B-D, the new G-D of ‘Truth’

KTemoc Konsiders

‘Tis the season of faith, but ’tis also the season for realizing that faith is not based on evidence or logic, and wherein, truth is subjective, which is precisely why religion requires faith.

RPK tells us this in his guest column at Free Malaysia Today, in an article titled Standards of evidence.

RPK wrote: Beliefs, in particular religious beliefs, are called faiths — religious faith. The reason they are called religious faiths is because you need to believe based on faith, not based on evidence.

Faith, in a way, can be described as the word to explain lack of evidence. Hence, whenever you fail to prove your beliefs with supporting evidence you classify it under faith. And you can get away with whatever beliefs that lack evidence by calling it faith. It would be considered quite acceptable. […]

… because faith does not need proof. And I will just have to take your word for it and believe that without question.

And they tell me that slavery has been abolished. Actually religion is slavery.

Joining him on the topic of ‘faith’ but in a separate article has been Adelyn Yeoh, an undergraduate student in Mount Holyoke College, USA, who also writes for CEKU at http://www.ceku.org. Her article poignantly titled Leaving god informed us:

Faith is the act of believing and religion is the institution through which faith sometimes operates through. Faith can operate without religion. […]

There were numerous things that did not sit right with me; things that did not seem just or fair, despite what religion claimed. Teachers would often use God as their trump card to get students to do their bidding. […]

… Religion is used as an additional divisive tool, not just by politicians but also by the average Joe. Overeager evangelical actions carried out by the average person working in the name of faith, despite having good intentions, often upset other parties. The reason for this is often because the evangelist has a presupposed notion of superiority.

I too posted my views more than a month ago in Faith & salvation, a kaytee special wakakaka on the subject of ‘leaps of faith’, those of gi-normous Grand Canyon-ish dimensions as required particularly by the Abrahamic religions and those of teeny weeny longkang-size lompat for Buddhist and Jainist beliefs, …

… while the tricky Chinese (non Abrahamic) religionists have their even more trickier religions, tap-dancing around the issue of faith, wakakaka.

From the above discussions, I think we have four words to consider in religions (except those tricky Chinese religions), faith, evidence, logic, truth – or indeed, the absence of the latter three.

Whatever, if any blame needs to be apportioned, well, let’s blame it on those ancient Egyptians. Note I stated ‘ancient’ Egyptians, not the current Egyptians who are Arabs. The ancient Egyptians were not Arabs.

An aside, once I had toyed around with a series of posts questioning mainstream biblical narrations, titled ‘who was Abrahim?’. I went up to 21 posts but wearied of the amount of reading and cross referencing I had to do, decided to switch to and focus on socio-politics in this blog. But if you like to read them, provided you won’t be offended by the liberal discussions of Old Testament biblical characters, you will find all 21 posts filed in Back to Abraham soon! (which I may, that is, return to finish/complete the series)

angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac to god alan yeap at Malaysia Today should note this was another case of an angel talking to a prophet and the angel was not even an archangel, wakakaka

Anyway, why should we blame those ancient Egyptians for the issue of faith versus evidence (proof), logic or truth in religions?

That’s because the Hebrews (supposedly the patriarch Abraham) started the Abrahamic religions, with the Hebrews-Israelites-Judeans-Jews inheriting from the ancient Egyptians four things (4 only since we’re into stuff of 4 like the above-mentioned faith, evidence, logic, truth), which were:

(a) circumcision – yes, the royalty in ancient Egypt started this, not the Hebrews;

I don’t like the look of what appears to be a pair of pliers (on right)

(b) a matriarchal lineage – the Pharaoh’s daughter inherits the throne of ancient Egypt which was why the royal brother incestuously married the royal sister in order to keep the kingdom under his rule, as did daddy Pharaoh. Whether they did you-know-what has never been specifically mentioned.

The Hebrews,-Israelites-Judeans-Jews followed/follow the ancient Egyptian system, thus orthodox Judaism practises matrilineal descent for more than 2000 years, where anyone with a Jewish mother has irrevocable Jewish status, regardless of whether mum has converted to another religion. Despite it being under orthodox Judaism, the lineage was obviously more of a racial rather than a religious consideration.

Some reforms occurred in the early 1980’s to include patrilineal descent, but by 1986, the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly rejected patrilineal descent and even warned that any rabbi who does so would be expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly.

Maybe one of the ‘lost 10 tribes of Israel’ migrated to and took up residence in Negeri Sembilan (or perhaps Padang)? wakakaka.

(c) monotheism – again yes, it was the heretic Pharaoh, Akhenaten (formerly Amenhotep IV) who was the first person to worship only one creator god, way way before the Hebrews knew about YVWH.

Pharaoh Akhenaten was called ‘heretic’ because in polytheistic ancient Egypt, one was considered a heretic for crazily worshipping only one god, wakakaka;

Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti and daughters praying to their One G-D, Aten

(d) while the general scholarly position thus far has been that the Hebrew script came from the Phoenicians, some have asserted that it was from the ancient Egyptians, who possessed three types of scripts, namely hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic. Whichever, the ancient Egyptian script doesn’t have vowels which the Hebrew Torah (bible) seems to follow, where a striking example would be the Tetragrammaton YVWH.

hieroglyphs

demotic script

… which brings us to my post title of B-D.

Okay lah, I am t’ng k’oui (chong hei), meandering like a lazy willow & bamboo-lined Karnafuli* river across the Plains of Chitchat-tagong (no, not the one in Bangladesh), wakakaka.

* polite mispronunciation, wakakaka

Now, what does B-D stand for or tell us?

Firstly, we may assume that the vowel-less letters has god-like qualities because of their resemblance to the Hebraical G-D. Please have a bit of faith here lah, wakakaka;

faith as taught by the church

Secondly, remember that having faith obviates the need for evidence, proof, logic etc, including the truth, wakakaka;

Thirdly, B-D has assumed a disproportionate significance in the politics of Malaysia right at this moment and we should pay heed to it;

Fourthly (the final of our four thingy’s), sceptical kaytee as usual wishes to examine the political evangelism that’s promoting the new ‘god’ B-D, wakakaka.

Okay, let’s start off with the D of B-D where D, placed second, is more recent that B.

D = Deepak or Deepak Jaikishan, the carpet bagger seller who was once a figure meeting up covertly and furtively with B = Balasubramaniam, and allegedly also doing various ‘odd jobs’ for Rosmah and Najib, and at times variously Rosmah’s toy boy, godson, best friend, confidante, aide, Mr Fix-it, gifts giver, confidential-private majordomo, etc.

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