I Am Twenty-Eight

"Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest."

Larry Lorenzoni

My birthday visited me last month and since I have tweaked my social media accounts to not alert my acquaintances to its passing, I received only birthday wishes from the usual suspects. My mom and dad did, and so did my sister. As with all previous years, I got a birthday greeting on Facebook from that one guy with whom I went to high school who was born on the same day I was. The nursing matron who oversees the department I work in wished me as well, no doubt after recently handling my work documents but thankfully, she did not pass the word. Like some mountain-dwelling misanthrope, I purposefully kept my birth date a loosely guarded secret just to see who doesn't care enough to remember, so I can in turn forget their birthdays in a passive-aggressive fashion. Take that, friends-I-don't-have!

My wife reminded me of it weeks before le quatorze juillet (my birth date) came up, repeatedly asking me what I want for my birthday. Then, in spite of the (variable and confusing) answers I gave her, she got me a bottle of Ralph Lauren's Polo Blue Eau de toilette because my last bottle of BO concealer ran out two years ago. I take it that she thinks I stink but she's still married to me, so I guess it's true love after all.

She wrapped it so I can unwrap it in a few hours time at dinner.

Eau de toilette literally means "toilet water".

Now I shall smell like a polo player.

This prompted me to look up the difference between eau de toilette, eau de parfum and eau de cologne and apparently, they are just different gradings for a scent's concentration. Eau de parfum contains about 10-20% aromatic compounds, eau de toilette has 5-15%, while colognes are usually citrus extracts with 2-6% strength. There are significant overlaps in the number ranges because the French just don't give a fuck like that. Anyway, the different grades dictates whether you can spray a fragrance on yourself liberally or simply dab your pulse points with a drop or two. Judging from how some people's application of their fragrances can make my eyes water from 6 feet away, I suspect that very few people are aware of this fact. They won't notice that their scent is overpowering of course because of olfactory habituation (the why-is-this-pile-of-poop-smelling-less-offensive-the-longer-I-stand-beside-it? phenomenon). Maybe I can share what I learned about perfume strengths with them and lose even more friends.

And what did I get for myself?

Well, since I asked, I'll tell me. I bought a new smartphone to replace my stupidphone. It's a Samsung Galaxy S5 - an Android - because I am an atheist and I want no part in the Apple religion. I also bought myself a few video games from Steam (Penny Arcade's On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness 3 and 4, and Might & Magic Heroes VI) and made myself a birthday drink for good measure.

It was a piña colada, of course.

Add cat to taste.

And because birthdays are just thinly veiled excuses to stuff our faces and then vowing (and failing) to eat less for a whole week after that, we went to Sharing Planet, a nearby restaurant that serves food portions meant to be shared by two or three average-sized Malaysians. Cheryl and I ordered two whole portions and ate till we hate ourselves.

Quesa-nacho grande. La tentación del diablo!

Mixed grill, with the addition of a slab of rump beef.

Now I'm twenty-eight. I'm at that age when I need to mentally calculate how old I actually am if people catches me unaware with a sudden question. I guess the older you get, the less significant each year becomes, eh?



Thirty ahoy,
k0k s3n w4i

Cold, Hard Cash

"A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it."

Bob Hope

I think most households would have some sort of receptacle for the loose change that we unwittingly generate in our day to day transactions. In my household, it takes the form of a plastic tub which Cheryl bought for me when she got tired of me secreting coins everywhere like an incontinent piggy bank every time I come home – and now that we have an infant at home whose main mode of interaction with the world around him is gustatory, it had literally became a matter of life and death.

A couple of weeks ago, the tub began overflowing and I decided to take the lot to a bank and convert them into a form that would fit into my wallet more readily. Counting the coins proved to be a much more challenging task that I anticipated because they were in a mix of the old 2^nd series coins and the newly minted 3^rd series pieces. The new 50 cents are about the same size as the old 20 cents and are only ever so slightly bigger than the new 20 cents. Complicating it further is the fact that both the new 50 cent and 20 cent coins are gold in colour (the former being nickel-brass clad copper and the latter are made from nickel brass) so I had to look at each gold piece carefully to confidently differentiate them. The new 5 cent coins are also bigger than their 2^nd series predecessors and are actually closer in size to the 10 cent coins (old and new) so there’s that as well. But counted the lot I did and after counting the stacks I've built from them, I found that they totalled a sum a little more than RM170. After that, I plowed the stacks into a plastic bag and then nested that into a second plastic bag before bringing it with me to the bank.

Hardly anything that glitters is gold.

The first bank I brought my swag to told me that their coin-counting machine was out of order and that no, they cannot just take my word for it regardless of how upstanding a citizen I am or how many old ladies I have helped across busy streets.

That could not be helped so I took my heavy bag of loot to a nearby second bank. The receptionist who handed me my number told me that I need not bother as their bank does not offer the service of transmuting metal into paper for its customers. I ignored her because by this point, I was already sufficiently annoyed that my hearing had begun failing me.

When my number came up, I walked to the counter and plopped my baggie of cold hard cash right under the nose of the teller. He looked like he was going to repeat what the receptionist told me but I cut him off at "Sir" because I am not in the habit of letting people tell me the same things twice as if I am a particularly stupid dog.

"I would like to pay my credit card bill with these coins," I said, handing him a payment slip with my credit card number on it. He looked at me hard for a second. I smiled in reply.

He excused himself from the counter, presumably to get ahold of someone belonging to a higher pay grade than he is, and returned with a lady who asked me how she could help me. I repeated my request.

"I'm sorry, sir," she began. "Usually, we would tell our customers to sort their coins into their separate denominations before accepting them. You see, our machine..."

"So, is there an official company policy saying that you cannot accept my coins if I haven’t sorted them?" I interjected because I wasn’t in the mood to give any fuck. I was not going to go through the tedious process of counting the bloody coins again.

