The God Delusion

I bought Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" at MPH Funan Centre on 19 May 2007 (price: S$18.90). This is the new UK paperback edition with a new preface (book details at Amazon.co.uk):

"The God Delusion" is an excellent book that uses science, philosophy, history, logic and reason to explain why the gods promulgated by Christianity, Islam, Judaism are extremely improbable, and debunks the idea that we need to believe in such gods to be good humans to lead meaningful and moral lives.

In fact, when I was young, I had already pondered on the following conundrum:

Christianity says it is the one true religion. Islam says it is the one true religion. But logic dictates that if Christianity is the one true religion, then Islam must be wrong. Or if Islam is the one true religion, then Christians must be worshipping the wrong god.

How can both religions be right? The only logical conclusion that can be drawn is that they could both be wrong!

As I learnt more about science and history, I gradually came to the realisation that it is not god who created humans, but it is humans who had created god.

Being educated in an English speaking environment, I was exposed to a lot of Christian evangelists who were extremely enthusiastic in their trying to proselytise me to their faith. I am very glad that my school education required me to study all the major religions of Singapore: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism. When you study comparative religions, and have a good grounding in science and history, you will be armed with enough defences to protect yourself against the shrill being blasted at you by the Christian evangelicals that "you must believe in Jesus Christ or you will be condemned to burn in Hell for eternity!" Talk about a loving god :-)

Despite my constant debates and arguments with these Christian evangelists, I knew these debates were always lost causes. I cannot possibly sway others who are set in their beliefs to my way of thinking, as they cannot possibly convince me about changing my stance without conclusive evidence that their god is a real entity.

However, I do not go about preaching to others about my atheism. The irritating thing about Christian evangelicals is that they do. And every Saturday, you will see them waylaying passerbys (especially people going to the library) to tell them about the "4 Spiritual Laws".

However, as the Christian evangelists are well funded and are always proactively promoting their religion, so it is inevitable they will gain new converts. Indeed, the dawn of the 21st century has not seen humankind stepping into a new age of science and reason. Indeed, in the sole hyper-power of the world, the United States of America, fundamentalist Christianity has greatly expanded its influence, and have gained significant power in the political arena.

The problem with fundamentalist Christians is that their stance is as rigid and as scary as the Islamic Taleban , as they both base morality on ancient scriptures instead of rationality and reason.

"The God Delusion" is a much needed book to educate the public on why the existence of the Christian god is highly improbable, and that morality should be based on rationality and reason, and not on ancient texts espousing values that have no relevance to modern living. The book is well thought out, well argued, well organised, well written, and well worth reading.

Richard Dawkins actually made a 2-part documentary for UK's Channel 4 station on a related theme prior to the publication of "The God Delusion". You can watch the documentary on Google Video:

Root of All Evil - Part 1 : The God Delusion

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9002284641446868316

Root of All Evil - Part 2 : The Virus of Faith

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7619161192220036050

Lingoes

A few years ago (2004), I wrote about the excellent Merriam Webster Online Dictionary (www.m-w.com) . I still find this online dictionary extremely useful today because besides giving you the definition, you can also click on the speaker icon to hear how each word is pronounced.

Try figuring out how to pronounce these words:

• Cheyenne
• Banyan
• Pyrrhic

and you will see why the pronunciation feature is a godsend.

However, if you are using a notebook computer, you may not have internet access all the time. It would be nice to have access to a dictionary that is installed on your hard disk in such situations. For this, I can heartily recommend this new freeware that I have just found called "Lingoes":

www.lingoes.net

Lingoes is not a dictionary. It is a dictionary engine. After installing the dictionary engine, you need to load the actual dictionary separately. However, it can load MORE THAN ONE dictionary! I loaded mine with the following dictionaries:

1. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
2. Oxford Advanced Learners English Dictionary
3. Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary
4. Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners English Dictionary

The interface is very user friendly. The dictionary interface will display the word definition from all the dictionaries you've loaded. Thus, if you do not understand the explanation provided by one dictionary, you can scroll down to read the explanations given by the other dictionaries to make things clearer. And because I also loaded the "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary", I can also see the Chinese definition on the same page.

Mind you, the dictionaries available for download are ELITE stuff (from Longman, Oxford, and Collins no less). True, the dictionary publishers supplied only their "Learners edition" dictionaries for free, but that is actually good enough for the average user.

For your info, the Oxford and Collins advanced learners dictionaries only cover about 50,000 words, while the Longman dictionary covers about 100,000 words. That is why many a time, you will find a word defined only in the Longman dictionary, but not in the Oxford or Collins advanced learners dictionaries. Because the Longman dictionary has a larger word set than the others, I arranged for it to be the first dictionary in my results list.

In contrast, my hard copy "Oxford Concise English Dictionary" covers 240,000 words, which is more than double that of the Longman and 4 times that of the advanced learners dictionaries. Obviously Oxford will not provide their premium "Concise English Dictionary" away for free.

The "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary" has a word set of only 25,000 words. However, for its limited vocabulary, its Chinese definitions are invaluable.

I noticed that the definitions given by the Collins COBUILD dictionary are the easiest to understand. This dictionary is very suitable for primary school children.

Lingoes also has a feature called "Cursor Translation", which allows you to display the dictionary definition of a word in other applications like Word, Excel etc. Just hover the mouse cursor over a word and click the Left Shift key to popup the dictionary definition.

