Lawrence Khong's Flawed Understanding

There has recently been a flurry over the real meaning of "atheism" and what makes a person an atheist.  It all began from a Supper Club interview during which Lawrence Khong, a pastor in a local independent church, after making his firm anti-homosexuality stand clear said this:

An atheist is very religious. He has a belief system. He believes there is no God.

Paul Tobin, the founding president of the Humanist Society (Singapore) explained in his letter to the Straits Times that:

Atheism is not a belief system; it merely describes the absence of belief in god(s).

That sparked off a debate on what "atheism" really means.  That is so reminiscent of what I myself have experienced about what it means to be a "Christian".   One writer to the Straits Times who is presumably a theist and most probably a Christian had the cheek to go on his moral high horse and wrote "atheists themselves cannot agree on a single definition of atheism."  But we Christians can't agree on what a "Christian" means.  The schisms we see that fragment the church into a few thousand denominations (I'm being conservative in my estimate) are evidence of our inability to decide for ourselves what "Christianity" means.  To this day, after 2000 years, we are nowhere near coming to a consensus on the simple definition of what makes a person a "Christian".

I say this is reminiscent of what I have experienced because although I'm a devout Christian and I have served the church since my early childhood and will continue to serve the church all my life (which means I'm not just your average pew warmer), I have been accused by fundamentalists of being a non-Christian and many of them don't even serve the church in any capacity.  But let's turn our attention back to atheism.

Most theists who have this need to insist that atheism is a belief system will quote dictionaries that give a definition that suits their purpose.  I will explain later why we theists have this agenda to turn atheism into a belief system.   From what I've seen online most theists will slyly use the Macmillan dictionary which defines an "atheist" as:

the belief or theory that God does not exist.

Any grammarian will tell you that when you need the correct definition of an English word, you don't look up Macmillan Dictionary or any other dictionaries, some of which will of course have outrageous definitions.  You turn to the definitive Oxford English Dictionary which defines an atheist as:

A person who denies or disbelieves the existence of God or gods.

That appears like a good enough definition and it's two-pronged.  First, a person who denies the existence of God or gods is an atheist.  This is a reference of course to those who are certain 100% in their minds that God or gods don't exist.  They are the extreme atheists, if you like.

The second group consists of those who disbelieve the existence of God or gods.  "Disbelieve" is different from "deny" in that to disbelieve something is not to have a belief in something.  The same Oxford English Dictionary defines "disbelieve" as "have no belief or faith in".  Notice that the sentence is to be read disjunctively.  A person who denies the existence of God is an atheist and similarly, a person who disbelieves (ie has no belief in) the existence of God is an atheist.

Paul Tobin is of course correct in his definition.  An atheist can believe or disbelieve a variety of things but the lowest common denominator of what makes a person an atheist as Paul has correctly pointed out is an absence of belief in God.  Of course that does not stop an atheist from insisting that God absolutely cannot exist.  Such a person is as much an atheist as a person who merely has no belief in God or gods even if he will not stake his all that God absolutely doesn't exist.

I hope that much is clear.

But why the hoo-ha over such an inconsequential thing as semantics?  Why should the definition of an English word be so important to a pastor and to so many of my fellow Christians?  We Christians don't care a jot for the dictionary definition of a "Christian" but each denomination comes up with its own definitive articles of faith of what makes a "true" Christian.  If we don't care for dictionary definitions, why are we so insistent that an atheist must believe or disbelieve in what the dictionary says is the definition of an atheist?  There is a sinister reason which I will come to later.

Supposing I'm willing to concede that an atheist is one who believes wholeheartedly and is 100% clear in his mind that there is no God.  So what?  If you go by that definition, Richard Dawkins wouldn't be an atheist.  He has himself said that on a scale of 1 to 10 of non-belief in a supernatural divine being, he would be about 8.  So if we Christians want to have proprietary interest over the word "atheist", another word should be coined to denote those who have no belief in God as opposed to those who are absolutely sure that God does not exist.  Let's call them "brights", a word I believe some atheists (such as Richard Dawkins) wanted to apply to themselves at one time.  So a bright is a person who has no belief in God and an atheist is a person who insists 100% that God does not exist.  So what?  I hope my fellow believers can see what a red herring the definition of "atheist" is. If we insist on a strict definition of "atheist" that excludes even Dawkins, what have we achieved? Nothing but obscurantism and confusion which we Christians are famous for.

All this argument over semantics tells me something is not quite right with my fellow believers. If we are honest with ourselves, we have a hidden agenda that we don't want to reveal to the world. It's the same agenda that that flawed debater William Lane Craig has.  I initially wrote "dishonest debater" but I hesitate to call him that because I think he may very well believe in his own errors which would make him more a fool than a liar.  I have elsewhere written about Craig and if you are interested you may click below:

          Why the Defence of God Infuriates Me  and
          White Lies and Holy Lies

As Paul correctly says in his letter, atheism is not a belief any more than not skiing is a sport.  I've heard a worse analogy - calling atheism a religion is like calling abstention a sex position.  But quite apart from semantics, to declare an absence of belief to be a belief is absolute ludicrous and I'll explain why.

Christians don't believe in the existence of a divine Krishna.  If a non-belief in Krishna is a belief, a Christian would have two beliefs: his Christian belief and the belief that there is no Krishna.  If you think of all the religions that we have today and in the past, each deity of which the Christian has no belief in, that would make him a believer in a few thousand beliefs.  On top of that he has no belief (or so I hope) in fairies, pixies, leprechauns, the pink unicorn, the purple unicorn, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Celestial Teacup, Santa Claus, the flying reindeer, etc.  If each non-belief is a belief, that would make any one of us a believer in an infinite number of beliefs.

For there to be a meaningful dialogue or debate, we must not clutter the issues with nonsense.  To claim that non-belief is a belief is one such nonsense designed to confuse everyone.

Most atheists I have met and spoken to including Richard Dawkins (whom I've met at a writers' conference in Wales) do not say that they have a belief that God does not exist just as they don't say that they have a belief that fairies don't exist.  Most atheists will agree with this formula about God's existence: the likelihood for God to exist is no greater than the likelihood for fairies and pixies to exist.  That is all.

Why then do some people, principally my fellow believers try so hard to turn atheism into a belief system? I did not know the answer to this question until I saw on youtube a debate in which William Lane Craig participated and everything became clear to me.

Any theist who has engaged in a debate with atheists will know that we theists are stumped from the very commencement of the debate.  We believe in God but we are unable to adduce the smallest shred of evidence for God's existence.  The Loch Ness monster or the abominable snowman has more claim to existence than Almighty God if we look purely at the evidence.  This glaring absence of evidence is something a theist cannot just ignore unless he wants to be laughed and jeered out of the debate forum.

