Lee Kuan Yew's religion and the hope of faith.

 

Some years back, I wrote about LKY and his view on religion. I posed a quiz: What do LKY, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin have in common? The answer? They do not consider themselves an atheist. 

LKY wrote this in his book, ”One Man's View of the World”: "I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I neither deny nor accept that there is a God." 

LKY is however a nominal Buddhist. Here is what nominal meant to him: “I would go through the motions and the rituals like offering to his ancestors food and so on. It is like clearing the graves during Qing Ming. With each passing generation, fewer people go. It is a ritual."

Bottomline? LKY is not a believer in a traditional sense. In other words, he does not believe in a supernatural being, a personal God, who is said to be the creator of the vast universe, and yet bothers to micromanage every detailed aspect of our life like a fastidious auditor would look for that point-decimal discrepancy in the balance sheet. 

So, it is tempting to ask this, "Where does LKY draw his comfort from, if not from religion?" 

Here is LKY's reply: "It is the end of my aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly." 

I therefore believe that to the grand old sage of politics, religion is just one of the many ways people deal with their unavoidable death or expiry. The Christians subscribe to a heaven of eternal bliss. The Hindus believe in reincarnation. And the atheist, like Christopher Hitchens, would rather just accept it as an eternal shuteye or blackout.

I guess heaven is a place everybody dreams about at some point in their life, even amongst the fiercest critics. And even for the ruthlessly pragmatic LKY, he had such wistful longing when he said: "I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist - otherwise the other world would be overpopulated."

Incidentally, ever the flawless logician, he was once asked about the afterlife and he said: “No, it goes against logic. Supposing we all have a life after death, where is that place?" 

"I neither deny nor accept that there is a God...I don't know. So I do not laugh at people who believe in God. But I do not necessarily believe in God - nor deny that there could be one,” LKY said. 

Lesson? One.

Mm...I guess when it comes to religion, whether you believe it or not, doesn’t make it any less true. Objective truth does not change goalposts just because you can’t bring yourself to believe in it. 

However, I believe that the inherent paradox of what is objective and subjective is that the answer lies very much in this question: “On which side of the coin does truth lie?” In other words, does objective truth lie with the believer or the naysayer? 

Well, in reality, that would depend on what you use to measure what you believe, right? 

You see, if you “worship” gravity, the object of your worship would have been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the moment the fabled apple fell on the young Issac Newton’s head sometime in the early eighteenth century. Science would therefore be your empirical instrument of faith, so to speak. 

But religious belief is a whole new ballgame altogether. It tends to defy the laws of nature (hint, hint, it’s supernatural). As such, it requires that which is natural to reach out in a way that is beyond that which is natural. 

For want of an apt analogy, it reminds me of a bungling sleuth studiously picking up the breadcrumbs left behind by someone whose identity the sleuth is still figuring out and whose journey covered is far ahead of him. 

To me, I strongly identify with that bungling sleuth, who is sincere in his quest, but never fully able to catch up with the breadcrumb feeder. He thus knows there is more to what he sees, but how much more and how much longer to the end of that breadcrumb-picking journey will always elude him. 

It is something akin to what CS Lewis said: “To speak of meaning of life is an act of rebellion against a glib and shallow rationalism that limits reality to the realm of empirical facts.”

Alas, enticing words from an atheist’s tongue ought not to prematurely end one’s quest for what is planted out there for the sojourner of meaning to unravel, which is often beyond what this world has to offer. As such, the struggle to find meaning cannot just be a reducible exercise of the critical mind, no matter how brilliant that mind is. For some quest, faith is the inductive courage to take the leap into the realm of the unknowable. 

Let me end with this observation by philosopher John Dewey: “the deepest problem of modern life was our collective and individual failure to integrate our thoughts about the world with our thoughts about value and purpose.” 

And many have been trying in vain to fill that gap John Dewey is talking about. They came up boldly and proclaimed to have all the answers, cocksure about it even, but little do they know that objective truth simply defies human arrogance to domesticate it for self-profit. 

For, I believe, only the open-minded heart that keeps searching in humility is the beholder of true faith, and its objective truth. It is thus a journey of a lifetime, and not a destination that often ends in the same way that the Dead Sea had ended for itself.