Tag: religion

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Books & printed materials History & heritage Liberty Society

[1939] Of a major revolution in secularism

I now understand a step in the history of evolution of secularism. Though I think it is ultimately irrelevant to why I subscribe to secularism, it nevertheless enlightening to see how the school of thought evolved.

Ethics is the work that provided the energy for a quantum leap in the area.

Public domain

Baruch Spinoza completed Ethics in 1676 and it was published posthumously in 1677.

Reading these giants makes me feels small. Not only do they make me realized that I am not the first to hold whatever I hold, they had given thought to many other things which I have yet to think of independently.

I am not reading Ethics in Latin of course. Rather, I am still reading The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart.

It is through Stewart and later Wikipedia and other sources that I learned that Spinoza considered that God and Nature are two of the same entity. As a result, God is everywhere while bounded to the law of physics. God bows to the law of Nature. With that as the premise, he elegantly went on to create a system to explain how everything is a manifestation of God.

The implication is that unlike religion — in this context the Abrahamic religions, specifically, Christianity — which assumes that God is an active participant of this world, Spinoza’s God is removed and irrelevant to the workings of the world.

“In that event, what would be left for God to do?” Stewart wrote that in a different context but the same sentence is applicable to the implication of the idea that God is Nature.

I do not subscribe to Spinoza’s reasoning but how he arrived at the inevitable need to create a secular state is most ingenious. It nothing less than shocking to me when I began to comprehend the gravity of his ideas.

One may wonder why Spinoza considered God and Nature as one. I am still struggling to understand that at the moment.

Besides secularim, Spinoza holds an enlightening view on social contract. I believe, those that are all to eager to talk about the Malaysian social contract  — especially those who believe that a social contract is written in stone  — should give Spinoza a go.

Categories
Books & printed materials Fiction Liberty Society

[1898] Of Republic of Heaven

I had never read a book after watching its film adaptation. I am usually dismissive of those who do that. I admit, I am arrogant about this kind of stuff. It is a feeling of those listening to alternative less-than-mainstream music have against those that listen to commercialized songs like Britney Spears’ or Backstreet Boys’. When Lord of the Rings came out in 2001, I spent excessive time deriding those who fell in love with Tolkien’s works because of the movie, instead of the book. I am like a book puritan, like those religious conservatives watching liberals as if the latter suffer from grave moral erosion deserving in the lowest level of hell. Worse, watching the movie before reading the book ruins imagination.

Well, I finally lost my moral authority to assume that holier-than-thou attitude because of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material.

To my defense, I read it not because I fell in love with the film. Well, I did fall in love with it but that is not the reason why I started reading it.

The reason is this: it was the controversy the film invited when it, The Golden Compass, hit the cinema. Christian conservatives in the US wanted for the movie to be boycotted. On the other side, the director Chris Weitz was criticized for self-censorship when he diluted reference to Christianity in order not to offend the religious rights.

That and a desire to entertain a friend convinced me to watch the movie. I like the movie but I wanted to do a comparison between the movie and the book, just to discover by myself about the heretic nature of the trilogy with respect to religion.

I did not manage to do my comparison until I got myself a free copy of the whole trilogy at the KL Alternative Book Fest some time ago.

Finishing the first installment of the trilogy failed to prove the alleged hostility that Pullman’s work has against the idea of religion. The idea presented in the first book was mild though creative and I could not really understand the brouhaha surrounding it. And so, my interest in reading the trilogy waned as I picked up other wonkish books to read.

I did continue reading the trilogy after renewing my commitment to finish reading all of my books that I have ever bought. As I did that, I was hooked by the second book and it was until the end of the third book did I finally comprehend why the book is not at all innocent. It was about killing god, or rather, killing an angel who pretended to be God. It was about dismantling the Kingdom of Heaven to create a Republic of Heaven.

In Pullman’s universe, the first ever angel made others believed that he was the creator of the universe, a god. The angel later retired from life as he grew older and appointed an angel named Metatron as a regent. Metatron assumed full godly authority and tightened the Kingdom of Heaven’s grip over the world. Metatron later became more powerful than God, or the Authority as named in the book, and supplanted his position, effectively becoming God himself.

The Church, ignorant of the truth, meanwhile, being the agent of so-called God, tried to restrict free inquiry. Parts of the Church secretly worked to turn human kinds into, effectively, obedient zombies incapable of running their life freely, incapable of questioning. It was this effort along with the discover of dusk, started the ball rolling. The Church strongly denied the existence of dusk though they themselves were aware of its existence.