What Craig has striven to do in many of the debates I have seen is to shift the burden of proof onto the atheist.  In other words, fine, I can't adduce any evidence for God's existence but can you adduce evidence to show that God does not exist?  If you can't, my inability to show evidence for God's existence should not be held against me because similarly, you can't show evidence that God does not exist.

But philosophers and thinkers have long known that this is a stupid argument.  You can't prove a negative.  Bertrand Russell came up with his Celestial teapot to establish the philosophic burden of proof.  If someone tells you that there is a teapot that orbits the sun, surely the burden of proof must be on him to show that that is a fact.  To expect someone to show proof that there is no teapot orbiting the sun is unfair, ridiculous and downright wrong.

Basic intelligence tells us this must be so.  If I say I speak to an invisible rabbit, it's for me to show the invisible rabbit exists.  To expect my opponents to prove that my invisible rabbit does not exist is just dumb.

Because we are faced with an impossible obstacle even at the start of any debate with an atheist in that we can't show any evidence for God, we do what I have always decried as dishonest and unjust but which many theists have no qualms resorting to - deception.  We begin by forcing atheists to admit that they BELIEVE God does not exist.  So, atheism is a belief system and a religion.  So if they believe in the non-existence of God, they should prove it.

But we theists must know that what the atheist asks of us is precisely what we ourselves would exact from a madman who tells us that fairies exist.  We will surely reply that fairies don't exist in reality. We will then ask the madman to show evidence for the fairy's existence.  If the madman asks us in response to show evidence that fairies don't exist, we will dismiss his request as unfair and crackpot.  It's the same here between the atheist and us.  Are we theists so obtuse that we can't even see this?

Naturally, people of other religions won't bring this up because they too haven't any evidence for their gods.  Atheists are the only ones who will point this out to us.

The next time you hear someone insisting that atheism is a religion or a belief system, you must remember the theist's deceptive agenda.  There is a reason why we want atheism to be looked upon as a religion.  It's to hide the obvious shortcomings of theism - the very central subject of theism God himself is not backed by the flimsiest evidence.

IMH and Acupuncture.

I read with dismay and shock that the Institute of Mental Health is now introducing acupuncture in its hospital. This is what asiaone.com reports:  "The Institute of Mental Health (IMH) has become the first health-care provider here to start using acupuncture to help addicts break their drug, drink or gambling habits."  For more, please read this.

This is a first that no reputable hospital should be proud of.  Medical doctors, if they are to be true to their honourable calling, must always practise only evidence-based medicine.  Anything more than that would not be in line with the clear mandate doctors have to heal their patients.  When I see a doctor, I would be shortchanged if he performs faith-healing on me.  Even if he does not force it down my throat but politely offers faith healing as one of the "methods" of treatment to me when I go to his clinic or hospital, that would be, in my opinion, an outrageous abuse of his position as a legally recognised medical practitioner.

It is not too much for a patient to expect a registered medical practitioner to offer only evidence-based treatment recognised by his peers and validated in proper peer-reviewed journals.  Before IMH embarks on any treatment programme, it is duty bound to satisfy itself and the public that whatever programme it offers is backed by evidence and properly controlled studies and is duly referenced in peer-reviewed journals.

Let us see what evidence IMH has in starting this new acupuncture programme.  How effective is acupuncture?  I have personally gone through a huge amount of data on this question and from what I can gather, there has been not a single study that shows that acupuncture is efficacious.  No, not one.  Any study that seems to suggest even remotely that it has some efficacy is alway immediately shot down by experts in the area who point out that the study is flawed or there is no real control provided.  Almost all studies show there is absolutely zero effect in the use of acupuncture.  Of the rare studies that suggest its mild efficacy, reviews of these studies always indicate some severe flaws in the studies and any perceived efficacy is due wholly and indisputably to placebo effect. In many of the studies that proponents of acupuncture will draw your attention to excitedly, the sample size is too small for any significant conclusion in favour of acupuncture to be made.  It is also significant that the "success" of acupuncture is always in ailments that cannot be properly confirmed such as pain and the placebo effect is usually shown to be at play here.  That it is merely placebo effect is frequently confirmed when a control group is subjected to a needle prick too but they are pricked at the "wrong" point of the body and yet this control group claims to have benefitted from the procedure.

As far as science goes, it is correct to say that acupuncture has no advantage whatsoever apart from being a placebo.  That is a scientific statement of fact and I defy IMH to dispute it with evidence.

Given that acupuncture has zero advantage to the patient, can IMH argue that as long as there is no harm, it's all right to administer the procedure?  Of course not.  A hospital is not a church.  You can show statistics as I have shown in the past (click here) that prayers don't work but churches will continue to pray.  But a hospital is different.  It's obliged to do only that which can be of medical benefit to the patients.  But it's not only that.  Prayers are harmless even if they don't work but the same can't be said of acupuncture.  There are serious risk factors.

The latest study of adverse events related to acupuncture concludes that "although serious AEs associated with acupuncture are rare, acupuncture practice is not risk-free." (See Xu, Shifen, et al. (2013). "Adverse Events of Acupuncture: A Systematic Review of Case Reports"Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2013 Infection was the most common adverse event.  You may click here to read the entire paper.  Bear in mind that the paper is not addressing the question of whether acupuncture works.  The fact that acupuncture does not work is well documented in countless other papers and studies.  This paper only deals with the adverse effect of acupuncture, not its non-existent benefits.

There are many articles that you can find from respectable journals that attest to the fact that acupuncture does not work.  In fact there are at least a few hundred times more articles about the inefficacy of acupuncture than there are of the inefficacy of prayer and so technically, if IMH were to introduce prayer into its list of treatments, it would not be so outrageously wrong as if it were to introduce acupuncture.  If you are interested in reading a sample of the many articles against acupuncture as a treatment for anything at all, please click on this link.  I think I have made my point clear. Acupuncture is inefficacious and not beneficial to the patient except as a placebo. But that's not all. It also exposes the patient to unnecessary risks of adverse effects.

This is what the news report says:  "The Straits Times understands that no major scientific studies have been published on using acupuncture for behavioural addictions but the ancient method has developed in recent years outside of China as part of a combined approach to curb such disorders."  The reader is left wondering why then does IMH introduce acupuncture when no study has been done to show its efficacy on behavioural addictions and there are known adverse events?