"No, it’s just that…" she faltered. "If you don’t want to sort them, then you have to leave your coins with us for a couple of days for us to sort them for you before processing your credit card payment."

"Excellent!" I said with a huge grin on my face. "Let’s do precisely that!"

She was taken back because she didn’t think that I would agree to that. After another awkward moment, she excused herself, saying she would be right back.

About a minute later, a middle-aged gentleman came to the counter instead and asked me, quite unironically, how he could be of service. The lady who talked to me must have given up.

We had a repeat of the previous conversation I had with the woman, including him telling me that they "usually" have their customers sort their coins first and I demanding to read their SOP guidelines.

"Look, your colleague previously said that I can leave my coins for a day or two for your people to sort," I told him. "I agreed to it, so I consider the matter settled. Unless you are saying she lied to me?"

He stupidly repeated that line about how they "usually" have their customers do the sorting before bringing their coins to them. Since stupid is a game that two can play at, I stupidly repeated the prior agreement I had struck with the lady.

"Okay," he said resignedly and picked up my bag of change.

"Good man! There’s RM170 in the bag. I will check if the correct amount is banked into my credit card account," I said and shook his enervated hand.

Like I always say, why let customer service providers frustrate you when you can frustrate them instead?

P.S. According to Act 519 (Central Bank of Malaysia Act1958), in section 24 regarding legal tender, the bank has the right to refuse a payment in coins if the amount exceeds RM10. If they knew the law, they could have refused me on that ground alone. But they didn’t, so la dee da.

Unflappable,

k0k s3n w4i

The 25th March 2013 Fire at the Sarawak General Hospital

"Seems to me the basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur."

Jerry Seinfeld

At 8:27 PM yesterday, one of my colleagues working the night shift in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) texted in our departmental Whatsapp group for house officers,

"Kebakaran!!!" wrote Olivia.

Unlike the cry of "fire" in the English language, the Malay word "kebakaran" specifically carries the meaning of a destructive fire-related event separate from the actual Malay word for fire, which is "api". That is besides the point, I know. I thought it was a joke but she confirmed it,

"Yes, in the hospital. Evacuating patients. LOL." I didn't add that. She really did say LOL.

Another house officer working yesterday night posted the following blurry camera-phone picture,

At the main entrance of the SGH.

And it wasn't a drill. Sarawak General Hospital made like Nero's Rome and burned. It was only successfully doused at about 9:30 PM and from real-time updates provided by my colleagues-on-duty, I assumed that it wasn't too bad because the evacuated patients were later carted back to their respective wards where they can continue dying at their own leisurely pace. Speculations were abound. As the smoke rose from the corner of the main building where the linen department's located, many assumed that someone must have dropped a cigarette butt into a basket of scrubs or something.

I am working tonight but this morning, I had to go to the hospital to give a presentation on vesicoureteric reflux. After that was dealt with, I hotfooted to the linen department and found that business was proceeding as usual there. After exploring the perimeter of the hospital for a couple of minutes, I found the site of interest right outside the west wing of the main hospital block. There were yellow tapes to keep the riffraff out but introducing myself as a doctor working in the PICU, I simply waltzed in and mingled amongst the fire investigators, journalists, and maintenance company reps.

It was the utility shaft.

I spoke to a firefighter on site and he told me that they were currently investigating how the conflagration conflagrated, and were questioning witnesses, taking pictures, looking at schematics, interviewing reps from the company responsible for maintaining the utility hardware and scribbling down notes and schematics - y'know, serious fire-investigating business.

As you can see in the picture above, the two biggest blackened pipes (which seemed to have grown some bumpy warts on them) are part of the air-conditioning system of the hospital and the extreme heat had warped the foam insulation around them. The smaller pipes carry all the other stuff that a hospital needs like water, nitrous oxide, medical air and oxygen. We were very lucky that the medical air and oxygen conduits didn't go kaboom and take half the hospital with it (the PICU, where I am currently posted in, is right above the spot). Those pipes were lined with asbestos. And considering that it happened right outside the Radiology Department, we could have lost our very, very, very expensive scanning equipments - even without the stopping power of a cinematic explosion.

I spoke to an electrician and he told me that the inferno probably started from the high voltage wires that also run in the utility shaft and one of them is a humongous, python-thick cable that supplies our MRI machine. I have no idea how much power is required to keep an MRI machine running but the cost of the maintenance of just one can go into obscene seven digit figures in just one year. He thinks that one of these cables must have overheated and cooked the shaft until it is crispy.

A photographer taking pictures of the exposed MRI power cable.

Here is a closeup.

I am no engineering expert, but having incredibly high voltage cables in the same utility shaft where a large pipeline filled with compressed oxygen also runs sounds stupidly dangerous to me.

And just in case you are interested, the utility shaft runs from here,

The powerhouse of that keeps the hospital running.

To here,

A hospital that is barely running.

While the Radiology Department is still semi-operational, all the MRI scan appointments were diverted to the MRI suite over to our sister hospital, the Heart Centre (PJHUS) and we have no idea when we can start firing up our machine again. Also, only emergency CT scans would be entertained for the day due to a risk of overheating. I heard that they were going to tear up the concrete-entombed part of the utility shaft to investigate further and repair the damage - so it is definitely going to take awhile.

The PICU smelled like people had been barbecuing char siew in there all night long and that made me hungry so I went to have char siew rice for lunch. The air-conditioning seemed to have gone kaput so I am seriously dreading tonight when I have to report for duty. Does it make me evil that a small part of me wish that the PICU was blown to smithereens just so I don't need to go to work? After the very sick children and babies were evacuated, of course. I am not a total monster.

Patients lodging at the billing counters. Photograph courtesy of Nadim Bokhari.

No one died.



Insider source,
k0k s3n w4i

You Will Now Hear What I Really Sound Like

"A speech is like a woman's skirt: it needs to be long enough to cover the subject matter but short enough to hold the audience's attention."

