"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." - Gertrude Stein

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On how the decline of traditional moral values results in a society with fewer social ills:

"My partner is Swiss. Her niece Nina went to USA on a year-long Rotary exchange programme. Once she was asked to give a talk about the curriculum ‘back home’ in Switzerland. When vetting the script, the American teacher was appalled that Nina planned to include sex education as one of the regular classes taught in her Swiss school. Her reason was it was “not Christian” to discuss such things. She ordered Nina to exclude it.

Nina was disturbed because she saw how many teenage pregnancies there were in the US school. Not only did it impact so many young lives, there were expensive government-funded programmes to handle these young mothers who eventually left school and raised single-parent families. On the contrary, the rate of such teenage pregnancies in Switzerland is low. Young as she is, Nina could see the wisdom of openly discussing these issues but the bias of the supposedly Christian fundamental dogma instead blinded her American classmates to the potential pitfalls of unprotected sex, peer pressure etc.

Another anecdote: I used to represent Singapore in sports. On a few occasions when playing in regional Games, we would share buses or have to walk past male athletes from countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh. On a couple of occasions, some of us girls were grabbed at or touched (openly!!) by those male athletes who were virtually salivating at the sight of women’s exposed legs/arms.

On the contrary, in summer in Europe — specially in Scandinavia — it is customary for women in parks or at the beach to strip their tops off. Nobody bats an eyelid and the mystique of the naked female body is non existent. The incidence of sex crimes like rape is so very low in such societies compared to the sexual abuse in countries with so-called “strict religious and moral codes”."