If you read on further in the newspaper, we are told this which I quote from asiaone.com:

Acupuncture can enhance the standard mode of treatment, said Associate Professor Wong Kim Eng, clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service, which runs the new acupuncture clinic.
It can help to relieve withdrawal symptoms, pain and cravings, as well as anxiety, he added, noting: "So far, there is no single medication that can cure addiction, or a perfect treatment programme. As an Asian society, we sought to borrow some age-old wisdom to improve treatment for our patients."

Is it right for the clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service to say that acupuncture "can help to relieve withdrawal symptoms, pain and cravings, as well as anxiety"?  What I would like to know is on what basis is he making such a claim?  If a patient were to undergo such a treatment and subsequently takes legal action against IMH for subjecting him to a treatment that is not backed by evidence and proper medical opinion, what defence can IMH rely upon to show that it has acted in the best possible manner as a registered medical hospital that delivers health care services using evidence-based treatments?

The clinical director of IMH's National Addictions Management Service continues to say in that newspaper article that we are an Asian society and so they "sought to borrow some age-old wisdom".  Should we engage tangkees to perform religious rites on the patients? After all, we are an Asian society and if we are at liberty to dish out treatment even when there is no study or evidence for it, what is so wrong with having something that is perfectly consistent with our culture as an Asian society?

What I'm concerned about is the newspaper further reports that this initiative "is backed by the Ministry of Health".  Is it right for the Ministry of Health to back a treatment that is totally unsupported by evidence or any form of study?  Let's not forget that acupuncture has been shown not to have any desirable effect (except as a placebo) on a whole host of ailments that it is traditionally reputed to treat. If acupuncture has been shown not to work in ailments that it is traditionally supposed to treat, what makes IMH think that it will work in something totally new and untested, such as behavioural addiction?

Singapore is a well-known medical hub for responsible and efficient health care services. People in the surrounding countries would fly to Singapore to seek treatment and they do that because they know they can trust the doctors in Singapore to practise responsible evidence-based medicine and they know we have great expertise in the various fields of medicine.  But reputation can be lost very easily and going into treatments that are not backed by evidence is the surest way to ruin our good name.  Acupuncture may be a part of our culture but so are the offering of prayers to the Goddess of Mercy and the rituals of tangkees or temple mediums.  They may be a part of our rich cultural heritage but I sure would not want to see them practised in our hospitals.

Anonymous and its Ignominious Defeat

Anonymous threatened to attack Singapore Government websites on 5 November 2013 but the date came and went and nothing happened.  Since their days of notoriety when they first attacked the Church of Scientology that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of some of their members, Anonymous have had other victories notably, their involvement in Tunisia and Egypt and one could say without exaggeration that they did play a part in the overthrow of the Egyptian government.

It became clear to me by the evening of 4 November that nothing would happen the next day.  Apart from a few government website failures in the days before 5 November which the government insisted were closed for extended maintenance, virtually nothing happened on the 5th which Anonymous promised would be cataclysmic.

What exactly is Anonymous?   They consist of a group of young people who have strong views about justice and fair play and who use their computer and hacking skills against institutions which have acted unconscionably or, as is usually the case, in a supercilious manner.  Yes, these young people are particularly allergic to arrogance and when Tom Cruise, a one-time advocate for the Church of Scientology declared with a smirk on his face that when he witnessed a road accident, he would have to do something because he knew he was the only one there who could do anything, that really riled up a lot of people in the internet community.  The Church of Scientology believes only they can cure and heal people by using what they call "Dianetics", a superstitious mumbo-jumbo which saner folks know is nothing more than a religious claptrap.

Anonymous is not an organised group.  Their members communicate online and they have been likened to a large flock of birds which has no leader but occasionally when one bird goes in a different direction, more will follow and eventually the whole flock switches its direction to follow that bird.

On 4 November, I looked up all of Anonymous' announcements and Singapore was not mentioned at all.  Philippines and Syria were featured a great deal but not a word about Singapore.  I had concerned friends who asked me if their kids should take the public transport because a computer failure might cause trains to crash, especially trains that are not operated by a human driver.  I told them nothing would happen and all this fear was unnecessary and silly and they would be laughing at themselves on 6 November.  It is fear that will bring a country down even if nothing is going to take place.  In any event, from what I know of the Anonymous, they are a responsible group that cares a lot about what is right and just and going round harming people is something they seek to prevent and not something they themselves do.

What actually happened behind the scenes?

This is my guess and I must stress it's pure speculation that comes about from my personal observation of what has taken place in Singapore.

There is a disgruntled resident in Singapore, most likely a Singaporean who goes by the moniker MESSIAH.  He probably has some personal grudge against Kong Hee, the self-appointed pastor who lives in the lap of luxury and whose wife was at one time a neighbour of the rich and famous in Hollywood and who is now himself charged with criminal breach of trust.

One of the first things MESSIAH did was to hack into the private website of Kong Hee's wife, Sun Ho.  Thereafter, the local newspaper website was attacked.  I don't know the details of that attack but it was likely a DDoS attack.  Then came a video purportedly from Anonymous warning the Singapore government of a plan to cripple the nation's internet system which put the government on full alert.

Singaporeans were urged by Anonymous to show solidarity by blacking out their Facebook profile and to wear red and black on 5 November.  Here is where the fault line in the hackers' plan can be seen.  They need cooperation from the people and they ain't getting any from Singaporeans.

In the months leading to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt was a very different place from Singapore.  If the standard of living or a nation and the contentment of its citizens can be placed on a scale, Egypt and Singapore would be occupying close to different ends of the spectrum.  Yes, Singaporeans love to complain and slam the government but I sense they sometimes do it in a rather affectionate way, a little like a wife scolding her beloved husband among friends.  I've seen that ever since my early childhood.

No Singaporean I know want to see a disruption in our internet services.  Everyone is proud of Singapore's legendary efficiency and nobody wants to throw a spanner in the works.  The fact that nothing happened on 5 November despite Anonymous' boastful claims is a triumph for the people of Singapore.  None of us wants to destroy our homes just because of one disgruntled Singaporean who is working in cahoots with a bunch of foreign youngsters.  We are all very happy here.  Anonymous can go to Sudan and Egypt where there is a lot of work to be done but there's nothing for them here.  MESSIAH was furious when the local papers reported that Anonymous wanted to attack Singapore.  He insisted that Anonymous was going after the Singapore government and not the people of Singapore.  No, Singapore is not Hosni Mubarak's Egypt where the government are different from the people.  If you attack Singapore or its government, you attack the people of Singapore and you must be out of your mind if you think any one of us will cooperate with you.