Metatron himself was formerly a human called Enoch. As you can see, there are references to actual characters in the Abrahamic tradition. You will realize that assertion alone is heretical beyond scale. There are frequent reference made against religion throughout the trilogy but it only become more memorable towards the end.

There were rebellions, among men and angels against god in the name of free will. Part of the rebellion was fueled to undo the lies told by God.

In any case, Metatron in the end, was killed by humans, thus freeing human kinds from tyranny, allowing free will to flourish without having the smoldering Church lurking somewhere. God himself die somewhere in the book.

I am slightly disappointed with the ending. As usually, reading a good book causes one to become involved in the universe created by the author. I saw the two main characters of the trilogy, Will and Lyra, walking along the beach with their daemons from afar, falling in love. There was a feeling that you want them to be together. But they could not be together. They had to part ways because of, ehem, the structural integrity of the whole universe depended on them staying apart. I found myself protesting when I they found out their feeling was futile, that something larger was against it, something larger than god. It was morality and responsibility to others. It was about the Republic of Heaven.

That disappointment however does nothing to diminish the brilliance of Pullman.

Categories
Humor

[1712] Mengenai kembali kepada agama

Kesesakan lalu lintas adalah satu kebiasaan bagi Lebuhraya Persekutuan. Kehadiran pemandu-pemandu yang tidak sopan yang sentiasa memotong barisan juga tidak asing. Tambahan lagi, Jumaat semalam bagi saya merupakan satu hari yang dipenuhi dengan permintaan yang tidak munasabah langsung. Mujurlah ada radio sebagai teman yang sentiasa cuba mengalihkan perhatian saya daripada sumber-sumber yang menimbulkan kemarahan. Di radio terpasang frekuensi 93.9FM. Radio 24 yang dikendalikan oleh Bernama sedang menimbangi pandangan orang ramai tentang cara mengatasi kos sara diri yang meningkat dan salah seorang yang berkongsi pendapat berjaya menghiburkan hati saya yang gelisah.

Pengacara bertanya, “Ya, bagaimanakah encik mengatasi peningkatan harga-harga makanan serta minyak?”

Dengan yakinnya, dia menjawab, “Kita mesti kembali kepada agama.”

Sebelum ini, ada pandangan-pandangan yang boleh diterima pakai. Seorang penelefon berkata rakyat tidak perlu panik dan patut terus berbelanja untuk menjana ekonomi negara semasa kesihatan ekonomi terancam. Seorang penyokong Keynesianisme, mungkin.

Ada yang berpendapat yang inilah masanya untuk kita melipat-gandakan usaha untuk menambahkan pendapatan. Seorang lagi menyaran supaya rakyat meneliti perbelanjaan seharian dengan menyediakan bajet tahunan. Perbelanjaan yang kurang penting haruslah dipotong.

Boleh dikatakan rata-rata, kebanyakan pendapat yang dikongsi biasa didengari, kecuali apabila agama ditawarkan sebagai ubat kepada kos sara hidup yang tinggi.

Pengacara rancangan radio itu jelas kurang berpuas hati dengan pandangan itu dan kemudiannya meminta penjelasan lanjut tentang pendapat kembali-kepada-agama.

Tanpa teragak-agak, jawapan yang diberi: “Ini semua satu cubaan daripada Allah.” Dia berasa jika kita bersungguh-sungguh yakin dengan Allah, semua masalah ini akan dapat diselesaikan.

Bagus. Teruskan berdoa tanpa melakukan apa-apa. Buatlah sembahyang hajat dan yakinlah dengan hebat yang agamalah penyelesaian kepada masalah kamu. Tuhan akan menjawab doamu! Yakinlah!

Hahaha. Komedi hari Jumaat.

Categories
Humor

[1650] Of I am the Messiah

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I wonder how many religions started like this.

Categories
Society

[1646] Of is an Obama administration bad for US-Muslim world relationship?

A really odd but well-argued point on Obama’s religion and how it would affect the relationship between the US and the Muslim world at large.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

[…]

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is ”irtidad” or ”ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as ”apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

[…]

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic. [President Apostate? Edward N. Luttwak. New York Times. May 12 2008]

I do not think it would adversely affect the US-Muslim world relationship as long as Obama administration’s foreign policy respects others more willingly.

Whoa, Obama administration… I am jumping the gun!