Religious harmony in Singapore – The Issue & Suggestions
Over the weekend, I had the privilege of attending the 2nd Interfaith Conference on Dialogue & Engagement 2009*. Here are some of my thoughts (greatly influenced by the conversations I had that day) on the kinds of religious conflicts happening in Singapore, why they happen and what can be done.
Why religious conflicts happen in Singapore: Confusion over the new boundaries
Everyone agreed that we want to respect each others religions (including atheism/agnosticsm/humanism). However, the panel dialogue surfaced lots of situations/incidence which subtly screamed: You say you respect me, but here’s when you didn’t!
What that showed, in my view, was that people didn’t know how to behave in order to demonstrate their respect. We need to dialogue and establish what constitutes acceptable behavior; we need to define the boundaries.
In the past (judging from conversations with older people, and from the emphasis in school 20 years ago), there was a lot on religious practices and rituals, amongst the religious followers, in national campaigns and public messaging. These tended to be the source of misunderstandings as well. Religious differences were : Muslims didn’t eat pork. Buddhist/Taoist burnt offerings, Christians celebrated Christmas etc. People got upset when rituals of other faiths affected their lives eg. when ashes flew into each others living rooms.
Over the years of dialogue, we’ve come to accommodate each other’s rituals. When organizing an office party, we know we need to ask if there are vegetarians attending. We happily accept Christmas presents. We have no issues with colleagues wearing tudungs or turbans. We have agreed on the boundaries, and we know how to behave to show our respect for diversity.
Today’s population is more exposed to global issues, which is becoming increasingly ideological. New issues have cropped up. Issues where we haven’t had enough dialogue on, where everyone has a different idea of where the boundary is.
When we think of “inter-religious” dialogue in terms of rituals only, and insist on keeping everything else “secular”, we swept very real and contentious issues under the rug. Many of these issues were touched on during Saturday’s dialogue, and I will briefly outline them here.
Some areas of contention and conflict, which needs discussion:
Religious groups in the secular setting : the school, the workplace
It’s OK to give my colleague Christmas presents, invite them for Deepavali party, wear my tudung. Is it OK to give my colleagues Bible-verse-bookmarks, invite them to church, form office cell groups? It’s OK to talk about religious festivals during Moral Ed class, is it OK to talk about the different Creation stories during Science class?
Religious overtones in policy: Homosexuality, healthcare, advertising
- We accept that we have different dietary restrictions, and we’ve worked out ways to accommodate every kind of diet. Can we accept that we have different sexual practice restrictions and work out a way to accommodate everyone? Same with issues like euthanasia, abortion, HIV subsidies. Where advertising is concerned, does advertising in a religious publication mean that my company is inclusive and respectful of diversity, or does it mean that my company favors a particular religion, or has my company flouted secular principles? Everyone will interpret a gesture differently; we need a dialogue to establish different behaviors mean.
Religious practices at home: Funerals, altars, festivals
This is tricky. It always is when the homes and families are involved. But perhaps here is when dialogue is needed, acceptable behavior established, and rights guarded. What kind of funerals should be conducted when the deceased is of a religion separate from the family members? Are altars offensive or inclusive?
This list is far from exhaustive, but already, we see where the dialogue has to go to.
What can/needs to be done
Our inter-faith dialogue has to move beyond introducing our rituals to one another. We need to establish
1. Boundaries of acceptable behavior, and a common understanding of what each gesture means
2. Terms of engagement. How should we conduct our outreach activities without offense? How should we practice our faith outside the places of worship? What is the criteria for offensive/discriminatory behavior? When we disagree, how should we go about voicing our protest in an amicable way?
Without establishing boundaries and terms of engagement, it is inevitable that I offend you with well-meaning gestures. When you react negatively, I would then feel slighted. A recipe for conflict.
Who needs to be involved
1. Religious leaders/organizations.
Because of how they are looked to as the authorities, they have to be the ones starting the conversation. And then they have to preach in the manner they have agreed to. Representatives of secular/non-religious/minority religion groups need to be included too, to ensure they are not discriminated.
2. The State
It is the State’s responsibility to provide mechanisms through which the agreed upon boundaries and term of engagement are respected and enforced
3. Public & secular organizations – companies, schools, hospitals, NGOs
It came as a surprise to me to learn that NIE does not have a mandatory Race/Religious Sensitization course for the people who influence the thoughts of the next generation 300 days a year. Teachers, HR managers, policy makers, etc need to know how to deal with religious issues sensitively, and how to diffuse issues when they do crop up in a fair and sensitive manner. Telling a child to shut up and sit down doesn’t really help in the long run. Companies need to be aware that how they run their Christmas sales can be offensive or not. Hospital staff need to know how to tell when it is offensive or when it is helpful to offer to pray for the patient. If NGOs, educators, health workers, and religious groups had decided to sit down together to discuss sexuality education years ago, the whole AWARE saga might not have taken place. If clear terms of engagement had been established, perhaps the religious groups would have protested AWARE’s policies in a more civil and acceptable manner.
