sure), and in most cases, fatally. And it all happened because people like Samuel gullibly believe in exorcism.

Something something something genetic fallacy!

Listen to what Samuel described as a genetic fallacy that Willie allegedly made. He said (quite unintelligibly) something like this: "You are making a genetic fallacy, just because we are born in a certain place and a certain time, therefore we have no reason to believe in religion. Something is wrong because of the origin; the answer is wrong just because of the way it came forth." I wish he could have been more coherent so I can at least see what he meant by Willie committing the genetic fallacy. If I have to guess, it had something to do with Willie explaining why Samuel is not delusional by society's standards in believing the things he do, citing Samuel's surroundings, his upbringing and his community as the reasons. Willie is not saying that Samuel's beliefs are wrong because his situation is wrong or evil.

Christians have to shoulder the burden of proof for God but atheists/agnostics are not shouldering the burden of proof from evolution. Willie is committing the fallacy of special pleading!

Um, no. Look at the choice of antibiotics that is prescribed to treat you when you get an infection, and the importance of completing the course of medication - that's evolutionary theory applied to the real world. Look at Tiktaalik, a Devonian lobed finned fish evolving into a land-dwelling four-legged creature with adaptations for terrestrial living - you can touch the damn fossil. It's real. There's a wealth of transitional species in the fossil records bridging major groups of living creatures if only you would take your face out of your Bible and look. Can I see Jesus? Nope. Can I touch his crucifixion wounds like Thomas allegedly did? Nope.

90% of the world believes in God. Therefore we are not delusional and there's something to it.

Since he likes bringing up logical fallacies, I'll do one: Samuel is committing the argumentum ad populum, or the argument from popularity. Just because lots of people believe in something doesn't say anything about whether it is true or not. There was a time that most, if not all, people in the world believed that the sun goes around the Earth. So yes, most people in the world can be wrong about something.

Part 7: Willie's Response to the Cross Examination

Part 8: Summary from Samuel Nesan

Part 9: Summary from Willie Poh

Part 10: Questions and Answers with the Audience

I was the representative from the godless team who, with the cooperation of a bloke from the other side, selected the questions that I felt would be pertinent to the debate, bring up points not explored by the speakers. I discarded those which are blatantly trying to make a point and those that resembles more like a novella in length than a tweet. Here's where I have culled a selection of queires to comment on which I feel were not satisfactorily addressed,

If humans are created in the image of God, why are there congenital deformities?

This one was obviously written by a certain six-fingered atheist musician I know in the audience (he has pre-axial polydactyly, to be exact) and he told me that to date, no believer could answer it satisfactorily. Samuel fell back on his personal go-to non-answer for everything that's wrong in the world today: The Fall™. I have personally scoured the Bible to look for the Christian answer to this question and I have not found any. What I did find however, was Leviticus 21:16-21 which says, "The Lord said to Moses, "Say to Aaron: 'For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord." What this tells me is that the Christian God that Samuel worships is a discriminatory asshole (Jesus notwithstanding) who tells handicapped, deformed, and little people to not touch his food. So, I am always amused when people pray to the Christian God to help people with these conditions.

What scientific literature have you (Samuel) read on evolution and can you explain it satisfactorily what the theory says to demonstrate your understanding?

Samuel's answer here truly demonstrates how he really have no idea what he's objecting to. You can see here that he admitted how he had not even finish reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which is 150 years behind time on the current understanding of evolution. He also did not take up the challenge of explaining or defining the theory to display his understanding. So, the reason why he kept parroting the fact that there's no satisfactory evidence to support biological evolution is simple: he simply did not bother to read about the evidence.

Why do you (Samuel) have no problem believing in microevolution over short periods of time but balks at the thought of macroevolution in geological (read: massively long) timescale?

Sam went into how we can't explain life came from non-life again, further cementing the obvious: he has no idea what evolution is. Evolutionary biology, as conceived by Darwin and understood by scientists today, is the explanation for the diversity of life, not its origin. The principles driving microevolution and macroevolution is identical - both operates via natural selection where environmental pressures dictates what genes would best help an organism survive and pass it on to its progeny. To say you believe in one and not the other is like saying "I believe that a bus would arrive at its next stop in 10 minutes but I don't believe it can reach the next city is 10 hours." And to answer Samuel's quibble that there is no clear definition of biological evolution, Biology by Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes defined it as "any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." It is elegant but non-scientists may find it cryptic. In fact, Darwin himself would not immediately understand it as he never knew about DNA or what "allelles" are.