Author unknown

I have very little stage experience. The first that I could remember was in kindergarten where I was suppose to be a wind-up toy coming to life at night in a little girl's bedroom - I had Groucho glasses on for some reason and as it was a preschool production, porn did not ensue. When I was 15, I sang a song on stage during a Buddhist camp. I sang Miss You Like Crazy by The Moffatts (shut up, we all went through those years), beating an older guy who roped in a friend to play the guitar as he garroted Green Day's Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) with his vocal cords. My voice broke the following year, thus ending my budding musical career. When I was 16, I got roped into some kind of personality pageant in another Buddhist camp where I answered some Miss Universe-type questions and danced on stage with a really hot 13-year-old. I won that too, haha. And it's not creepy if the girl's age is my age divided by two plus sev... holy shit, it was creepy!

What I consider to be my best stage achievement was when I was 17 and was involved in organising a Buddhist meet. I was put in charge of coming up with games for the younger kids and designing the programme booklet. A buddy of mine was suppose to emcee and after he showed everyone how excruciatingly bad he is in the first few minutes, I simply stepped in, relieved him of the microphone, and took over the job for the next 8 hours, and the head organiser of the event came up to me and basically said, "This whole thing would have sucked without you". As you can see, I had an excess of confidence back in those days but I have lost most of it after my vampiric second ex-girlfriend siphoned all self-respect and dignity out of me between 2004 and 2006.

The freethinking and sceptical community of Malaysia does not have any official leaders and as I was the liaison for my side in the recent debate we had, I was automatically placed in one of the Very Important Poopyface seats.I later realise that I was expected to speak on behalf of perhaps one of the least understood demographic groups in our country. While I had appeared in front of crowds in the past doing many things, I have never given a speech in my life - so the fear of screwing it up was palpable.

Anyway, I just received the video recording of my speech in my mail, and for the first time, you, dear readers of my blog, will hear how I really sound like in real life. Prepare for disillusionment,



On my right was Le Fiancée™. Pastor Samuel, who gave us permission to use his church, was seated left to me.

You can read the original script of the speech here.

The podium was a bit low so I was compelled to hunch over it just so I can read my note. I didn't intend to achieve much. I just wanted to appear affable, relatable and human, which is how most atheists are really like in real life in an attempt to mirror the contents of my statement. That is also the reason why Willie, our debater, did not focus his arguments in attacking the worldview held by his Christian opponent (and half the audience) but instead, opted to simply explain where we are coming from. We did not seek to turn anyone to our side. We sought to be heard and understood.

Aaanyhow, there is now video evidence of my existence on the internet! Kok Sen Wai 1, Jesus 0. To all you faithful believers who kept your faith in me in spite of the lack of proof, unanswered prayers comments, and prolonged droughts of new blog posts; you are all vindicated! To all you Kok Sen Wai sceptics, agnostics and unbelievers - kindly suck it.



P.S. The last time I was seen on stage was in 2009 when I got accidentally cast as the lead in a sketch for my med school's Annual Night. You can read about that here, if you are one of my stalkers.

RELATED POSTS: The First Ever Atheist Versus Christian Debate in Malaysia, where you can watch the debate proper.



No Winston Churchill,
k0k s3n w4i

The First Ever Atheist Versus Christian Debate in Malaysia

"I treated the Bible not as the word of God. I treated the Bible as a historical book, not just claiming that everything it says is accurate - although I do believe it."

Samuel Nesan, Supervising Manager

and Debate/Dialogue Representative

of the Young Apologist group

On the 25th of August 2012, two unprecedented and minimally historical things happened for the freethinking community of Malaysia. One, this is the first time we have come out to debate a theistic believer on question of God's existence. Two, this is the largest meeting of atheists to date in our country, which is not saying a whole lot since past secular soirees were typically held in places where alcohol floweth freely and attendance were in the range of about two dozen atheists, tops. It was jointly organised by the Young Apologist group (an organisation that seeks to explain the Christian God through logic and evidence) and the Malaysian Atheists, which I represented in a managerial capacity - which is to say that Chan Ju Ping hooked up with them and then left me to liaise with the Christian side as he go traipsing through some Sarawakian forest on a research trip. The bulk of the heavy lifting were done by the Christian side though since they had to arrange for the venue of the debate, provide the sound system, and supply a moderator slash timekeeper - but hey, they challenged us to debate in the first place, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Me? I just had to round up fifty atheists and get them to go to a... church. Yeah.

Incidentally, the video recording of the event (sans the introductory statement I gave) just hit YouTube earlier this week. The debaters were,

Mr Samuel Nesan, a Christian apologist with a Bachelor in Theology from the Bible College of Malaysia.

Mr Willie Poh, an atheist lecturer at the Multimedia University with a B.IT (Hons) Software Engineering, whatever that is.

The motion of the debate was worded simply: Does God Really Exist? "God" in this context, is defined as the Christian God as described by the Bible. The format of the debate was arranged thus,

1. Opening statements from Sam and then Willie. Here they lay out their arguments.
2. Rebuttals from Sam, followed by Willie's. Here they poop on each other's arguments.
3. Cross examination, where they asks each other questions to clarify or to obfuscate each others' positions.
4. Response segment, where they "respond" to the cross-examination they received, after they have already answered the questions during the cross examination itself. Yeah, I don't get this either.
5. Summaries from Sam. Willie got the last word.
6. The Q&A round, where written questions from the audience were collected and vetted by representatives from either side of the debate. I was the guy from our side, and I chose questions which were coherent and those which brought up issues not addressed within the debate proper.

The video recording were divvied by segments into ten easy-to-digest bits. The video quality is a bit iffy but the audio can be understood (depending on how tolerant you are of the Malaysian accent, of course). You may notice that the speakers repeatedly references "Dr Kok". That would be me.

