I recently received an email regarding the film The Golden Compass. The mail alleged that the film starring Nicole Kidman and based on a series of books by author Peter Pullman is anti-Christianity. (Excerpts of the mail can be found here.)

Whatever Pullman’s stand is, I’ll leave it to one’s own conviction whether to catch the film or not. Either way, I have never been quite comfortable with linking Hollywood and religion, be it against or in support – as in the case of ‘The Passion’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.

Such actions border on fanaticism and it brings conflict between believers and non-believers which only further deepens any existing misunderstanding. In fact, such conflicts are really unhelpful and have already brought many to ask, ‘Is God (or religion) still relevant in the present day where science is attempting to answer every phenomenon in the physical world?’

Indeed, it would appear that the world has more conflicts as a result of religion. Some of the enmity today is a result of wars more than a thousand years ago between two major monotheistic religions – Christianity and Islam.

Thus, we believe that God is outdated and irrelevant. Faith in a God is the superstition of the under-informed and the ignorant. Friedrich Nietzsche goes so far to say ‘God is dead!’. And the post-modern man goes even further to claim, ‘God is but a construct of our intellect. There was never a God.’

Yet, mankind today placed as much faith (if not more) on many other things as we used to place in religion or God in the past. For e.g. we believed that the physics behind the elevator has been worked out properly by engineers and it will take us safely to the level we are going to. We step onto a bridge, and believed the civil engineers have worked out the math to ensure it will support all that weight on it. We go to work on the 60th floor of a sky-scrapper, without fear of its collapse because we believed the architects have worked out the sums correctly and pillars of the right size are supporting the building. It doesn’t matter we don’t actually go find out on ourselves if all of these things we believe in are really done as they should be. We believed what our science textbooks tell us – for e.g. E=mc^2, F=MA, V=IR, 1+1=2 etc. – just like our forebears would have believe in the commandments of God or the tenets of their religion.

Has science and its offspring technology become a substitution for God? Have they make our world better since it is science which allowed us to understand many things?

Technology has definitely provided us much creature comforts. We have automobiles that takes us to our destination quickly and conveniently, planes which whisk us across half the planet in a day, and air conditioners that makes our dwellings comfortable. We already possessed the power to make changes to large tracts of our landscape. But at what cost? At the cost of exploiting our planet’s resources in which we replaced with tonnes of waste a year in the form of trash and carbon dioxide. The cost of maybe the death of million other species, and our planet with it.

Also, because of limited resources, science would have taught us to use our resources in the most cost effective ways possible. Taken to the extreme, that would mean we should euthanise people who are brain dead; and abandon the old and less productive and also those who has disabilities (or even kill them before birth).

But since pagan Rome has Christians been taking in people who are sick and desolate and to give care to them. Is science really more superior than the belief in God?

It is almost funny that many people who doesn’t believe in a God also believe that if we have some ‘oughts’ we need to enforce, we should just make a law to do so – for e.g. banning chewing gum entirely because we ought to keep the MRT free from gum that get the doors stuck. We ought to maintain our parents and not abandon them so we make laws to punish such people and set up family courts where parents can sue their unfilial children. We ought to allow everyone to freely express themselves and to do what they want, so any strong objections against that should be labeled a ‘hate crime’ and be outlawed. We ought to separate the matter of religion and politics and not mix the two.

But on what basis do we apply our laws? Morality? If the basis is morality, then wouldn’t one’s morality simply just be one’s own bigotry or self-righteous views then? Why is there still a need for ‘oughts’ (i.e. socially acceptable norms) if that’s the case? Take for example, if you felt that I should give up my seat to a pregnant lady, who are you to enforce it upon me since I would have felt it is equally right for me to occupy that seat because I have paid the same fare and I am tired? Yet, anyone who hears of such an argument would visibly wince or even protest loudly about the person’s selfishness.

Some would even call morality the attempt to use God to enforce one’s own bigotry. But think further, why are there things that we will all universally feel indignant about? Why are there things that we instinctively would feel is wrong? For e.g. why would a child lie and try to push the blame away when confronted for the missing candy in the candy jar for the first time, even when no one has told him that it is wrong? Why is there this concept of ‘conscience’?

We must also ask, where did some of our more humane ideals such as equality come from? Granted there are bastards that wouldn’t practice what they preach, is it not true that Christianity teaches that we should love all as we loved ourselves? Is it also not true that some of the greatest fighters for equality and freedom are driven by their faith in God? Without God, would the world not have degenerated into a dog-eat-dog world, where the strongest would dictate the terms and the weak would just be exploited? Yet, it will take no one much convincing that it is only right to protect the weak.