Douglas J. Futuyama had a longer definition and he describes evolution as "change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions."

I know about microevolution but DNA can only decrease in information, but wouldn't a monkey evolving into a human needs an increase in the complexity of its DNA?

This one clearly came from a Christian - describing human evolution as monkey-to-human instead of saying we came from a-common-ancestor-which-gave-rise-to-both-humans-and-monkeys was a dead giveaway. Modern monkeys are our genetic cousins, and you wouldn't say you descended from a cousin, would you? It also made two unsupported assumptions (a) DNA can only lose information, not gain and (b) a human is more complex compared to a monkey.

I'll tackle the second one first. The idea of "higher" or "more-evolved" lifeforms is tricky to quantify. The marbled lungfish has 133 billion base pairs in its genome. Paris japonica (a flowering plant) has a genetic code that is 150 billion base pairs long. A single-celled freshwater amoeboid, Polychaos dubium, has a documented 670 billion base pairs in its DNA. Humans? We have a paltry 3 billion base pairs. The point I am trying to make is that "complexity" is irrelevant to the survival or evolutionary fitness of an organism. It's how well-adapted that organism is to its environment.

The first assumption is plain wrong. I'll illustrate with one simple, relatable example: the dog, or as I like to call it, the Canis lupus familiaris. It's Latin name informs you that it is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and indeed, dogs can still interbreed with wild wolves. There is an estimated 150 to 600 breeds of dogs worldwide with vast diversity in morphology from Great Danes to Chihuahuas to French Bulldogs, all of which were bred from the plain vanilla gray wolf stock. This is a clear demonstration that information (in this case, body shapes, colours, fur-length, etc) within DNA codes can be increased. If that's not what you meant by information, then please define it.

Why is evolution reasonable when it causes racism i.e. white men killing aborigines?

The person who posed this question is the same person who posed the above, and it demonstrated the same sloppy thinking style. I bring this up because I was dissatisfied with Willie's answer and wishes to smack him in the face with a panda for missing the obvious. On the Origin of Species, Darwin's book, was published in 1859. Is the questioner saying that racism did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century?

Aside from plain crazy talk, the questioner is also committing an appeal to consequences, a blatant logical fallacy, in that he or she supposes that the consequence triggered by any fact or claim has any bearing on its truth value. When someone falls from a skyscraper to his or her destiny as a red stain on the streets below, does it mean that the laws of gravity is "unreasonable"? Passages from the Bible were historically used to justify slavery and racism, does it mean that... oh wait, the Bible actually go into specifics on how to buy slaves, how to bequeath slaves to your heirs, and how you shouldn't be punished if your slave didn't die immediately from your beatings. Unlike the theory of evolution, which makes no statement of what races are more primitive or less deserving of rights, the Bible openly tells you the etiquette of being a slave and a slave-owner, with not a single passage condemning the practice of slavery.

Do you believe in free will? Doesn't the omniscience of God negates free will?

I have nothing to add to this. I just want to bring this up because Samuel plain didn't understand the intent of the question and Yoshua the moderator (he himself a Christian), outright told Samuel that. You'd notice that there's no moderator from the atheist side and while we requested that an atheist representative (yours truly), be inserted into the question selection process for the Q&A round, we had opted not to stick a someone sympathetic to our worldview in the moderator's seat. It's win-win. Either the Christian moderator is completely impartial (good), or is biased towards the Christian side (good, because it would make us look like we were being unfairly treated).

Can morality exists without God?

Willie answered this ably. I would add that other than the obvious fact that no one (to my knowledge) in the atheist community is going around robbing, raping and killing just because they don't believe in God. Morality is also found in animals and one of the most dramatic examples I've found is an experiment by Masserman et al with rhesus monkeys where he rigged up a food dispensing mechanism for them that, when operated, also delivers an electric shock to fellow monkey. They found that most rhesus monkeys would rather starve than reap benefits from the suffering of another member of its species. No god required, unless you think the monkeys were feverishly reading the Bible when the researchers' backs were turned.