So, since my opinion was repeatedly sought after during the debate, I will be writing short bit of commentary for each part, bringing up some highlights, and breaking Mr Samuel's arguments down into chewy bite-sized pieces.



Part 1: Opening Statement by Samuel Nesan



Okay. He brought up four arguments for the existence of the Christian God.

• Argument from (Messianic) Prophecies: God as described by the Bible is real because it made predictions about the coming of Jesus; prophecies which are later corroborated within the same book.
  
  This is circular reasoning because you are using the Bible to prove the Bible to be true. There is also a major unstated premise built within it assuming the Bible to be a reliable record of such prophecies and their subsequent alleged fruition without providing any proof or evidence in support of that premise, therefore begging the question. This is the same book that talks about talking snakes and a guy who can turn water into wine, mind you. If it's published today, you'd ask if J. K. Rowling wrote it.


• Argument from the Limits of Science: God is spirit and exists outside of space and time, so science can't be used to investigate the claims of God's existence.
  
  This is not so much an argument for the existence of God as it is saying you can't prove he doesn't. This is true. But then again, science can't prove the existence or non-existence of anything if you claim it lies outside of the material world. I can tell you that Batman exists but he lies outside of space-time too - does it automatically make his existence more plausible? Nope. This is also an example of Samuel trying to have his cake and eat it too as Christians also claims that their God physically flooded the whole damn world at some point. You'd think that that would leave a lot of indisputable evidence but modern geology have completely ruled out all possibilities of a global flood. And if you have trouble understanding geology, ask yourself this: how did the koalas and kangaroos knew they were suppose to live only in Australia - and no where else - after they disembarked from the ark? Why did all the polar bears go north while all the penguins go south? And if we can't find evidence for one of the most awesome of God's physical miracles in our material world (but instead find evidence against the events described within the Bible), then we must be honest and admit that the Bible is not a completely factual document and this should throw all of claims of Jesus' alleged miracles into the same sceptical light (to go back to Sam's first argument and kick it between the legs).


• Argument from Experientialism: I feel God is real.
  
  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Okay. Willie's response to this is eloquent and elegant - or at least it would be eloquent and elegant if he actually finished his point before his time ran out during his turn to rebut so I'll reproduce it here. He told a story about how he, after watching a horror flick like Paranormal Activity, would be afraid of the dark and would feel a presence behind him when he's in bed. Does it mean that there was really a ghost or spirit behind him just because he felt it there? And why did the spook only started haunting him after he just saw a scary movie? Likewise, when a Christian says he or she feels God presence or love, does it mean that this God they describe necessarily exist? And why do they only have this feelings after reading the Bible? What about people who don't feel Jesus but feels the spirit of another deity from another religion instead? What about people like me who feels that God doesn't exist?


• Argument from You-Can-Feel-God-Too: If you are truly sincere in accepting him into your heart!
  
  When I was in med school, I went to church for a bit. I read the Bible and tried inviting Jesus into my life sincerely as advised by my Christian friends. I felt nothing. Okay, that's not strictly true because I felt stupid doing that. So, if Samuel can use his experience as evidence, I can too.

Part 2: Opening Statement by Willie Poh





Part 3: Rebuttals by Samuel Nesan



He brought up the fine-tuned universe argument and argument from morality but since he did not go into them, I shall not either. Here are the most egregious points he did make,

• According to Genesis 3:1-24, man had fallen and therefore cannot see God even if he's in front of our eyes.
  
  Yeap, this is a prime specimen of argument from scripture. This is only a valid argument if you can prove that the scripture you are referencing to be a reliable source of information which, as the Flood story showed, it is not. Can Samuel show us evidence that the events described in Genesis 3 really happened? Show us one talking snake, will you?
  
  I can't believe we have to argue that there's no such things as talking snakes to grownups.


• Hell is just a place of eternal separation from God, not really a hellish torture chamber as depicted in medieval arts.
  
  Revelations 21:8 describes hell as a "lake which burneth with fire and brimstone". Matthew 13:49-50 says hell is "the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth". Revelations 14:11 claims people who have rejected Christ would be "tormented with fire and brimstone" and that "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night". I don't know about you but hell sure doesn't sound like a day at the spa to me.


• The universe is unimaginably vast and old even though he only needed one planet and a few thousand years for his purpose because God is fucking powerful and he can do whatever weird thing he wants that makes no sense.
  
  This is basically the "God works in mysterious ways" gambit.


• God does not break the laws of physics but intervenes through the laws of physics.
  
  Matthew 14:25 had Jesus walking on water. In Exodus 14:21-22, God had more fun messing about with fluid physics by parting a damn sea. Jesus totally violated the conservation of mass when he multiplied the bread and fishes in Mark 6:41-44. Between this and the hell thing, I am starting to really wonder if Samuel have even read the Bible.


• Evolution is not provable.
  
  E. coli is a bacteria and one of its defining characteristic, differentiating it from the pathogenic Salmonella, is its inability to utilise citrate as a source of energy under oxic condition. However, after growing more than 30,000 generations of these bacteria on a medium that is citrate-rich, they evolved the ability to do what they couldn't. Evolution is proven. In a lab. On a petri dish. And in my line of work, I fight the evolutionary progress of bacteria daily as they evolve resistance to the antibiotics I prescribe for my patients. Just to put it into perspective, this is what we all learnt in med school: In the 1930's, Neisseria gonorrhoeae was treated using sulfa drugs, which it quickly developed resistance to. In the '40s, penicillin became the drug of choice but doses had to be continually increased in order to remain effective. In the '70s, penicillin and tetracycline-resistant gonorrhea emerged and fluoroquinolones were then used - but soon, resistance to this antibiotic emerged as well. Since 2007, we've been using third-generation cephalosporins, (i.e. ceftriaxone) and reports of a cephalosporin-resistant strain had emerged as well. Evolution is not only provable, it is an everyday problem for me.


• I believe in microevolution, not macroevolution.
  