What we saw on 5 November when we looked up in the sky was this large flock of birds heading in one direction.  Suddenly, one tiny bird (that's the MESSIAH) changed its direction and strayed away from the flock in the hope that others would follow it.  The rest went on their merry way, ignoring the lone bird which quickly turned round to join the flock. The title of this article is misleading.  It's not Anonymous that was defeated but Messiah with his own little petty agenda, not shared by the rest who see more pressing needs in other countries.

The Government now has one job to do.  Find out who the MESSIAH is and deal with him severely as a traitor against the nation and people of Singapore because that's precisely what he is.

Why our New Testament Professor is wrong

When I saw in the church bulletin one Sunday that Dr Tan Kim Huat, Professor of New Testament and Academic Dean of Trinity Theological College was giving a talk on the Second Coming of Christ, I was interested but I was not able to attend the talk.  Recently, I was very pleased to see in the church's bimonthly magazine a writeup of what Dr Tan said at the talk.  I am assuming that the writeup by someone who attended the talk in my church magazine is a fair and accurate account of what was presented by Dr Tan at the talk.

A large part of the talk dealt with the Olivet Discourse, a discussion Jesus had with the disciples on the Mount of Olives that was recorded in Mark 13, Mt 24 and Lk 21.

Dr Tan seems to base the Olivet Discourse on Mark 13 and so it is to that Gospel that I shall primarily turn my attention to.  If you would like to read for yourself what Mark 13 says, click on this link.

What Dr Tan attempts to do is to split up what Jesus says into two parts: 

1.  the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem which recorded history tells us occurred in AD 70; and

2.  the Second Coming of our Lord which obviously hasn't taken place in the last 2,000 years.  

My argument is that in the minds of Jesus, his listeners, the Gospel writers and his disciples, the two events are so closely linked in time that one is believed to closely follow the other, ie, our Lord's Second Coming follows immediately the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.  I will show that a reading of all three texts in the Synoptic Gospels on this passage will lead any reasonable reader to conclude that that is the position.

I will now examine Dr Tan's arguments and explain why they are totally flawed.

Before I begin, I should mention that the Olivet Discourse is not surprisingly left out in the Gospel of John.  There is no mention of it there at all.  John's Gospel, most scholars agree, was written no earlier than the late AD 90s.  It is the last of our canonical Gospels and many of the verses that appear in the Synoptic Gospels that tell us that the Second Coming of our Lord is imminent are absent in that Gospel.  Some scholars believe that the Gospel was written after the death of all the Apostles including John, the last surviving Apostle.  The originals of these Gospels were anonymous and we ascribe the names of these Evangelists to the Gospels by church tradition. Naturally,  after seeing that our Lord had still not returned after the passing of all his Apostles, the writer of John would be careful not to include texts which spoke of the imminence of Christ's Second Coming.  If you are interested in reading more of this, you may want to read what I wrote some time ago when I discussed a moving passage in the Bible in The Passage that Makes Me Cry.

Instead of sticking to Mark's Gospel, Dr Tan curiously began by referring to the corresponding verse in Matthew's Gospel, ie Mt 24:3-4 which reads 

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” 

Why does Dr Tan suddenly jump to Matthew's Gospel?  The answer is obvious.  He wants to divide the Olivet Discourse into two main portions: one pertains only to the destruction of the Temple and the other to Jesus' Second Coming.  That verse in Matthew is the only one that will afford him such an opportunity.  The corresponding verses in Mark and Luke are different and they tell us that the writers do not view the destruction of the Temple and Christ's Second Coming as two events separated by a huge time scale of, as we know it, more than 2000 years.  Let's read the corresponding verses in Mark and in Luke:

Mark tells it this way in Mk 13:3-4 -

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?” 

Luke is no different.  He says this in Lk 21:7 -

“Teacher,” they asked, “when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are about to take place?”

Notice that Dr Tan avoided using those verses in both Mark and Luke, because he can't argue that the disciples were asking two very different questions.  If we are to use Scripture to interpret Scripture as any evangelical pastor will tell you to do, I would have to say that bearing in mind what has been said in Mark and in Luke, that passage in Matthew is best explained this way - the disciples obviously take the Second Coming and the destruction of the Temple to occur around the same time.  They are asking for a sign that will herald these events ie the Temple destruction and the Second Coming.  Any notion that these two events will be separated by a time scale that exceeds 2000 years is preposterous.

Now let's see how our Lord replies and let's see what Jesus thinks of the time scale between the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 and his own Second Coming.

Having divided the Olivet Discourse into two events which are separated by a period that exceeds 2000 years, Dr Tan then proceeds to divide Mark 13:5-37 into four parts.  Why four parts?  This is how Dr Tan divides the passage. Verses 5 to 23 relate to the destruction of the Temple which took place in AD 70.  Verses 24 to 27 relate to Christ's Second Coming which still hasn't taken place this year ie in 2013.  Verses 28 to 31 go back to the destruction of the Temple and verses 32 to 37 jump to the Second Coming of Christ. Is this not a rather messy way of telling a simple story and is our Lord incapable of telling something truthfully and clearly without flitting from one time frame to another?  I submit that this is the typical apologist's ludicrous answer to the obvious fact that Jesus and everyone else in the 1st century AD took the view that the destruction of the Temple and the Second Coming of Christ were events that took place one after the other.  And I don't mean after a space of more than 2000 years.  Rather, one followed the other IMMEDIATELY.  I didn't pluck that word from the air.  I borrowed that same word "immediately" from one of the Gospels which I will come to in a while.

But first, let's use the same Gospel that the good professor used in his talk.  The Gospel of Mark. Yes, I know.  He used the Gospel of Matthew when he wanted to zoom in on the question the disciples asked but that was for a purpose that I have already shown above. Thereafter, he used the Gospel of Mark so I shall keep to the same Gospel before moving on to the other Gospels later.

According to Dr Tan, verse 24 suddenly breaks away from the story about the destruction of the Temple and launches into Christ's Second Coming and that story continues until verse 27 before Christ suddenly goes back to the Temple destruction in verse 28.  So let's see what verses 24 to 27 say:

“But in those days, following that distress,“‘the sun will be darkened,    and the moon will not give its light;the stars will fall from the sky,    and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’“At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.

Let's look at verse 24 again more closely:  "But in those days, following that distress". "Those days" must refer to what was referred to by Jesus before verse 24.  Also, "that distress" must refer to something referred to earlier.  You can't just pluck a portion of a passage out of its context and decide by fiat that it refers to a period more than 2000 years after the period the passage is referring to. 

"That distress" in verse 24 must refer to something.  A plain reading of Mark 13 will show any reader what it refers to.  It refers to verse 19 which, according to Dr Tan, talks about the destruction of the Temple.  Let's look at verse 19 from verse 18 onwards:

Pray that this will not take place in winter, because those will be days of distress unequalled from the beginning...