Samuel's response to the above question.

This is what I consider the absolute highlight of the night and thought it deserved its own bullet point. Samuel brought up Adolf Motherfucking Hitler and that automatically aroused laughter from the unbelievers in the audience before he even elaborated on his point. Several atheists (including me), immediately brought their palms to their faces. We do that because we have heard this a million times and we know exactly what's coming. While Samuel did not want to characterise Hitler as an atheist, he also said, "I don't believe he's a believer."

I do not want to comment on what Hitler really believed or did not believe in, but this is what he said in Mein Kampf: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." He also said in a 1922 speech, "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter."

Samuel also tried to link the theory of evolution to Hitler's motivation by saying "Hitler believed in the survival of the fittest" when the Nazis actually banned works on Darwinism. In fact, Hitler said this about atheism in October 1934 in a speech in Berlin: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

Then finally, Samuel trotted out his most egregious point of the night. He said, "Without God, morality is subjective." That is patently untrue. According to the Bible, God is most definitely not an objective source of morality. Take the Ten Commandments, for example. One of them was "Thou shalt not kill." If this is an objective law of morality, it means that under no circumstances are anyone allowed to take another person's life but within the same Biblical book, just some chapters ahead, God commanded the Levites (Exodus 32:27) to "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour." 3000 people were murdered. In fact, God is so bloodthirsty that he gave Jephthah victory in battle in exchange for him burning his own daughter as an offering to Him (Judges 11:30-31, 11:34-40). And if "Thou shalt not kill" is truly an objective moral law - emphasis on objective - then God is immoral if he breaks it, regardless of context. And boy, just between the Flood which wiped out most of humanity, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Plagues of Egypt, he certainly act as if killing is a-okay if you're a cosmic super-being. Objective morality, my comfy ass. The God of the Bible is the greatest moral relativist I know.

Commentator's Note

And I'm done. The reason why I chose to sit down and write this commentary to accompany the videos is because I want to demonstrate how ineffectual debates are in conveying knowledge and accurate information, and to illustrate the fact that debates are really just popularity contests where two talking heads play he-says-she-says.

Even so, I think Willie did an amazing job explaining the atheistic position and refrained from saying anything untruthful. We knew that this is going to be recorded and it simply wouldn't do for us to perpetuate any falsehoods.

At the end of the night, some Christian youths approached Willie with what he thinks are genuine and sincere questions about science (I said "he thinks" because I wasn't there), and you wouldn't believe how delighted he was. It's the teacher in him, methinks. I also heard unconfirmed reports about a fence-sitter in the audience who fell off the fence into our lawn, but I am naturally sceptical of hearsay. But you already know that.

RELATED POST: My introductory speech before the debate.

READ ALSO: Mr Pepper Lim's write-up, Debating God’s Existence 25.8.12. He was responsible for organising the video recording of the debate.

Part of minor secular history,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Oh My Science, Events and the Non-Routin..."

You Will Now Hear What I Really Sound Like

Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2012 23:40

"A speech is like a woman's skirt: it needs to be long enough to cover the subject matter but short enough to hold the audience's attention."

Author unknown

I have very little stage experience. The first that I could remember was in kindergarten where I was suppose to be a wind-up toy coming to life at night in a little girl's bedroom - I had Groucho glasses on for some reason and as it was a preschool production, porn did not ensue. When I was 15, I sang a song on stage during a Buddhist camp. I sang Miss You Like Crazy by The Moffatts (shut up, we all went through those years), beating an older guy who roped in a friend to play the guitar as he garroted Green Day's Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) with his vocal cords. My voice broke the following year, thus ending my budding musical career. When I was 16, I got roped into some kind of personality pageant in another Buddhist camp where I answered some Miss Universe-type questions and danced on stage with a really hot 13-year-old. I won that too, haha. And it's not creepy if the girl's age is my age divided by two plus sev... holy shit, it was creepy!