  Microevolution is basically the changes in gene frequencies within a species or population while macroevolution occurs at the level of species or above it, resulting new species. What evolution-denialists like Samuel Nesan do not understand is that microevolution occurring over vast amounts of time results in macroevolution. Francis Collins, American physician-geneticist, head of the Human Genome Project and the current Director of the National Institutes of Health, said: "Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things." He is also an Evangelical Christian.
  
  One of the most dramatic examples of evolution in the fossil records is the Archaeopteryx, which was caught in the dramatic act of evolving from theropod dinosaurs into birds. My favourite example of evolution is how dog-like terrestrial hoofed carnivores called Pakicetids evolved into the modern whale. If you're interested, I have written about the evolution of the human appendix to bookmark the first successful appendicectomy I performed: The Most Dangerous of Worms.

Part 4: Rebuttals by Willie Poh





Part 5: Cross Examination of Willie by Samuel, and Vice Versa



In this segment, Samuel gets to ask Willie the hardest questions he know on the atheistic and scientific worldview we hold,

• Question 1: Samuel brings up his beef with "macroevolution" by asking how life comes from non-life.
  
  This illustrates perfectly how little Samuel understood about the theory of evolution. The theory explains the complexity and diversity of life, but makes no statement on how life began so his question, while being an important one, is irrelevant to his objection to evolution - something I felt Willie should have highlighted to avoid perpetuating that misconception in his audiences' minds. The study of the origins of life is called abiogenesis and as Willie pointed out, the correct answer is "I don't know" and not "Goddidit". Willie referenced - though he did not name - the Miller-Urey experiment where replicating the conditions of early Earth, they were able to create amino acids (organic compounds) from inorganic compounds. In fact, they were able to synthesise more types of amino acids that the original twenty that all life on Earth requires. Joan Oró found that through a similar experiment, he could synthesise adenine from inorganic material - and this is a big deal because adenine is one of the 4 nucleotide bases that makes up RNA and DNA (the molecular genetic code of all life), and forms adenosine triphosphate (the energy currency of all life). As for how all these organised themselves into the first organisms, I would give a better answer than Willie's: We are working on it.


• Question 2: How do you explain hauntings, demonic possessions, exorcism, shamanism, voodoo and other claptraps that I also believe in besides Jesus?
  
  Even if all these things are true, it still doesn't mean that God exists. It's baffling that Samuel would even bring all these up. Fact is, all these are claims. All we have to show for it are eyewitness accounts, crappy video and audio recordings, and a whole fat lot of non-reproducibility. As Willie said, many have tried their luck with James Randi's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge and could not even past preliminary testings once the confounding factors were removed. What we sceptics are saying is this: please prove to us that there is even a consistent, reproducible, unexplained phenomenon happening before asking science to describe and explain it.


• Question 3: Are you saying that I - a believer of a cosmic superbeing out of space and time who impregnated a virgin Jewish girl in order to be born to get himself killed in order to forgive me of my sins which was caused by ancestors of mine ate a fruit after being duped by a talking snake - am delusional?
  
  Unfortunately, I can't medically say that Samuel is delusional. The psychiatric definition of a delusion is an unshakeable and irrational belief in something untrue which defy normal reasoning even when overwhelming proof is presented to dispute it, with the caveat that that belief is not something cultural or religious which may be seen as untrue by outsiders. One thing that struck me in Psychiatry 101 back in my med school days is that a religious belief is virtually indistinguishable from a delusion, and it's only excluded because a person's surrounding community believes in the same thing too.


• Question 4: Is atheism scientific?
  
  Willie said yes. I say it can be. Atheism is statement of disbelief in a god or gods. If you are an agnostic atheist like me who recognise that the existence of an omnipotent creator outside of space and time is an unfalsifiable claim (and is therefore a claim that cannot be proved or disproved by science), the only logical and honest position you can assume towards it is one of agnosticism. But I am also an atheist because I don't believe that there is such a being due to the lack of good evidence or reason to do so. In this case, I am also being a sceptic and scepticism is scientific.

The second half of this video is Willie turning the tables in Samuel with some cross examination of his own. Here are Willie's questions, Samuel's answers, and my critique of his answers,

• Why are the awesome miracles only found during Old Testamental time, while modern alleged miracles are low-key and easily disputable? Samuel said miracles now are still awesome, by his standards, and that money-grabbing televangelists are a proof (haha) of that.
  
  Samuel essentially evaded Willie's question completely by applying his own definition of awesome to Willie's question, after Willie specifically defined awesome as the amount of physical effect a miracle has on the material world. If you like, here's a diagram I drew to illustrate how descriptions of miracles tended to be more epic in the past than they do now, and this is because you can make claims of anything happening in the past and if it happened far enough back in time, you can avoid pesky sceptics like me investigating that claim effectively.
  
  And just to bury Samuel's point further, I present to you the case of Peter Popoff, a once famous Christian faith healer who was making 4 million dollars a year healing people on TV - he was utterly dethroned by James Randi when his seeming-ability to guess people's personal info and even their illnesses came from a radio feed from his wife, the transmission of which was intercepted by Randi and recorded. You see, Popoff's wife and her aides gather information about audience members from conversations and prayer request cards filled out before service, and then beam them into Popoff's ear by radio. Other tricks he pulled including seating audience members who can actually walk (albeit with minimal aid) in wheelchairs, giving the illusion that he can make wheelchair bound individuals walk again. These are simple cons, but Christians' credulity, as demonstrated by Samuel in referencing the powers of televangelists, predisposes them to simply believe in such claims of miracles unsceptically and indiscriminately. Samuel asked at some point during the debate: How much evidence would be enough? And my answer is: definitely waaay more than what Samuel considers to be enough.