Nowhere else do we see any mention of "distress".  Hence, the event in verse 24 which is about the Second Coming (according to Dr Tan) will take place "following that distress" and this is the distress mentioned in verse 19 which is the destruction of the Temple.  In other words, the darkening of the sun and moon and the falling of stars which are a sign of the Second Coming will take place following the destruction of the Temple.  Now comes the question - how long following?  In other words, how long after the destruction of the Temple should the Second Coming be?

Now, here is where I think Dr Tan's argument falls flat.  After our Lord talks in great detail about the darkening of the sun and moon and the falling of stars and his Second Coming, he continues to say in verse 29 onwards:

Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

When our Lord says in verse 29 "When you see these things happening", "these things" must of course be the things he has just said ie the darkening of the sun and the moon and the falling of stars which herald his Second Coming.  To now say that these verses from verse 29 onwards refer to the destruction of the Temple is artificial and it does violence to the integrity of the passage.

But do you know why some scholars including Dr Tan insist that these verses don't refer to the Second Coming of our Lord?  The obvious reason is Jesus says in verse 30,"Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened." These scholars are putting the cart before the horse.  They know that if you read the passage as it is printed without incorporating the changes they want to add to the biblical text, you will reach the inescapable conclusion that Jesus is promising that his Second Coming will take place shortly after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.  That would be opening the Preteristic can of worms because we know Jesus didn't return in the first century AD and we affirm in the Creed and the Liturgy that he will come again.

Of course some scholars have other tricks up their sleeves.  Some of them will argue that "generation" does not mean "generation" but it means an age which can be, yes, 2000 years long.  But Dr Tan didn't make that argument so I won't counter it here.

Dr Tan based most of his talk on Mark 13 I believe because the other two Gospels make it more difficult to artificially divide the corresponding passages into his "neat" 4 parts in Mark 13.  If you would like to read for yourself here are Matthew 24 and Luke 21.  Read for yourselves and you will see that the Second Coming is to follow the destruction of the Temple immediately.

In Matthew 24:21, mention is made of the "great distress" which was also referred to in Mark 13 and which Dr Tan pigeonholed as a reference to the destruction of the Temple. And in Matthew 24:29, we read this:

“Immediately after the distress of those days“‘the sun will be darkened,    and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky,    and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’“Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. 

There we have it.  The word of God in St Matthew's Gospel tells us in no uncertain terms that IMMEDIATELY after the distress caused by the destruction of the Temple, the Second Coming of our Lord will take place.

Putting the whole thing in its historical context, Matthew's Gospel tells us that IMMEDIATELY after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, Jesus' Second Coming will take place.

This is in line with what I wrote a long time ago concerning our Lord's Second Coming.  If you would like to read that, please click here.

Singapore School Anthems Part 2

We have awarded the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM AWARD (click here)  and have scoured many school websites in search of the RUNNER UP to the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM.  Many school anthems are rather nondescript; they aren't very good and neither are they so terribly rotten that they are worthy of a mention here.  These school anthems aren't featured in my blog.  I've got to have a limit on the number of school songs to write about in this blog and only the top two and bottom two school anthems will be presented in great detail.

But this does not mean that I have not looked at many other school anthems. Just to show you that I have been doing my homework, I'll give an example of a school anthem that is typical of many school anthems which are rather middling and they are not very good or very bad.  The example I'll pick is that of Marymount Convent School, a girls' school.

The song consists of a few short simple lines that one would expect because of their simplicity to be at least flawless in grammar and usage but alas, that is not the case.  Desiring always to be just in my judgment and mindful of the possibility that the school could have misprinted the lyrics, I googled the school song and was led to an excellent performance of it by a lady with a beautiful voice called Geraldine Png.  Here is the screen capture of the youtube performance of the anthem of Marymount Convent and the same erroneous sentence can be seen here:

Nobody who has an elementary knowledge of the English language can possibly defend that sentence as grammatical and I'll be insulting your intelligence if I take up space on this blog to explain why it's wrong.

[EDITOR: Very shortly after I posted this article, I received three separate calls from my friends who told me that they could not see anything wrong with this sentence and one of them hastened to inform me that he was not in any way unintelligent.  Of course not.  I didn't mean it that way. 

Here I will explain to all my intelligent readers why the line is wrong.

Ever to thee we will abide 

The word "abide" used here has the archaic meaning of "live" or "dwell".  When used in this sense, the correct preposition is "in" and not "to".  

The anthem writer, if I may add a little facetiously, bearing in mind always that she might very well be a nun, should have taken more care in her Bible reading since this word with its archaic meaning is liberally sprinkled all over the first 10 verses of St John's Gospel in the 15th chapter.  In fact, in those ten verses, we see "abide" repeated some ten times or so.  "Abide in me and I in you", "He that abideth in me and I in him...", "If ye abide in me and my words abide in you...", "ye shall abide in my love" and many others. 

To use the preposition "to" instead of "in" with the word "abide" is very unusual. If I may go into the psychology behind the error, my guess is the anthem writer was thinking more of TURNING to the school.  She very likely had in her mind "Ever to thee we will turn" which would have been correct.]

This is typical of many school anthems which consist of short unassuming lines and they would have been reasonably passable if not for some glaring grammatical mistakes.  Why these schools did not bother to run through the lyrics of the song with a competent English language teacher is something I can't understand.

But these songs aren't outrageously rotten and they don't come anywhere near winning the RUNNER UP award for the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM.

What then am I looking for in a school anthem that is worthy of the second most rotten award ?  The anthem has got to stand out for being really bad.  If you have read Singapore School Anthems Part 1, you will recall that the recipient of the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM was guilty not just of plagiarism but it even failed to make the minor necessary changes to the lyrics in order to adapt the words to the school.  It's the ultimate in rottenness and I can't even conceive of anything worse than that in a school anthem.

That is the most rotten school anthem.  Here we're looking for the runner up. It can't be as bad as the ACS anthem but it's got to be outstandingly bad.

