I know its weird to being a post with a digression. But i shall digress.

Excerpt from A Pain in the Neck by Grace Chow (Oh, the writing was at a time before the current pm)

"... Lee Kuan-Yew, the first Prime Minister of independent Singapore, popularly known as 'God'; his son and probable future Prime Minister, Lee Hsien-Loong, popularly known as 'Baby God'; and the current Prime Minister, Goh Chok-Tong, popularly known as 'the Holy Goh'

There is something beautifully poetic about the juxtaposition of this threesome. It is the concept of the past, present, and future rolled into a sort-of quasi-religious Holy Trinity; it stands for the immortality of the Powers-that-be. This religious association cannot altogether be written off as flippant: the making of Singapore is after all, attributed to God; he is generally considered infallible; his memoirs sell like the Bible; he lets the Holy Goh do all the work these days and, when the time is ripe, he will send us his son to save us from a life in hell.".

Some of you might have noticed the recent hee hur hoo har about Tomorrow dot SG featuring a racist's racist blog. Here's a flurry of exchanges brought to attention by Singabloodypore. I shall digress again.

Darn... suddenly got alot of work liao, check back later, i'll add more to this post.


More

This brings up the question of what the agenda is, for Tomorrow dot SG. The site itself puts up a statement that goes like: "Don't ask us what's our agenda - we don't have one (except to highlight the diversity of the Singaporean blogosphere)."

A site like Tomorrow dot SG, because it has a board of editors, and serves as a portal into blogosphere for many blogders, cannot be without agenda. The main agenda of it is to bring our attention to "interesting blog posts". But that is the conceptual agenda, of the site. The true agenda would be an amalgation of agendas of each editor who has the power to click the publish button. So when editors order a witch hunt (Outside of the court of law, i don't believe in reasonings that goes like 'despite my actions, i didn't specifically say it'), it truly becomes a rather rhetorical topic for thought, as to whether individual agenda of editors could materialise the conceptual agenda. I guess much of it depends on the processes within.

If you remember, there was a sgblogconspiracy meme started by mr brown couple months ago. Among one of the conspiracies was that Tomorrow dot SG was started by someone from IDA and that it was one of the gahmen's ways to control the sg blogosphere.

"It cannot be true", and one of the reasons cited for it was that the site has a board of editors, who are bloggers come together. It does seem quite sound an argument. But what if these editors were slowly replaced by say... cyborgs under the gahmen control? What if one of the editors tried his best to be nasty and made the other editors fed up and causing them to leave one by one? "Bah, it's just a conspiracy theory." What would a scrub of the universe like me with only a readership of seven daily know about anything.

Enough digression. I actually wanted to talk about faith. Why is faith undesirable. First let us examine the definition of faith.

Faith
1 Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2 Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See synonyms at belief, trust.
3 Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters.
4 often Faith Christianity. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
5 The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith.
6 A set of principles or beliefs.

By the very definition of faith, it is undesirable because it is illogical. Take the racist's racist blog for example, he says "It is part of my faith that malays are inferior", adapted from Austine Cline's example. Aside from the usual dismissive labeling that he is a racist, we could provide logical and analytical arguments, and find that his conclusions are based on bias rather than statistical data.

So why should we approach any differently when someone says he/she has faith in God? Some could say that the belief in God is harmless for Singaporeans because we're so used to obeying the rules in this pa pa country that no Singaporeans would be fundamentalists. No Singaporeans would deny birth control, deny children their medicine so parents could pray for them, cut off their own penises etc etc. That all these illogical acts resulting from illogical beliefs only happen in countries that chew gum. Maybe, but maybe not.

It is because that faith does not require logical evidence, and that some Faith, condemns logical/critical thinking, which is why a person who acts on faith, cannot inherently know that something is wrong when something goes wrong. Faith, be it believing in a loving god or a god who endorses the killing of women and infants, is undesirable.