• Jesus appeared to Paul in a blinding flash of light and he allowed Doubting Thomas to feel his wounds in order to prove to them he is God, so why can't don't we modern sceptics get the same evidence from Jesus? Samuel said that even if Jesus appears to us, we would not be able to see him because of The Fall™.
  
  It was a spectacular act of Samuel shooting himself in the foot and demonstrates how muddled his internal logic is regarding Biblical non-explanations. Both Paul and Thomas were "fallen" too. They too are mortals on Earth who lived long after mankind's alleged fall from grace. So were Moses, Abraham, Lot and all the Old Testament prophets who had dealings with God or his agents.


• If you pray and it changes God's mind, then he is not omniscient. If you can't change God's mind, then why bother with intercessory prayers? Samuel said you shouldn't ask for stuff when you pray but instead say "God, let your will be done."
  
  Here is a further example of Samuel's incoherent and inconsistent faith. One moment, he said you shouldn't ask God to do things for you in your prayer but when Willie asked if he would pray to God to save his loved ones, he suddenly said he would. Also, to dispute Samuel's initial point using the Bible, Matthew 22:21 had Jesus saying, "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." Jesus said you can totally ask for any stuff ("all things") and you shall get it ("ye shall receive") so long as you have faith ("believing"). However, that itself is its own little problem and you can read more about it here in this short piece titled: The Problem with Matthew 22:21.


• Why choose Christianity and not other faith? How vigorously have you sought out other faiths? Samuel said Christianity is truer than the other religions, and that came from him pursuing a Masters in Comparative Theology.
  
  From Seminari Theoloji Malaysia, an interdenominational Protestant seminary. Yeah, those guys are totally going to be impartial. Also, Christianity is truthier than other faiths? Citations please.

Part 6: Samuel's Response to the Cross Examination



Here, Samuel responds to the answers given by Willie to his questions and in doing so, he made a few points, which I'll get cracking on,

•  Atheists have double standards for expecting Christians to shoulder the burden of proof from the Christian God's existence.
  
  Duh. You claim God exists, you prove it. If I claim an invisible STD fairy is the entity that causes the herpes, and then you'd expect me to prove its existence, wouldn't you? And if you can't prove that the STD fairy doesn't exist, does it mean that claims of its existence automatically has validity?


• The film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is fact. A girl died from demonic possesion.
  
  No, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a movie loosely based on Anneliese Michel, who died from malnutrition and dehydration from almost a year of semi-starvation while the rites of exorcism were performed - one or two sessions each week, lasting up to four hours, over about ten months in 1975 and 1976. Her story is actually a cautionary tale against trusting in the supernatural. Here is a list of accounts of more than a thousand human beings harmed (with more being unreported, I'm sure), and in most cases, fatally. And it all happened because people like Samuel gullibly believe in exorcism.


• Something something something genetic fallacy!
  
  Listen to what Samuel described as a genetic fallacy that Willie allegedly made. He said (quite unintelligibly) something like this: "You are making a genetic fallacy, just because we are born in a certain place and a certain time, therefore we have no reason to believe in religion. Something is wrong because of the origin; the answer is wrong just because of the way it came forth." I wish he could have been more coherent so I can at least see what he meant by Willie committing the genetic fallacy. If I have to guess, it had something to do with Willie explaining why Samuel is not delusional by society's standards in believing the things he do, citing Samuel's surroundings, his upbringing and his community as the reasons. Willie is not saying that Samuel's beliefs are wrong because his situation is wrong or evil.


• Christians have to shoulder the burden of proof for God but atheists/agnostics are not shouldering the burden of proof from evolution. Willie is committing the fallacy of special pleading!
  
  Um, no. Look at the choice of antibiotics that is prescribed to treat you when you get an infection, and the importance of completing the course of medication - that's evolutionary theory applied to the real world. Look at Tiktaalik, a Devonian lobed finned fish evolving into a land-dwelling four-legged creature with adaptations for terrestrial living - you can touch the damn fossil. It's real. There's a wealth of transitional species in the fossil records bridging major groups of living creatures if only you would take your face out of your Bible and look. Can I see Jesus? Nope. Can I touch his crucifixion wounds like Thomas allegedly did? Nope.


• 90% of the world believes in God. Therefore we are not delusional and there's something to it.
  
  Since he likes bringing up logical fallacies, I'll do one: Samuel is committing the argumentum ad populum, or the argument from popularity. Just because lots of people believe in something doesn't say anything about whether it is true or not. There was a time that most, if not all, people in the world believed that the sun goes around the Earth. So yes, most people in the world can be wrong about something.

Part 7: Willie's Response to the Cross Examination





Part 8: Summary from Samuel Nesan






Part 9: Summary from Willie Poh





Part 10: Questions and Answers with the Audience



I was the representative from the godless team who, with the cooperation of a bloke from the other side, selected the questions that I felt would be pertinent to the debate, bring up points not explored by the speakers. I discarded those which are blatantly trying to make a point and those that resembles more like a novella in length than a tweet. Here's where I have culled a selection of queires to comment on which I feel were not satisfactorily addressed,

• If humans are created in the image of God, why are there congenital deformities?
  
  This one was obviously written by a certain six-fingered atheist musician I know in the audience (he has pre-axial polydactyly, to be exact) and he told me that to date, no believer could answer it satisfactorily. Samuel fell back on his personal go-to non-answer for everything that's wrong in the world today: The Fall™. I have personally scoured the Bible to look for the Christian answer to this question and I have not found any. What I did find however, was Leviticus 21:16-21 which says, "The Lord said to Moses, "Say to Aaron: 'For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord." What this tells me is that the Christian God that Samuel worships is a discriminatory asshole (Jesus notwithstanding) who tells handicapped, deformed, and little people to not touch his food. So, I am always amused when people pray to the Christian God to help people with these conditions.


• What scientific literature have you (Samuel) read on evolution and can you explain it satisfactorily what the theory says to demonstrate your understanding?
  