Finally, Lingoes has a LIMITED pronunciation capability. It actually makes use of the built-in speech synthesizer in the Windows XP operating system to pronounce the words. Speech synthesizers do not normally pronounce words correctly. You can compare the pronunciation generated by Lingoes with those recorded in the Merriam Webster website. The difference in quality is very pronounced :-)

Letter to the Straits Times Forum

The Straits Times Forum published a letter of mine in the online edition today. I had commented on an article written by Dr Andy Ho, the senior science and ethics writer for the Straits Times, which actually contain hidden biases favouring Creationism and Christianity over science (I am sure Andy Ho is a devout Catholic based on the position he has taken in his other opinion articles). I submitted my letter to the Straits Times last Friday (25 May 2007), and thought that it was rejected for publication. I was quite surprised that they finally published it today (2 June 2007), almost 9 days later.

http://www.straitstimes.com:80/ST%2BForum/Online%2BStory/STIStory_124926.html

I believe the free site on the Straits Times website contains only a 3-day archive for free access by the public. If you are interested to read what I wrote, you will need to visit the link before Tuesday (5 June 2007).

For some strange reason, the Straits Times has made every sentence ending in a period (full-stop) a paragraph on its own. In my original letter, excluding the bulleted points, I had a total of 6 paragraphs. In the published version, this ballooned into 13 paragraphs! The Straits Times published my letter without deleting a single word from my original.

Regards, NJ

Dispatches - Undercover Mosque

Last Saturday (5 May 2007) at a reunion lunch gathering with some ex-Conner (FIS) colleagues, I mentioned to my friends that I was very perturbed by the hijacking of religion to promote hatred and intolerance. I was referring to the fundamentalist Islam as practised by militant and radical Muslims in the Middle East, but which is gradually making in-roads into South East Asia, and even influencing moderate Islam here. Personally, I feel that the problem has been severely amplified since 9/11 as moderate Muslims everywhere are not aggressively confronting the theology of hate that is sprouted by the radicals, allowing children and impressionable youths to be indoctrinated with this dangerous form of their religion that threatens life and society for everyone. By allowing these teachings of hate to grow, the intolerant form of Islam becomes the "norm" instead of the extremist variant they were supposed to be!

I had developed a certain impression of such radical Muslims from my reading of internet articles and newspaper reports. However, I was actually quite unprepared for the level of hatred that is being espoused by the religious teachers (imams) against non-Muslims until I watched this British documentary, "Dispatches - Undercover Mosque" from UK's Channel 4 TV station. The 1-hour documentary shows how although some British mosques publicly profess to promote an Islam of love and understanding and tolerance of other faiths (they belong to a government inter-faith group that works with other religious organisations), internally, the imams go about propagating their teachings of hatred for all "kuffaars" (non-Muslims), and for their ultimate aim to bring down governments and establishments and to install their militant brand of Islam for everyone.

The documentary is quite an eye-opener. It was aired in the UK on 15 January this year.

Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peFQWuk4nuo

Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuCLC8kjWCI

Part 3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5t5EqWX92k

Part 4 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMztM0Z7BYE

Part 5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zv3BUmwqs

Part 6 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvjvNScmTQA

DVD43

Last Sunday (15 Apr 2007), I visited the new megastores at Tampines (Ikea, Courts, and Giant) for the first time. I learned 2 lessons from this outing:

1. Never visit 3 megastores at one go. It is tiring to walk around just one megastore, never mind three!
2. Never shop at Giant Tampines on Sunday, or at any peak period. The queues are horrendous!

I had not intended to buy anything at Giant. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Giant was selling the original DVD for "Superman Returns" for only $12. Now, that is even cheaper than the VCD version, which retails at $15! The DVD version even includes a second DVD containing a bonus documentary about the making of "Superman Returns", which was not available on the VCD.

There was a catch. This original $12 DVD is actually a Region 6 DVD, meant for the China market. Singapore is designated Region 3, as is most of South East Asia. However, the Region 3 DVD for "Superman Returns" retails for $30, which is significantly higher than $12 for the Region 6 DVD.

Theoretically, all DVD players sold in Singapore should only play Region 3 DVDs. However, most standalone DVD players have been tweaked at the factory to be "Region Free" - otherwise, consumers will not buy them. As such, playing the Region 6 DVD was not a problem on my standalone DVD player.

However, when it came to the DVD drive on my Dell notebook, this was not so simple. Region coding has not been disabled on the DVD drive on my notebook, which has been configured as Region 3. And all the DVD playing software provided by Dell (Dell MediaDirect as well as Microsoft Windows Media Player) "respected" the region code setting on the drive, and therefore refused to play the Region 6 DVD!

Although I could change the DVD Region setting on the DVD drive to play the disc, I am limited to only changing the region setting 5 times. This was not a permanent solution:

I did a Google search, and found the following freeware gem:

http://www.dvd43.com/

DVD43 installs on your Windows XP system and performs real-time decrypting of Region protected DVDs. When it is running, it displays a green smiley face on your system tray, and will auto-strip all Region protection from a protected DVD when the DVD is played.

And indeed, once installed, the Region 6 "Superman Returns" DVD played beautifully in both Microsoft Windows Media Player as well as Dell MediaDirect on my notebook.

Hope you find this tip useful.