Cuckoo

I want to start off that I’m typing this at 3 am in a McDonald’s with a big screen TV, who plays Electrico’s “What Do You See” which is a pretty OK U2 / Coldplay thing, although you know when you are writing a national song, other than being anthemic, it’s got to be more melodic, and it’s got to make more sense when you sing it without the accompaniment. And it goes without saying that it doesn’t sound very nice when you hear it every 20 minutes. Sometimes I think they put that song there so as to chase away people just buy 1 coke but hang out here for a few hours at a stretch.

Was seeing someone coming and ordering some food, and I thought, wow, she’s beautiful, until I took a second look, and realized – whoops, it should really be he’s beautiful. Ah well, I guess that’s common. Asspecially after midnight on Saturday.

There is a person that I will now call cuckoo, not because he is stupid, (even though in a way he is a little daft). A cuckoo is a bird who lays his eggs in somebody else’s nest, and I think in a way that was who he was.

He was – let’s say he was from the B class, but he hung out a lot with people like us in the A class. I know, that is very elitist. I don’t really know why there is a class system in Singapore secondary education, but there is, we just accepted it as it is. Ironically, years later, when I went to the US, I got introduced to the idea of affirmative action. The universities there are more willing to accept people from more disadvantaged backgrounds, not because they think that this way life is more fair, but because having a greater diversity of people in your university community makes the educational experience a richer one for all people involved. If you put all the high scorers in the same class, everybody would just be a nerd from the same kind of background.

Anyway, at that time, I just thought that he was a social climber. But eventually, a few years ago I glimpsed another truth: that he was also more like us than the people in the B class, who he also got along with nevertheless. Like many of us, he was stubborn and opiniated.

All the same I felt that he was always a little insecure, and I guess – who wouldn’t? I felt that he aspired to a level of intelligence that was a little beyond him. It still didn’t change the fact that he was smarter than most people, of course.

He’s a teacher now. He’s teaching at a girl’s school, even though he’s incredibly lecherous. He’s not only lecherous, he’s really too candid about it. He was showing around pictures of some of his class dressed in SIA sarong kebayas and a mutual friend said, "you know, I don't really think you should be in the teaching profession." Of course, we all recognise that there is still a yawning gap between being extremely horny and actually acting out on it, and we know that while he is standing dangerously close to the line, he hasn't actually crossed it.

He’s not like me, I like to make a lot of off-colour jokes, not because I’m especially lecherous. I have a good imagination, but I like to see people squirm. Or laugh. Or both. Shingot is lecherous, but he shuts his mouth up about it, and he seems to accomplish this seeming contradictory intellectual position of being very faithful to his wife, while retaining the freedom to leer at any woman he chooses. That’s in a way quite sensible if – and only if he succeeds in pulling it off. Otherwise you can imagine how fucked up things can get.

Cuckoo’s been single for a long time. I feel that there is something quite childish in the way that he talks about women solely according to their physical attractiveness, and not very much else.

He’s a Cancer, and something about him behaves like a Cancer person. He’s a little clingy to his friends. You will find him a little not very respectful of personal boundaries. And if you’re the subject of his pet peeves, he could be very persistent in finding some reason to get annoyed at you.

He’s quite friendly at first, which is good. But soon enough his faults will surface. And there is this innocence about him which is dangerously close to naiveté.

Recently, he confided a secret to me. He had been hanging out with a few friends of mine, who were Christian. I even thought for a while that he was in the same church as them. Until he recently indicated to me, after finding out that I am a Buddhist, that he’s just “infiltrating” them and trying to find out what being a Christian is really like.

He didn’t want to be a Christian, and I suppose in a way I agree with him. I will never be a Christian because there are too many Christian ideas I really don’t agree with. And because I cherish my freedom of thought too much.

After swearing me to secrecy (at least not telling those people) he went on a tirade against mega-churches, and how they systematically brainwashed you, while all the same they provided you with a community that made you feel like you belonged. He didn’t like the tithing. Your membership fee for a church is a fixed percentage of your income – this goes some way in explaining how a lot of churches to some extent set aside the traditional aversion towards material gain (remember it was written “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven”) and just tell their guys to go forth and multiply their income.

He didn’t like how Christian doctrine tells you that Christians are better than non-Christians, that men are just that much better than animals. That is the dirty little secret of Christianity – I was quite shocked to read in an article, that in a poll of pastors, 50% of them are unwilling to hold inter-faith dialogues, lest people might think that Christianity is not the superior religion. Yes, in Singapore.

And he also didn’t like how a lot of Sunday school teachers would tell the congregation that the Bible is right and your science textbooks are wrong, which basically reverses the work of other school teachers like him. I think a lot of these things are all about protecting the Christian faith attacks. First, you bend the truth as far as you can, maybe even break it, so that people stop doubting the Bible. Then in the end maybe you even bend what’s written in the Bible.

I suppose I shared a lot of his misgivings about the Christian faith. What happens in Islam I can only guess, because it is even harder for me to find out what goes on in a mosque sermon.

But I understand a lot of problems that take place in a religion. How do you preserve a faith when everything is based on a book, and ever since that book was written, people keep on finding out stuff that keeps on contradicting what’s in there? How do you preserve the character of a community, and keep them believing? How do modern living, and the moral values of the religion that you want to impart, coexist with each other? How do you make all these thorny philosophical problems accessible in some form to people who may or may not be intellectually sophisticated to grasp all the issues? How do you tell them that although what’s written in the Bible is false, all these stories allude to a spiritual truth?

I know where he’s coming from. But a lot of these things don’t really have to do with religion. There are a lot of faculties in universities which teach pretty useless stuff, but they are very resistant to change. There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t applied and probably shouldn’t be applied, but you just insist on it just because it’s there. Then it’s a human issue, the principal-agent problem.

The government has so far adhered to the Religious Harmony act, because it recognizes the importance of preserving social harmony. But recently it has found that the Church of Our Saviour has stepped over the mark, as some people have pointed out about the AWARE incident. I think they can go too far, and I don’t think they should be protected if they go too far. If you read some of the things that they’ve been saying about “secular thought”, you would be completely shocked. The way they’re talking, they would rather prefer the enlightenment didn’t happen, that we’re all still living in the stone ages.

All the same, I recognize that organized religion provides certain things that cannot otherwise be provided. Atheists always talk about a new religion called “humanism”. How the hell do you know that humanism is going to work and not have the problems that Christianity is having? In spite of everything, it is all tried and proven. All the fuck-ups (think about the bloody holy wars and the Reformation) have already happened. How do you know that your new religion will not result in a lot of stirred shit?

And this Cuckoo, what is he “infiltrating” the church for? Does he not recognize that it is a community of people who have shared values? Does he not realize that society is going to be in big trouble if you took away all these little communities? This is part and parcel of living in the real world, rather than living in a world of ideas. I have this theory that many church goers are closet atheists, that they all don’t believe in the literal existence of God, but rather they just say what they say because they need the spiritual guidance and the friendships in the church. God is false but all the other stuff is real. Does he want to “infiltrate” the church because he can have a few more friends?

In fact I am going to commit some intellectual blasphemy here. I think you should not reject religion because it is false. You have to see the whole picture, the whole system, and then make a wholesale evaluation.

I'm thinking, religion is really not that important to me to intellectualise about. Its all about practice, what you actually do with your life, it's about whether or not it makes you a better person, makes you want to do things the right way, rather than the content of your belief. Knowing things on an intellectual level, I've come to realise - it doesn't mean anything at all.

Well, at least he knows how to be friendly and polite to people, which is much more than I can say for myself.