  Samuel's answer here truly demonstrates how he really have no idea what he's objecting to. You can see here that he admitted how he had not even finish reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which is 150 years behind time on the current understanding of evolution. He also did not take up the challenge of explaining or defining the theory to display his understanding. So, the reason why he kept parroting the fact that there's no satisfactory evidence to support biological evolution is simple: he simply did not bother to read about the evidence.


• Why do you (Samuel) have no problem believing in microevolution over short periods of time but balks at the thought of macroevolution in geological (read: massively long) timescale?
  
  Sam went into how we can't explain life came from non-life again, further cementing the obvious: he has no idea what evolution is. Evolutionary biology, as conceived by Darwin and understood by scientists today, is the explanation for the diversity of life, not its origin. The principles driving microevolution and macroevolution is identical - both operates via natural selection where environmental pressures dictates what genes would best help an organism survive and pass it on to its progeny. To say you believe in one and not the other is like saying "I believe that a bus would arrive at its next stop in 10 minutes but I don't believe it can reach the next city is 10 hours." And to answer Samuel's quibble that there is no clear definition of biological evolution, Biology by Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes defined it as "any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." It is elegant but non-scientists may find it cryptic. In fact, Darwin himself would not immediately understand it as he never knew about DNA or what "allelles" are.
  
  Douglas J. Futuyama had a longer definition and he describes evolution as "change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions."


• I know about microevolution but DNA can only decrease in information, but wouldn't a monkey evolving into a human needs an increase in the complexity of its DNA?
  
  This one clearly came from a Christian - describing human evolution as monkey-to-human instead of saying we came from a-common-ancestor-which-gave-rise-to-both-humans-and-monkeys was a dead giveaway. Modern monkeys are our genetic cousins, and you wouldn't say you descended from a cousin, would you? It also made two unsupported assumptions (a) DNA can only lose information, not gain and (b) a human is more complex compared to a monkey.
  
  I'll tackle the second one first. The idea of "higher" or "more-evolved" lifeforms is tricky to quantify. The marbled lungfish has 133 billion base pairs in its genome. Paris japonica (a flowering plant) has a genetic code that is 150 billion base pairs long. A single-celled freshwater amoeboid, Polychaos dubium, has a documented 670 billion base pairs in its DNA. Humans? We have a paltry 3 billion base pairs. The point I am trying to make is that "complexity" is irrelevant to the survival or evolutionary fitness of an organism. It's how well-adapted that organism is to its environment.
  
  The first assumption is plain wrong. I'll illustrate with one simple, relatable example: the dog, or as I like to call it, the Canis lupus familiaris. It's Latin name informs you that it is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and indeed, dogs can still interbreed with wild wolves. There is an estimated 150 to 600 breeds of dogs worldwide with vast diversity in morphology from Great Danes to Chihuahuas to French Bulldogs, all of which were bred from the plain vanilla gray wolf stock. This is a clear demonstration that information (in this case, body shapes, colours, fur-length, etc) within DNA codes can be increased. If that's not what you meant by information, then please define it.


• Why is evolution reasonable when it causes racism i.e. white men killing aborigines?
  
  The person who posed this question is the same person who posed the above, and it demonstrated the same sloppy thinking style. I bring this up because I was dissatisfied with Willie's answer and wishes to smack him in the face with a panda for missing the obvious. On the Origin of Species, Darwin's book, was published in 1859. Is the questioner saying that racism did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century?
  
  Aside from plain crazy talk, the questioner is also committing an appeal to consequences, a blatant logical fallacy, in that he or she supposes that the consequence triggered by any fact or claim has any bearing on its truth value. When someone falls from a skyscraper to his or her destiny as a red stain on the streets below, does it mean that the laws of gravity is "unreasonable"? Passages from the Bible were historically used to justify slavery and racism, does it mean that... oh wait, the Bible actually go into specifics on how to buy slaves, how to bequeath slaves to your heirs, and how you shouldn't be punished if your slave didn't die immediately from your beatings. Unlike the theory of evolution, which makes no statement of what races are more primitive or less deserving of rights, the Bible openly tells you the etiquette of being a slave and a slave-owner, with not a single passage condemning the practice of slavery.


• Do you believe in free will? Doesn't the omniscience of God negates free will?
  
  I have nothing to add to this. I just want to bring this up because Samuel plain didn't understand the intent of the question and Yoshua the moderator (he himself a Christian), outright told Samuel that. You'd notice that there's no moderator from the atheist side and while we requested that an atheist representative (yours truly), be inserted into the question selection process for the Q&A round, we had opted not to stick a someone sympathetic to our worldview in the moderator's seat. It's win-win. Either the Christian moderator is completely impartial (good), or is biased towards the Christian side (good, because it would make us look like we were being unfairly treated).


• Can morality exists without God?
  
  Willie answered this ably. I would add that other than the obvious fact that no one (to my knowledge) in the atheist community is going around robbing, raping and killing just because they don't believe in God. Morality is also found in animals and one of the most dramatic examples I've found is an experiment by Masserman et al with rhesus monkeys where he rigged up a food dispensing mechanism for them that, when operated, also delivers an electric shock to fellow monkey. They found that most rhesus monkeys would rather starve than reap benefits from the suffering of another member of its species. No god required, unless you think the monkeys were feverishly reading the Bible when the researchers' backs were turned.


• Samuel's response to the above question.
  
  This is what I consider the absolute highlight of the night and thought it deserved its own bullet point. Samuel brought up Adolf Motherfucking Hitler and that automatically aroused laughter from the unbelievers in the audience before he even elaborated on his point. Several atheists (including me), immediately brought their palms to their faces. We do that because we have heard this a million times and we know exactly what's coming. While Samuel did not want to characterise Hitler as an atheist, he also said, "I don't believe he's a believer."
  
  I do not want to comment on what Hitler really believed or did not believe in, but this is what he said in Mein Kampf: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." He also said in a 1922 speech, "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter."
  