4. Public education
Going down to the grassroots level with inter-faith dialogues and activities is definitely useful, but only after the religious leaders have established societal norms and conventions, and after the societal infrastructure/mechanisms are in place to bring about this racial and religious harmony we seek.
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*About
This was organized by the EIF, together with the Buddhist Fellowship. EIF (Explorations into Faith) is a group under the Southeast CDC umbrella, that organizes inter-religious dialogues on a monthly basis, each time partnering a different religious group.
Participants discussed issues of Religion and Race in Singapore in small groups of about 5 – 10 people, and then came together for a forum discussion that saw a panel of 5 religious leaders, representing the Buddhist, Christian, Islam, Hindu, or Taoist faith. .
As part of the National Orange Ribbon Campaign (http://www.aux.com.sg/norc/index.php) to promote racial and religious harmony, the theme for discussion was on exactly that — Racial and religious harmony in the Singapore context.
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Religions are inherently incompatible, and conflicts are also unavoidable, even as potential conflicts always exist between any two persons. But with religions these conflicts cannot just be managed by reason, bargains and trades, appeal to civility, compassion, etc especially when it involves the notion of god which is beyond any man to question even less to be accepted as wrong, and certainkly not subject to any laws in any land.
So ultimately, again as with all conflicts, it has to be managed by appeal and use of the true god, namely the one with real power – be it the fists of a man, or the policemen and soldiers of the state. So a multi religious state is inherently unstable and must be sustained always by force.
The line is drawn by the government in any country – and certainly not by any church – as demonstrated here in the tudung and the Jehovah Witness, and recently the Chick publications evangelists. But as the full religious implications of where the line falls may not be entirely clear to the government – or that the government is unwilling to bear it – the government rather rely on the practitioners of the religions to debate and hopefully arrive at it themselves, and perhaps obviate the explicit drawing any legal lines at all.
(Some Christians may felt that jailing the evangelists was a line drawn wrong. But the state’s objective is to maintain the state – and not lose votes in our case – and not to give weight to the religious dogmas as the religions valued them.)
And this should be the emphasis in such dialogues, and not just a sharing session of what my rituals are and what yours are, being nice, polite and condescending, ad nauseum, but rather to know what is in your religion are objectional, even abhorrent, to others who do not share your world view; and that you have to modify, change whatever you do, in a manner consistent and compatbile within your religious beliefs systems, to acommodate these others.
If you refuse or you cannot find any consistent alternative but has to insist on being objectional and abhorrent, as deemed so by the others, and even as the others cannot change to accommodate you, then it must be understood the last resort is the enforcible law of the land. If you even cannot accept this, then you have no place in the land at all.
Thanks for your views…. i quite agree….
An interesting interview with Richard Dawkins (pretty well known outspoken atheist) on respect for religion.
Before this video, I do believe that there is be mutual respect for other beliefs. However, after listening to his reasoning, I do have some doubts. I am still undecided as yet, but I do think what Dawkins had said is not without merit.
I would still advocate mutual respects among the different religions, but that is because of pragmatic sociological reasons rather than any other reasons – people are more touchy when their religious beliefs are being questioned.
Anyway, I do agree with Insider’s view completely. But the key is, are people willing to modify their beliefs or stick to the line drawn by the government? In the US, there are some who do not believe in the middle line. And I am not surprise in SG, there will be those who are the same. So what are we to do with them?
The Christian Post has advocated for a theocracy because secularism is an assault on Christian beliefs. And this frankly scared and outraged me. I have no wish for SG to become another USA. And I do not think dialogues can ever convince these fanatics. And it is only the heavy hand of law that is keeping them at bay now.
PS: I am not paranoid or anti-Christian. But I do feel that it is very dangerous for SG because of these external influences, esp from movies like
EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed
The Voyage That Shook the World
The sheer misinformation in these pseudo-documentaries will only further polarize our society. Spreading the myths that evolution teaches immorality, atheism is the source of social ills, etc…
Pseudo-science institutes like NARTH, FOTF, AiG, CMI, ICR, etc which are easily accessible through internet are further spreading these misinformation – advocating fundamentalism.
Just one last point, no single religion advocate its followers to convert to another. Is it ever possible for any religion to not take offence that its followers have been converted? Perhaps if the follower did it out of his or her own free will, but what if it is through evangelizing? I do not think this can be solved easily.
Because to evangelize is to tell me that my religion is not as good as yours. One can’t evangelize and still respect another religion.
