My posting, in a thread in the IVLE forum for the USP module "Evolution":

What differentiates us humans from animals?

A very strong proportion of humans are actually insistent on keeping the terminally-ill, old, disabled, etc. alive.

They also insist on keeping monogamous relationships, restraining from pre-marital sex, etc...

We can link these two together into one common phenomenon: Morality.

If you think about it, morality is fluid, constructed and an artificial product of Man's desire to put some order into what would be a very natural, merciless, nasty world, as Nietszche so wonderfully figured out.

Thanks to morality, court battles rage over the right to end a comatose patient's life, and religion tells us having sex outside of marriage (another human construction!) is a horrible sin (what is sin?).

I derive a certain sadistic amusement from playing the devil's advocate whenever I can. Especially in a module titled "Evolution".

Perhaps it's the presence of individuals who choose the module and then insist on bringing their religious beliefs into the equation when discussing the finer tenets of scientific evolution.

It's kind of hard to reconcile the idea that human beings, as a species, evolved from ape-like ancestors millions of years ago, and the other idea the human race was created from sand and dust by God probably a few thousand years ago. To take a module that embraces scientific evolution so freely and whole-heartedly means automatically shutting oneself off from pseudo-religious debates about the origin of life, the evolution of man, and the aims and driving forces of evolution itself.

That's probably why I am a little miffed when voices from certain quarters suggest that natural theories of evolution can somehow fit into their own religious notions and contexts of how life and Mankind began.

Why try so hard to fit a square peg into a round hole?

In the olden days the ultra-religious could still freely wave their bibles and cry heresy. And the Church would step in with their thought police, arrest the Galileos and Copernicuses of their day, and have them tried and convicted and crucified before the night was out. If there were square pegs to be squeezed into round holes, you take your awl and tear out four sharp corners in the round holes to get your square hole. Simple as that.

Unfortunately, things don't work out so well today. There are these things called laws. Separation of church and the state. Education. And with them, come intellectualism and all its evils. Skepticism. Cynicism. Nihilism. Agnosticism. Christian existentialism. Atheism. So on and so forth. Once the Pandora's Box's open, no one can ever close it again. It has been wide open for the last two hundred years or so. I'm not saying intellectualism is good, however, or that medieval church-going folk were plain stupid. I sometimes wish I was as unthinking and happy-go-lucky as a duck and potato farmer in sixteenth-century Prussia. Then maybe, my life wouldn't be tormented at times.

Last week, I told Huishan that I was agnostic. She nodded and said that "intellectuals are usually agnostic or atheistic".

Ignoring the rather flippant manner in which she framed her statement, I could see some logic in that. She's probably talking about those people who spend much of their solitude thinking about abstract ideas, some of which cover the meaning of life, death, the unknown and the spiritual. These people then use reason and rationale to come to the conclusion that while a higher being may or may not exist, it has to be considered and thought about almost independently of any existing major religion known to Mankind, because the major religions are all seriously flawed in one way or another - be it in doctrine or practice. Hence many of them end up agnostics or atheists, of which I am now the former.

Is that really the case?

I can actually think of one person who defies such clear-cut logic. Let's call her J.

J was from the same church as I. We were once very close. She is very smart, as her PHD in biomedicine proves. Last year, I told her I was doing another module titled "Questioning Evolution and Progress" - it was a writing module, involving critical analysis. She apparently thought it involved evolution as a science, because she replied:

"Why are you studying that rubbish?"

Hello? Irony of ironies. You have a PHD in biomedicine, for crying out loud. Don't tell me you believe in intelligent design. It would defy all logic.

To a fair degree, faith and reason do not go together. You need to deny yourself a certain amount of cold, hard reason, in order to possess a strong, unshakeable religious faith. One demands logic, proof, rationale. The other demands you believe in something that can't be proven or attested to empirically.

Apparently, J doesn't really go for both. She doesn't really go all out for faith - I can personally bear witness to her past actions, speech and thoughts for more than a year. I am sure she did not go to church like a wholehearted Christian believer should. She once mentioned she went to church because of her mum.

And does she go all out for reason? After that passing (but rather telling) comment, I am not sure about reason too. And if she has been willing to forgo a slice of her precious weekend (because she once told me how busy she was) to go to church all these years merely to appease her mum, yet harbouring a lackadaisical attitude towards religion, and be content with maintaining the status quo of her rather half-baked spiritual life, with no impetus whatsoever to come to a definite decision whether to leave the church or to commit herself whole-heartedly to it, then... my doubt about her ability to reason can only climb higher and higher.

I am probably being overly harsh here. I sincerely hoped something has changed about her in the last five months we did not make contact with one another. There is... something frightening about how lackadaisical and nonchalant she can be about... life, and... things in general. About people, too. If the entire world was composed of apathetic people like her I would probably be content with killing myself long ago. Thank goodness.

And I'm not trying to be a hypocrite here, criticizing her half-baked religious commitment and all - at least I have already fleshed religion out very, very carefully.

The decision to shift my alignment from "Christian" to "agnostic" was a cold, and very rational, calculated one. (The shift in alignment from "free thinker" to "Christian" wasn't.)

While many people become Christians, or at least, started calling themselves Christians, most of them do not even know what they are getting themselves into. Taking on Christianity means committing oneself to the Christian God, fully, whole-heartedly, totally. It means a complete change in lifestyle and in one's outlook on life. It also means understanding every tenet, commandment and sinew of the religion. It also means understanding what role this religion has played in history, politics, society, the world and the universe. God created all these, after all - history, politics, society, humanity, the world, the universe. How can one not want to know about all these? Heck, some even call themselves Christians without even knowing much about what the Bible is.

It's fine, they say. Just trust God. He will make everything clear to you, in time to come.

Are they worshipping God, or worshipping the church?

I believe in a God, a higher being, but I do not believe that the church is an accurate conduit through which to understand Him, talk to Him, relate to Him.

Why am I so blasphemous? Because I bothered to pore through books and books about church history. Theology. The origins of the Bible. The Inquisitions. The persecutions. The Reformation. More churches created, more versions of the Bible held up for all to read and argue over. More pathways opened, with different people claiming each path truly leads to God. Arms are taken up, blood is shed, all in God's name. The God we worship is a peace-loving God - only after all the unbelievers die horrible deaths and spend an eternity in hell, forever and forever, may they all burn, burn, burn, burn.

I smile when my church mates ask me when I am going back to church. I am sorry, I have already made my conclusions.

God gave me a choice. To continue to struggle with a faith that is mostly constructed and whipped up by the euphoric atmosphere of church songs and manufactured prayer. Or to set myself free from the shackles of irrationality and a religion that is beautiful in writing and in theory but all too often smeared and tarred by a large proportion of its church members, who live in closed worlds and closed minds. I choose the latter, and I haven't regretted it since.

Why don't I have faith? Can't I come back to God? Wrong. Free of the church, I feel closer to God than ever. And I think of Him, everyday, before I sleep, when I wake. I look at the wondrous world outside and I thank Him for making me a part of this amazing universe.