  Samuel also tried to link the theory of evolution to Hitler's motivation by saying "Hitler believed in the survival of the fittest" when the Nazis actually banned works on Darwinism. In fact, Hitler said this about atheism in October 1934 in a speech in Berlin: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
  
  Then finally, Samuel trotted out his most egregious point of the night. He said, "Without God, morality is subjective." That is patently untrue. According to the Bible, God is most definitely not an objective source of morality. Take the Ten Commandments, for example. One of them was "Thou shalt not kill." If this is an objective law of morality, it means that under no circumstances are anyone allowed to take another person's life but within the same Biblical book, just some chapters ahead, God commanded the Levites (Exodus 32:27) to "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour." 3000 people were murdered. In fact, God is so bloodthirsty that he gave Jephthah victory in battle in exchange for him burning his own daughter as an offering to Him (Judges 11:30-31, 11:34-40). And if "Thou shalt not kill" is truly an objective moral law - emphasis on objective - then God is immoral if he breaks it, regardless of context. And boy, just between the Flood which wiped out most of humanity, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Plagues of Egypt, he certainly act as if killing is a-okay if you're a cosmic super-being. Objective morality, my comfy ass. The God of the Bible is the greatest moral relativist I know.

Commentator's Note

And I'm done. The reason why I chose to sit down and write this commentary to accompany the videos is because I want to demonstrate how ineffectual debates are in conveying knowledge and accurate information, and to illustrate the fact that debates are really just popularity contests where two talking heads play he-says-she-says.

Even so, I think Willie did an amazing job explaining the atheistic position and refrained from saying anything untruthful. We knew that this is going to be recorded and it simply wouldn't do for us to perpetuate any falsehoods.

At the end of the night, some Christian youths approached Willie with what he thinks are genuine and sincere questions about science (I said "he thinks" because I wasn't there), and you wouldn't believe how delighted he was. It's the teacher in him, methinks. I also heard unconfirmed reports about a fence-sitter in the audience who fell off the fence into our lawn, but I am naturally sceptical of hearsay. But you already know that.



RELATED POST: My introductory speech before the debate.

READ ALSO: Mr Pepper Lim's write-up, Debating God’s Existence 25.8.12. He was responsible for organising the video recording of the debate.



Part of minor secular history,
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The Marrying of My Oldest Friend

"Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Most of you know Nietzsche as the guy who said "God is dead." As you can see here, he said some nice things too.

I am out of my native element at weddings and that is why I rarely attend them. There is not much good I can honestly say about the institution of matrimony - holy or secular - but that doesn't mean I have nothing good to say about it at all. I am human after all and there are irrationalities I doubt I can ever be rid of. Sentimentality and nostalgia are some of those things. Psychologists have taken away the favourite toy of children, used an illusion to duplicate it and then asked which one the kids wanted. Most of the children rejected the "new" toy and wanted the old one back, even though it's the very same one. Imagine you have a wedding ring. Would you allow someone to destroy it and return to you an identical replica - even if they use a Star Trek-style replicator capable of reproducing it down to the last atom?

On an intellectual level, I know that marriages are shams but what I also know is that the excitement, trepidation and happiness people feel on their wedding days are real. I know it's real because I feel happy for them too, and on the 4th of June, 2011, that's exactly what I felt for my neighbour and my oldest friend when he married the girl he loves.

The groom and I.

Over the years, his trajectory in life and mine had launched in wildly different directions and we have grown distant even while he still lives next door. Should I have done something to preserve the way it was back in our toddling, kindergarten days when we were the best of friends? Should he? I am a great believer of letting relationships live, languish and lie on their own terms in the graveyard of life's little tragedies, and I suspect most of us are. We would be very haunted men and women if we cling to every ghost of our past.

The mother of my second oldest friend was at seated at my table and she asked me that perennial favourite of questions asked by women of a certain age. She wanted to know when it would be my turn to tie the red strings and snip off the loose ends.

"I'm not into the whole marrying thing," I told her.

"You mean, you're not ready to get married yet?"

"You can say that. You can also say that I'll never be ready."

My family has a rather cavalier attitude towards the whole idea of putting love on paper, and out of the six siblings of my mother's generation, only half of them showed enough enthusiasm to actually put it to execution. But for someone who considers marriage so lightly, I also consider it a lot. I have a vague conception of how I would arrange my wedding and I have also dreamed up the beginnings of the vows I intend to make. Perhaps I would make them yet - not to a hall full of people, only half of which I know - but in the silence of a familiar night upon a strange place. I would not speak the words aloud but in a lover's whisper meant only for one person's ears; under no steeple but the sky, with not a soul in attendance but the stars, and on no authority except that of the only two people in the whole wide world who matter.

Congratulations Mr. Chong Chan Bei and Ms. Hairen Gan, and families.

I am now of the age where I'll see my friends getting hitched one after the other. Soon, I will start welcoming their children into this odd, crazy, messed-up but amazing world of ours. And before I know it, I'll see them leave it - I'll see the legacies they left behind. I have this strange, unshakeable, depersonalising feeling that I am just a side character in everyone's lives, more spectator than player and closer to fiction than flesh. I am that guy who my ex-girlfriends dated and hated. I am that black sheep in the family no one understood. I am that friend who is now just a jumble of numbers and letters between real people in their phone books.

What scares me most is the realisation that I have been slowly coming to terms with it all my life. I guess this is why a lot of us eventually settle down, marry and have kids, even when we didn't want to at first.

"'Cause I'm a little bit tired of fearing that I'll be the bad fruit nobody buys.
Tell me, did you think we'd all dream the same?

And doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that hit too close to home?
Doesn't that make you shiver, the way things could have gone?
And doesn't it feel peculiar, when everyone wants a little more?"

Yes, Missy Higgins - yes, it does. Thank you for your beautiful song about scars.

Your supporting actor,

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