I've already mentioned in Part 1 that I have in my mind some categories in which points are given to the school.  Grammar, language, elegance and musicality are essential components.  For a long while, I could not find a school anthem that is bad enough for this runner up category and I was about to give up and focus my attention on the good school anthems when I stumbled upon a school song that fits the bill perfectly as the second most rotten anthem.   This school song is so badly written that it took me quite a while to get into the shoes of the composer in order to understand what it was that he (or more likely, she) meant to say in the first place, so incomprehensible and garbled are her sentences.  Here we have it -

The RUNNER UP AWARD for THE MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM goes to

RAFFLES GIRLS' SCHOOL

Before I begin, let me stress once again that the school anthem is not a reflection of the quality of the school.  I embarked on this exercise with a view to moving away from all this talk about "good schools".  Instead of adding to all the stressful talk that is currently going on about which schools are better or give superior education to students, I decided, purely with the intention of taking the heat out of schools, to zoom in on something which isn't all that crucial and for which no current teacher or headmaster needs to bother about because these anthems were written by their predecessors who have long left the world of the living.  This is a fun exercise which I hope will bring the smile to your lips.  In any event, everyone knows that RGS is indisputably one of our finest girls' schools in Singapore and this award does not in any way detract from its excellent academic credentials.  All the same, it does have a terrible school song.

Now, that I've settled that point, let's examine the school anthem.

I must admit I was totally flabbergasted when I first chanced upon the lyrics of this school song.  I couldn't believe my eyes that this was the RGS anthem.  I had to check the school's website just to be sure it wasn't a joke posted by some student of a rival school.  Everything is wrong about this anthem.  The music is awful but I have already decided from the start to pay the least attention to the musicality of the anthem because this can be highly subjective.

Let's look at the grammar.  The writing style tells me immediately that it was probably composed by a Chinese language teacher in the school.  The writer hasn't got a proper grasp of the rudiments of the English language and she lacks the linguistic sensitivity in weighing which of two words is more apt in a sentence.  This is a handicap very commonly seen in Chinese language teachers and I'm really not criticising these fine teachers whose strengths lie in the highly complex Chinese language which the Guinness Book of World Records tells us is the most difficult language in the world to master.  It may just be pure speculation on my part but I'm fairly certain the song was composed by a Chinese language teacher and why RGS picked a Chinese language teacher for this task is a mystery.

The very first sentence is elliptically jarring.

From high Olympus flows to us the glory

The glory of what?  That's probably on everyone's lips when he reads the first line of the anthem of Raffles Girls' School.  We saw in Part 1 the strange tendency of the ACS anthem in leaving out an article in a sentence but here, the addition of the article leaves the reader hanging in midair.  What the writer probably means is "Glory flows to us from high Olympus".  That would be grammatically more acceptable but it doesn't cure the sentence of the pervading sense of childish hubris that informs the entire anthem.  It reminds me of a loud bungling supercilious little girl who doesn't know how to be tasteful in her boastful speech.  This reference to Olympus is pretentious and falls flat particularly when there is no reason to speak of it in the first place. I'll deal later with this tiresome need of the anthem writer to force a bit of Greek mythology into the song and I'll suggest what I believe is the reason for this need.  I love to get to the psychology behind the problem.  But more of that later when I discuss the anthem's allusions to Greek mythology.

While still on the first stanza, we next see one of the most jarring lines (it's hard to decide which is most hideous since every line seems to be jostling for that honour) -

Rise, sisters, rise, the world is all before ye 

In standard usage, "ye" is the archaic form of the 2nd person plural pronoun in the subjective case.  In standard archaic English, "ye" has from its first usage been nominative.  There are of course later instances in the past where its use in the objective case is recorded but in these instances, such use is almost without exception colloquial or dialectical.

The Authorised Version of the Bible gives the best illustration of how one should use "ye" but this is hardly useful to most of us who are quite content with using the good old "you" (or perhaps I should say the newer "you").   But we always have in our midst those who think they can spice up their lacklustre writing with a few archaic expressions and these are the people who should take heed of the following highly instructive sentence from the Bible which illustrates quite comprehensively how one may properly use "ye":

If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?

If Madam RGS-Composer (that's the honorific Chinese language teachers love to use) had read her Bible diligently, she would have written "the world is all before you" and the hope and rousing beauty that this line evokes in its Miltonian simplicity would have been spectacular. 

I always like to do a bit of investigative work and get into the mind of the writer just to see why she wrote what she wrote or as Jeeves would put it simply, to get to the psychology behind the problem.  Why did she write "ye" when "you" would have been so much more elegant?

My guess is she had probably been reading the Scottish poem called "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond".

Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,

And I'll get to Scotland afore ye;

But me and my true love will never meet again

On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

Notice the use of "ye" in the objective case?  "And I'll get to Scotland afore ye". I've already explained that "ye" used in this way can be found in dialectical writings and it is easy to see many examples in Scottish poems.  But I really doubt very much if any respectable girls' school will want to fashion their school anthem after "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" especially when for the rest of the anthem, we see failed attempts at Greek mythological allusions. The two just don't make good bedfellows.


There are many other glaring errors in the anthem and they are too numerous for me to list them all here.  The error we see in the first line is repeated in some of the other verses.  For example, "The fire by which the will attains". What does this even mean?  It sounds like a word-for-word translation from another language, presumably, Mandarin Chinese which was what Madam RGS-Composer taught in the school.

There are many instances where the writer of the RGS anthem leaves the reader befuddled as to the intended meaning.  For example, in "So heart to heart we'll scale the heights of learning," what is meant by "heart to heart"?  I'm tempted to think Madam RGS-Composer meant "side by side" which would appropriately highlight the solidarity and camaraderie of the girls.  In the Mandarin Chinese language, the word for heart is liberally used in just about anything you can think of.  The anthem writer availed herself of the same liberty when she wrote this anthem.

Apart from linguistic problems, the writer is obviously unsure of her Greek mythology.  Writers of school anthems must be careful when they want to introduce elements from Greek mythology into a song.  If they do it clumsily, they can appear pretentious and silly.  They must not do it on the misguided understanding that it will imbue the song with a respectability it otherwise lacks. You can't make a rotten song great by throwing in the names of Greek mythological figures especially when you know nothing about Greek mythology. My sympathy is actually with RGS.  I understand why this was done.  RGS is closely related to Raffles Institution (RI) which is Singapore's top school.  The RI anthem makes a direct reference to Prometheus but it is done in a subtle and tasteful way.  The reference to Greek mythology in the RI anthem lends further depth to the meaning of the song and it enhances the beauty of the song.  RGS, ever envious of RI's superiority, probably felt that it should not be left far behind and so it threw in Greek mythological references without a firm grounding in mythology. That may have moved the RGS anthem writer to write "On us the sacred fire descends" but then she should have read up more about this fire before she comes up with this gaffe:

The magic fire that moves the gods to love us.

When Prometheus stole fire and brought it to men, the gods were far from being moved by feelings of love.  If the punishment they meted out to the thieving Titan is anything to go by, love is the last emotion they felt.

Quite apart from all this, every line in the anthem is shockingly inelegant.  The chorus, "Sisters in learning and sisters at heart / Life lies before us, here's luck to the start" is simply hideous and coarse and is really inconsistent with the kind of school RGS really is.

