Firstly, the Chinese are the majority ethnic group in Singapore and hence, Chinese culture and worldviews have always influenced, and continue to influence Singaporean society and politics to a large extent; and secondly, the Singaporean Chinese community shows much more religious variability than the other ethnic groups, with the nonreligious making up 23.3 per cent of the Singaporean Chinese pop. [...] To better understand the nonreligious then, he calls for the adoption of qualitative discursive analysis which shifts the research focus from the “individual to the discourse they employ, from the person to what they say, and how they say it, allow(ing) the social reality of the individual to be incorporated analytically into the wider societal conversation of which they are inherently a part.”18. [...] Anthropologist David Eller in his summary of Formations of the Secular,20 a classic work of Talal Asad, describes power and control in the relationship of state to society so well that I quote him here in full: Modern politics, particularly in the form of the modern state or government, seeks to delimit, quantify, and institutionalize all sorts of things – its borders, its population, its economy,. [...] I cannot see that [belief] as fundamental to the meaning of religion.” As I will elaborate further in the next paragraph, Wei Ting’s reply shows a cultural tension that exists in the three individuals’ definition of religious identity because of the differences between the Western construction of the term “religion” as espoused by the Singaporean state and perpetuated by our Western- centric educa. [...] The Programme seeks to be at the forefront in the development of scholarship and applied knowledge on the roles of religion and inter-religious relations in plural societies today.
- Pages
- 22
- Published in
- Singapore