What I consider to be my best stage achievement was when I was 17 and was involved in organising a Buddhist meet. I was put in charge of coming up with games for the younger kids and designing the programme booklet. A buddy of mine was suppose to emcee and after he showed everyone how excruciatingly bad he is in the first few minutes, I simply stepped in, relieved him of the microphone, and took over the job for the next 8 hours, and the head organiser of the event came up to me and basically said, "This whole thing would have sucked without you". As you can see, I had an excess of confidence back in those days but I have lost most of it after my vampiric second ex-girlfriend siphoned all self-respect and dignity out of me between 2004 and 2006.

The freethinking and sceptical community of Malaysia does not have any official leaders and as I was the liaison for my side in the recent debate we had, I was automatically placed in one of the Very Important Poopyface seats.I later realise that I was expected to speak on behalf of perhaps one of the least understood demographic groups in our country. While I had appeared in front of crowds in the past doing many things, I have never given a speech in my life - so the fear of screwing it up was palpable.

Anyway, I just received the video recording of my speech in my mail, and for the first time, you, dear readers of my blog, will hear how I really sound like in real life. Prepare for disillusionment,

On my right was Le Fiancée™. Pastor Samuel, who gave us permission to use his church, was seated left to me.

You can read the original script of the speech here.

The podium was a bit low so I was compelled to hunch over it just so I can read my note. I didn't intend to achieve much. I just wanted to appear affable, relatable and human, which is how most atheists are really like in real life in an attempt to mirror the contents of my statement. That is also the reason why Willie, our debater, did not focus his arguments in attacking the worldview held by his Christian opponent (and half the audience) but instead, opted to simply explain where we are coming from. We did not seek to turn anyone to our side. We sought to be heard and understood.

Aaanyhow, there is now video evidence of my existence on the internet! Kok Sen Wai 1, Jesus 0. To all you faithful believers who kept your faith in me in spite of the lack of proof, unanswered ~~prayers~~ comments, and prolonged droughts of new blog posts; you are all vindicated! To all you Kok Sen Wai sceptics, agnostics and unbelievers - kindly suck it.

P.S. The last time I was seen on stage was in 2009 when I got accidentally cast as the lead in a sketch for my med school's Annual Night. You can read about that here, if you are one of my stalkers.

RELATED POSTS: The First Ever Atheist Versus Christian Debate in Malaysia, where you can watch the debate proper.

No Winston Churchill,
k0k s3n w4i

Author: "k0k s3n w4i (noreply@blogger.com)" Tags: "Events and the Non-Routine"

Cheryl and I Go to a Debate

Date: Monday, 10 Sep 2012 02:59

"People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

To say that I had an eventful weekend is to severely understate it. After signing off work at 4:00 AM on Saturday morning, I made my way to the airport to catch an early morning flight to the Peninsula. There, I met the Crazy Cat Lady™ (who had flown in from Singapore) and together, we travelled to The Gardens to have my first ever lunch date with the future in-laws at a Hakka restaurant - which I thought appropriate as I am mostly Hakka by descent. Bet you didn't know that.

After that, we made our way to The Ascott where Cheryl had gotten us a rather swanky pad using some company coupon voodoo that I don't fully understand - it has a bathtub and shit. However, we weren't allowed to check in till 3:00 PM because room service was still resetting our room. We did get two complimentary iced lemon tea at their bar while we waited though. There, I wrote a speech on a piece of paper I borrowed from the bartender while Le Fiancée™ quietly snapped a bajillion photographs of me making oral love to my pen.

Courtesy of Cheryl's Instagram fauxtography.

The main reason why Cheryl and I were in town was because that evening, we were going to make history where the freethinking community is concerned - a couple of histories, in fact. In the past few months, my atheist friends and I had been busy organising the first ever live debate in Malaysia on the question of God's existence in partnership with the Young Apologist, a Christian group looking to defend their faith through reason, logic and evidence. Coincidentally, this is going to be the biggest concentration of Malaysian non-believers in any place, at any time ever (which sounds impressive until you realise that no godless meet in Malaysia ever exceeded twenty godless heads). I was suppose to give a brief statement about who we are and what we are about before the debate commence - hence, the speech I was writing. ~~Incidentally, it was also the first time I had to address a bunch of people on stage~~ Oh wait, I remember filling in for the emcee back in high school for a Buddhist meet because the guy we originally appointed was rubbish.