Went for the public forum on death penalty at Hotel Asia today. I was running late, so i took a cab from my house down to the hotel. I practised (There's practice and practise in the dictionary. i'm a little too tired to try and figure out the difference and which is appropriate) abit of subtle but not so subtle anxiety body language to indicate to the taxi driver that i was in a hurry.

I arrived at Hotel Asia on time to see that the forum didn't begin on time. Ironic huh? Anyway, there were like three agendas going on in the forum. Personally i don't really care for politics. Maybe, just maybe, woven intricately deep into the complex workings of my naive mind, which confounds even myself, is a comfortability that i do not wish disturbed. I wouldn't want to be detained like Dr Chee and stuff. I'm not a politician, not an activist, and not a pragmatist too. Actually, i don't know what pragmatism is. I am too tired to check out what practise and practice means, i'm also too tired for pragmatism.

However, i quickly noticed that the similarities between the workings of my beloved gahmen and that of christianity is absolutely striking. And speaking of christianity... that's where me, the aetheist, come in. Friends often ask me why it is that i'm biased against christianity as a religion. The fact that half my friends are christians and that talking about another religion which both of us don't understand is not very useful, seems to elude them. There is also the other fact that i could get a bible off the shelf but i don't expect to buy buddhist scriptures from a bookshop. Even if the scriptures can be bought from a bookshop, it doesn't help if my grasp of mandarin is pretty poor.

Am i anti-christian? You can label me anti-religion, but to call me anti-christian would be to give a single religion more credit than it is due. But enough digression. I'll continue talking about today's events.

As i was saying, there were three agendas present in the forum. One would be the political agenda of the opposition party in its bid for publicity. The other agenda was to discuss about the death penalty. I remember back in Gippy, where i tried my best to explain to my fellow countryman, Kumar, that caning as a form of legal punishment is barbaric. But i hadn't taken that step further, and the thought that death penalty is babaric too, eluded me. I guess i'm too well-versed in hollywood education to realise that death penalty is unethical. A life for a life.

I wouldn't go into how the death penalty is no good. If you're interested, you could always google about it. But Dr Chee gave a pretty good point sometime during the discussion. It is about fallacies in argument. One that is commited by many scientists, economists, evolutionists, creationist and even politicians too. I'll use the example talked about in the discussion.

It is hypothesized that the death penalty serve as deterrence. And history shows that crime was reduced when there was death penalty. There are many other factors that could have contributed to the reduction, like improving economy, education, so is death penalty the main cause of the reduction. Was it even a cause in the reduction. For all we knew, crime and death penalty could be independent factors. Is the correlation proven? Or is it an assumption? If its an assumption, who's assumption is it?

Towards the end of the discussion, the third agenda manifested itself. The agenda of the none other than the gahmen. A plain clothes police office waltz up to the forum moderater and demanded to look at her identifications, to determine if the moderater is sinagporean, the reasoning was so claimed. Which comes across as rather funny since any public events has to be registered with the police before it can proceed. The police officer is of course acting under orders. That's what uniformed people are paid to do. To carry out orders.

Anway, the only purpose for such orders is to strike fear into naive audiences like me. To instill a fear, to force the perception that anyone who speaks up to say something that the powers that be doesn't like to hear, they'll send the 'mah tar' to come knocking on your door, take down your ic number and [insert pratical imagination]

That's about the whole of the event that i'm willing to say. Anyway, it is my sincere hope that humanity would one day no longer have to contend with atrocities like caning and death penalty. An eye for an eye, a life for a life, is not.