The RGS anthem suffers from what I would term the "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" syndrome.  Some coffee shop owners think they can increase their business by giving their shop a name that smacks of antiquity.  The writer of the RGS anthem craves respectability for the school anthem which is decent enough and one can't fault her for that.  But the way she goes about doing it only serves to win for RGS the Runner Up prize for the Most Rotten School Anthem. 

Singapore School Anthems Part 1

There has recently been a great deal of hype and angst about schools in Singapore and the government is scrambling to assure us all that every school is a good school.  I have written a lot about schools in Singapore and I'm sure I have ruffled a few feathers especially of those who may have misplaced pride in some schools but the time is right for us to forget the academic records of schools and focus on something quite inconsequential, trivial and lighthearted - the school anthem.  The school anthem doesn't really mean much. If a school is unfortunate enough to have a rotten anthem, it may be saddled with this disgraceful yoke on its neck for a long time to come because schools don't normally alter their anthems.  But a bad anthem is no indication that the school is bad, as we shall see soon enough if you follow my blog on to Part 2.

Let me begin with the worst school anthem.  How bad can an anthem be?  It can't be that difficult to write a school anthem and I'm sure I can sit down for no more than a couple of hours and come up with something quite respectable. The fact that some of these schools have rotten anthems does make one wonder what the school administration was up to when some teacher or, as is usually the case, the school principal came up with his or her own composition.  But these are usually former teachers or former principals who are long dead, so please understand that I'm casting no aspersion on the current crop of teachers and principals who are all wonderful people and are perfectly able, at the drop of a hat, to write the most glorious anthems.

But really, how bad can an anthem be?  What makes a school anthem truly bad?  Naturally, because it's to be sung, the musicality of the anthem is important.  But I will attach less importance to music since I have to admit that this is one area that can be rather subjective and besides, whatever I used to study for my ABRSM Music Theory exam is all forgotten.  But any one of us can judge the language or grammar in a school anthem and we don't need to have a training in music theory for that.  We can also judge an anthem by looking at its choice of words.  This is different from its grammar.  For example, if the lines are largely in iambic pentameter  and we see a stray line "We in our youth try to acquire knowledge" which will immediately strike anyone as jarringly ugly and inelegant and that's because the metre is broken even though it's grammatical.  Perhaps "Despite our youth we'll scale the heights of arts" would be a great improvement.

But for the bottom-of-the-heap school anthem that wins our "Most Rotten School Anthem" award, we don't even have to examine the metrical structure of the lines.  Such a close scrutiny of the metre may only be necessary when we want to decide which of two great school anthems should win our coveted top prize for Singapore School anthems.

I will begin with the worst school anthem and work my way to the best, so please look out for future parts in this series.  I will be guided purely by aesthetics, poetry, grammar and less so, music.  I will be purely objective and I will give my reasons and you are free to disagree with me if you think I am wrong.  Just post your comments on this page below.

Which school takes the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award?  Such an anthem must not just be grammatically wrong.  It's got to be worse than that. And there is one school anthem that has just about everything you can think of when you want to look for a really rotten school anthem.  This anthem doesn't just get its grammar wrong, it does something truly shocking - it steals its song from elsewhere.  You probably think I'm being a bit harsh and the school merely "borrows" the tune of another song but no.  This is outright plagiarism in that not just the tune is stolen but the lyrics as well.

Now, you're probably wagging your finger at me in disagreement.  How can anyone plagiarize the entire lyrics of another song?  Yes this school anthem does precisely that with the exception that it sneaks its name in where someone else's name appears.  I will present the facts and leave you to be the judge.

It's with a heavy heart that I denounce the anthem of a school that I should feel something for but since I have decided to be purely objective so here it is -

The MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award goes to:-

ANGLO-CHINESE SCHOOL

(or ACS, as they would rather be called)

This school anthem is shamelessly a shocking plagiarism of the Canadian anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever".  It is shocking in that not just the tune was stolen by ACS but the lyrics as well. I'll just say a few words about the Canadian anthem.  "The Maple Leaf Forever" was written by Alexander Muir in 1867, some 19 years before ACS was founded.  In the song, we hear of "Wolfe, the dauntless hero", a reference to James Wolfe who captured Quebec from the French. It's not surprising that the song was not picked to be the official national anthem of Canada because its strongly pro-British stance would be objectionable to French-speaking Canadians but it was one of the songs considered for the national anthem and it is still widely sung today and is generally known as the unofficial national anthem of Canada.

Click here for the lyrics of this beautiful national anthem The Maple Leaf Forever and do a mental comparison with the ACS anthem (note: the music is identical):

You would have thought that a school that filches a national anthem would of course get its grammar right so on my score board, the school should at least pass the grammar category.  But not so for ACS.  With the ACS anthem, we don't have to go very far.  Just look at the second line of the anthem: "Oldham dauntless hero came".

The very first time I heard the ACS anthem, I felt strangely uneasy and I got a copy of the lyrics to see for myself if it really was printed as it was sung.  I'm sure all of you had that same feeling.  It's because we get this sense that there is something grossly wrong about the anthem.  It's the problem we have when we are drafting an email hurriedly and we copy and paste from wikipedia onto our own text and we fail to read through the email and click "SEND".  When we finally read through the email, we wish we could edit it but it's already sent. But folks, this is a school anthem we are talking about and not a personal email written in a hurry!!!

Leaving out an article in a sentence is common in Singlish but I have to remind myself that this school anthem was written in 1926 by a teacher called Henry Hoisington.  This was before Singlish even came into being.  Why then was the article left out in "Oldham dauntless hero came"?  Bishop Oldham, a great man for whom I have the highest respect, is of course the founder of Methodism in Singapore and the founder of ACS.  It is only when you look at the Canadian national anthem from which this line was copied that you will understand the reason for the error.  In the Canadian anthem, the line is "Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came".  Presumably, Hoisington, thinking to himself that since "Oldham" has two syllables while "Wolfe" is monosyllabic, felt he had to remove a syllable from that line and he must have decided that the article "the" was dispensable.

Whatever Hoisington taught in ACS in 1926, one hopes that he didn't teach the poor students English or English literature.  Anyone who reads poetry knows that you can always abbreviate the article the to th' so that you don't count it as a syllable.  It's a little like a grace note in music.

But Hoisington goes on to remove the article in other lines in the ACS anthem.  I just have to glance through the lyrics and I see a few examples: "emblem" stands by itself without any article but the most hideous error must be "the Land of Rising Sun".  I know a young boy who sang it as "the land of Rising Suns".  The poor lad is at least grammatically correct even if he badly needs a lesson in geography and possibly astronomy.