Is there really no God, or like me, I just see God everywhere? And no, I am not pitching for anyone to start having some kind of religious beliefs, but this has been eating at me for awhile and I just felt a need to say it.

I read with horror that Seng Han Thong, the MP for Yio Chu Kang SMC and adviser to the six-affiliate Taxi Operators’ Association, has suggested in the latest edition of NTUC This Week an additional surcharge for busy places like clubs, pubs, hotels, shopping malls and Raffles Place.

This is absolute bullshit. Pardon me for being ignorant because all the places in the world I have been to, Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru, Taipei, Hsinchu, Shanghai and Hangzhou, none of these places make the passenger (the customer) reward the the taxi driver (the businessman) so that he will willing go where his business is. On top of that, I have about half a dozen friends, colleagues and ex-colleagues from HK, who also said there’s no such thing there.

In other words (and as far as I am concerned), with the exception of the late night surcharges that’s universal, there’s probably no other place on this planet that comes with the following jumble of surcharges on top of the metered fare like Singapore:

And that’s not including the surcharges for boarding a cab in Changi Airport, Changi Airfreight Center, Seletar Airport and the Singapore Expo.

According to Seng, the root cause of soliciting, refusing to pick up passengers and overcharging lay in the pricing mechanism and errant cabbies resorted to such behaviour because demand for taxis exceeded the supply at certain times and places.

Thus ‘only location surcharges can address the problem of balancing the demand and supply of taxi services at specific places and time, while allowing taxis to charge a more affordable rate at other places such as HDB estates and neighborhood shopping malls.’

* Yawn * What else is new? When will the Tali-PAP be capable of coming up with solutions that doesn’t cost any money? Do we need to pay them another couple of millions a year to make it happen?

This is total utter crap, Seng! Aren’t you aware that someone once pointed out that with a total of 45,000 taxis, the taxi per capita in Singapore is way higher than that of Hong Kong? While that may not mean that the supply has exceeded the demand, it would however mean that the supply is not well utilized if passengers continually complain about how difficult it is to get a cab when some cabbies can afford to idle and park their cabs at certain places to tout and refuse to pick up passengers even when approached. Coupled with the fact that some cabbies lamented that they can circle around HDBs estates for more than half an hour without passengers while passengers in the town area languish for almost the same amount of time without a cab, why there can still exists a situation in which ‘demand for taxis exceeded the supply at certain times and places’, needs to be explained! Is it so hard for these cabbies to make their way to town? The argument that the surcharges are paid to alleviate their fuel burden is nonsense because wouldn’t they have wasted as much fuel looking for the almost non-existent customer in the HDB estates?

Like my friend Brian used to say… LAN CHEOW!! And I agree with him because I wonder why should we pay them for their unwillingness to use that fuel to come to town when they should?!

As the fact stands now, in all those others cities named above, none of them have cabbies which showed a lack of hunger for passengers. In fact, never was there an instance where I or my friends would need to call for a cab or wait more than 10 minutes for a cab there. In that case, I ask again, why do we continue to reward cabbies who can actually afford to be picky if life is really so hard for them? In fact, do we have statistics on how many cabbies have dropped out of the trade because they can no longer make a living from it?

But of course, our PAP MPs in their ivory towers would have simply told us that if we are unhappy [bway song] with the taxi service, we can always take the other mode of our so-called World Worst Class public transport like the MRT or the bus and stop whining. To prove their point, the Stooge Times will run articles featuring foreign talents quitters comparing how ‘good’ our transportation system is with that of the country they just quitted from. And the rubber stamp lapdog PTC (Public Transport Council) will always approve what the public transport companies asked for, by citing that they have meet the performance matrix and service standards, which only God Himself would know who wrote them. (Certainly not written by us commuters, right?)

Please, it is time to take a radical approach to deal with the taxi problem. It is time to remove ALL these freaking surcharges once and for all. Perhaps it is time to make our metered fare more on par with international standards so there will be no way for recalcitrant cabbies to try and take advantage from the flaws inherent in the system.

The following is a comparison of daytime cab fares with several other cities at a glance.

So, are our fares really so fxxking cheap that our cabbies are finding it hard to make a living even with all the current surcharges in place, or are they just so kriffing pampered that it’s high time we do away with those blasted surcharges to make them more hungry for passengers? I’ll leave you to decide if our fares are really competitive compared with these cities according to their nation’s respective per capita income, once you factored in all the stupid surcharges we have, of course.