And lastly, teaching creationism (regardless of which type) in a science class is a none-issue. One discusses creation stories in a philosophy or theology class, but not in a science class. Why? Because it is neither science, nor does it has any relevance or contribution to the students’ understanding of science.
To Eterna2,
Firstly what do you mean by respect?
If I disagree with you, do I disrespect you, as a person?
In Singapore I have found that people are particular sensitive about disagreeing. People cannot seem to detach what they think and believe from who they are. And to disagree to what is said or thought is taken as an offense to the person.
I, and anyone and everyone else,can always be wrong, perhaps with the only exception being god, if we can determine who or what god is. We all as fallible human beings stand to be corrected, constantly. But most people, particularly Singaporeans, cannot accept this.
So when we hear something we do not agree, we smile, say something polite and walk away. We dont challenge, we dont confront, we dont express disagreement, we maintain harmony instead. But this is bad. For there are such things as right and wrong. If someone wants to walk the way leading off a cliff, should I not try to tell him so? Or we condescendingly just “respect” his decision, and turn a blind eye?
Maybe its the way we have been schooled. When we were young we thought 1+1=3 and then saw some else much praised when she answered 1+1=2, and we were scolded for not being like her, and we felt ashamed of ourselves. Now that we are adults, we still feel the shame when we are told we are wrong.
Then, perhaps, to overcome this shame, we come up with there is no right and wrong. I say this is wrong. There is right and wrong. But we need to know how to tell right from wrong.
Secondly, there are fundamental values, eg the right for an individual to believe what he wants to believe. Can you deny me this?
Even if you say you can, what I believe is private and entirely and totally unknown to you. I can pretend to conform – when you deter me from expressing my true beliefs – but privately I am someone else entirely.
And this really is the more insidious thing. Superficially, there is religious harmony, the people of different religions “respect” each other, and take pains not to offend, be seen to do the “right” things, to always smile, even if hurting inside, but really you may be creating a suicide bomber, ticking away to explode someday.
On science. Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, says, in effect, that science is just one big constantly changing hypothesis. Particularly he said there are two types of theories, those proven wrong, and those yet to be proven wrong. Science is not the way to truth. Science is always tentative until someone comes up with the exception, eg Einstein and Newton. Then a new science is required. And Creationism can be acceptable as science, if it is postulated as a hypothesis with clear and falsifiable conditions, and not as fact, yet. On the other hand I find Evolution less a science on this requirement for falsibility.
Fundamentally there is such a thing as a limit on knowledge, that we cannot know everything, that there is a fundamnetal ignorance. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says as much at the quantum level. I can also illustrate this simply. Suppose for eveything you know, you have two more questions, then it is clear that the more we know the less we know. But we ask more than two questions, and for every question, we have even more questions. And so when you have known a lot, your ignorance will be infinite.
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Science is not the way to truth.
What do you propose as a way to truth then?
Dawkins:
“Whence, then, comes the oft-parroted canard, “Evolution is only a theory”? Perhaps from a misunderstanding of philosophers who assert that science can never demonstrate truth. All it can do is fail to disprove a hypothesis. Evolution is an unfalsified hypothesis – one that was vulnerable to falsification but has so far survived. Scientists generally don’t mind this kind of philosopher and even thank him for taking care of such matters, thereby freeing them to get on with advancing knowledge. They might, however, venture that what is sauce for the goose of science is sauce for the gander of everyday experience. If evolution is an unfalsified hypothesis, then so is every fact about the real world; so is the very existence of a real world.
This kind of conversation is swiftly and rightly sidelined. Evolution is true in whatever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we conduct our day-to-day conversations? Or fill in a census form: “What is your sex?” “The hypothesis that I am male has not so far been falsified, but let me just check again”. As Douglas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well.”
What is the falsifiable conditions for evolution?
“If evolution is an unfalsified hypothesis, then so is every fact about the real world; so is the very existence of a real world.” Concurred categorically.
Each of us is a mirror by itself. Don’t we seem to know a lot about others inclusive god or gods BUT one’s ownself? Therefore, in our dualistic world which is the truth of relativity, basically it is based on the principle of “action & reaction” & or ” cause & effect”. Perhaps technological science is the only one most closest to us today as well as the economic (bread & butter) because we seem to enjoy the fruits of science whether one is religous or not. Aren’t we taking thing for granted? Religion is a very personal thing & humankind need it/them because we are still mentally weak & there are so many unknowns on earth not to mention the whole universe.
However it is good sign that we can begin to talk, discuss, dialogue & debate as per inter-faith issue stated here! Thnak you Mathia Lee, keep up the good works & smile & cheer always! Take care!
Hi Evolutionist,
What is evolutioniism & creationism mean to you personally? Please do not quote from other sources or references as I am beginning to learn about the concepts of them & hence wish to know a thing or two in most simpler way. Thank you!