The other line that brings deep furrows to the brow is this:

No discord e'er will sever

You immediately look at the preceding line to see what it is that discord won't sever.

Our hearts our hopes our aims are one

No discord e'er will sever

This is inelegant even though it's not ungrammatical.  You sever chords, ties, bonds and knots but you don't sever hearts, hopes and aims.  Again, all you have to do is to look at the Canadian anthem and you will see why plagiarism can bring disgrace to your school for a very long time to come.  If you must plagiarize, at least put in the effort to tidy up the parts that differ from the source from which you stole the lyrics.

In the Canadian anthem, the lines are

And may those ties of love be ours

Which discord cannot sever

There you have it.  The original song talks about not severing the ties of love which is a perfectly correct usage.  Shame on Hoisington not only for plagiarizing the music and lyrics but also for making no necessary changes to the lyrics to ensure that the school anthem doesn't sound like the theme song for Jack Neo's future movie, "When an Ah Beng Copies a Song".

It's only fortuitous that Hoisington picked the Canadian anthem for the ACS anthem. He might very well have chosen a more famous national anthem and today, we'll all be laughing away every time ACS students sing with pride and gusto (which they will no doubt do in blissful ignorance of how rotten their anthem is):

God save our ACS

Long live our ACS

God save our school

Send her victorious

Happy and glorious

Long live to be our school

God save our school.

EDITOR:  In case you think I'm just doing a spot of ACS-bashing which I assure you I'm not, in Singapore School Anthems Part 2, I will be presenting the Runner Up Award for the Most Rotten School Anthem to a school that is famous for its high academic achievement.  It is a school loved and respected by all Singaporeans and parents will give an arm and a leg to see their child in the school.  I have only recently heard the anthem of that school (obviously the school would do well to take pains to conceal its anthem) and it's astoundingly ROTTEN!!!  Stay tuned for Singapore School Anthems Part 2.

NOTE: Singapore School Anthems Part 2 is now posted on this blog.

How bad is bad?

I've just read a very interesting Facebook posting by a friend who was complaining about the growing use of the term "my bad" to mean "my fault".  I don't know if you have come across this usage but I'm inclined to think that anyone who hangs around on Facebook, google+, online forums and chat sites is sure to have seen this.  When I first read it online in either a chat site or a forum, I didn't know what the writer meant.  But with time and the frequency of its use, I soon understood it perfectly and I'm quite adept now at the proper usage of this phrase.  It's only used when you want to admit to a mistake.  For example, if you describe someone as fat and others remonstrate that you're rude and insensitive, you simply say, "Sorry, my bad".  Succinct and to the point and the entire internet community forgives you for your earlier indiscretion.

In her posting, she frowns on the use of this phrase, "my bad".  I won't do justice to her witticism and humour (her article is very witty and humorous) if I do not quote verbatim what she wrote:

We had formidable English teachers at Marymount Convent whose mission in life was to ensure that if nothing else, we would speak English properly. One of my enduring Primary 4 memories is of sitting at my blue wooden desk in my green graph-paper uniform watching our teacher write out in white chalk on the blackboard the difference between nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.  

I can still hear her voice: “Girls, a verb is an action word. An adverb describes a verb. A noun is an object or a person. An adjective describes a noun.” 

By those rules “bad” was definitely an adjective, as in, “a bad day”. Having had those rules drummed into me since the tender age of ten, encountering “bad” as a noun left me feeling a little linguistically dislocated.

"Bad" is quite a bad deal for those of us who want to make some sense of the language. As a slang, originally US Black English, "bad" undergoes a reversal of sense so that in some circumstances, it can mean "marvellous" or "very good". Before Michael Jackson became white, he sang his greatest hit "Bad" which carries that meaning.  When used in that sense, the degrees of comparison for "bad" are not the standard "worse" and "worst" but "badder" and "baddest". For example one may say as a compliment, "Hey man, that new kid in town is bad, man.  Badder than anyone we know.  He's the baddest."

While I totally share the writer's view on the ugliness of "my bad" and I can never get myself to use "bad" in this way even when I want to sound young and cool, I'm not so sure I agree with the rigidity with which she (or more accurately, her English teacher) pigeonholes each English word strictly into one of the many parts of speech, as such categorization is called in grammar.  As everyone knows, many words can come under different parts of speech and some, like the word "fast" can be a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb.

But the writer is not talking about that.  She is saying, and quite rightly too, that "bad" cannot be a noun.

Now, how bad can "bad" be?  When I gave the matter some thought, I realised that "bad" can be pretty bad.  "Bad" has not only encroached into the realm of nouns, but also clawed its way into the arena of adverbs.  How many times have we heard someone say that he wants something "real bad"?  Or "my school didn't play too bad in that football game"?  You may say "bad" in these examples can only be used informally or colloquially but you have to admit that "bad" assumes a surer footing in the following sentence: "I felt bad after running up that hill" which is permissible even in formal English.  Notice however how peculiar the rules of grammar are in that once you use a different verb or when it is used with the auxiliary verb, "bad" becomes ungrammatical and unacceptable even in informal English.  Try forming a sentence in your mind if you don't believe me.

The writer goes on to decry the use of other adjectives as nouns and in an amazing display of her knowledge of modern songs, she quotes liberally from lyrics which I'm ashamed to say were totally alien to me and I had to look them up on youtube just so I didn't feel as if the world of music had passed me by.

After quoting from the lyrics of a song, "Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?", she wrote, "In the world of perfect grammar it should of course be beauty (a noun), not beautiful (an adjective)..."

Of course she is absolutely right but I cannot help feeling that a little more should be said about how bad the other adjectives really are in the world of grammar and they must have taken a leaf out of bad's book by showing the world how bad they too can be.  In fact, the OED tells us that adjectives have been making forays into the world of nouns for centuries.  For example, the OED records "intellectual" as an adjective that was first used in 1398.  By 1599, it made its first recorded incursion into the domain of nouns and up to this moment, it's not uncommon for us to refer to an intellectual as a person who is intellectual.  There are other examples that I can think of such as "explosive" a perfectly good adjective that somehow decided one fine day to metamorphose into a noun while retaining its adjectival properties.

Even the example given by the writer, the adjective "beautiful", refused to remain a mere adjective all its life.  The OED tells us that by 1756, "beautiful" took upon itself the right to be a noun.  More than a century and a half later, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a novel called The Beautiful and Damned.  

Now I daresay not even the English teachers of Marymount Convent with their forbidding exterior that the writer writes about with such reverence will dare expose their frown beneath their wimple.