Whom shall I send?

This country sends more missionaries abroad to spread the Gospel than any other country apart from the United States. An excerpt from this Christian Science Monitor article: "Their prayer life is remarkable, and the whole congregation prays together," Sam says. "In the country churches, you sometimes have to ring a bell to get them to stop."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p14s01-lire.html

Isaiah 6:8

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying:

"Whom shall I send,

And who will go for Us?"

Then I said, "Here am I! Send me."

God in science

Just wanted to highlight this New York Times article - Darwin's God - written by Robin Marantz Henig. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Essentially it fleshes out an interesting debate among scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars believe that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. But what they disagree on is why a tendency to believe evolved. There are two clear camps: Belief itself is adaptive versus belief is just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain. In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

The writer relates some interesting experiments:

- Anthropologist Scott Attran sometimes presents his students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will. If they don't believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

-The idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children readily accept. You can see this in the experiment Justin Barrett conducted recently — a version of the traditional false-belief test but with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had learnt that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

The article also asks a prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, who also happens to be a Christian how his view of God as a byproduct of our mental architecture coexists with his Christianity. Why doesn't the byproduct theory turn him into a sceptic?

Barrett replies: "Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people. Why wouldn't God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?"

"Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me - should I then stop believing that she does?"

I like the article because it gives a very good primer into the current debate on the biological explanations for a belief in God. To me, it seems that the harder the attempts at using evolution to account for God and why we believe, the more the evidence points towards the existence of God. The article suggests that we are hard-wired to believe in God. Does that sound familiar?

Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

The strange career of a troublesome word

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me "Nigger".

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
- Countee Cullen, "Incident" (1925)

Teaching the N-Word: A black professor, an all-white class, and the thing nobody will see

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/nword-bernard.html


Some years back, a pastor said during a sermon: "Why should people discriminate against someone else based on the colour of his or her skin when red is the colour that flows under everyone's skin?"


Luke 2:29 (Simeon sees God's Salvation)

"Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace,
According to Your word;
For my eyes have seen Your salvation
Which you have prepared before the face of all peoples,
A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel."

I am woman

Women's Day as captured in this beautifully compiled photo essay/video by Magnum Photos.
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/

"The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel

The website also contains other fantastic photo essays so please do take your time to go through it, especially its essay archive.

Science of the times

Twenty things you didn't know about...

Skin
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/20-things-skin

Leonardo da Vinci
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/da-vinci

Death
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/20thingsdeath

Sleep
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jul/20thingssleep



Thirteen things that don't make sense
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html


I came across these while trawling the Net for some research on an unrelated assignment. :-)

I'll be putting up some more links on various subjects as I go along. It's very fun for me because I'm been going through some wonderful websites and printing the articles for bed-time reading while I'm at it.

Let's talk

I usually smile at the office cleaning lady and and thank her whenever she stops by to clear my wastepaper basket around 6pm every day. Two days ago, she stopped by my desk and started telling me about how a fellow colleague of hers took the tong with which she uses to grab the rubbish but did not tell her about it. She said that she turned up for work that day and discovered that her tong was missing and told her manager. She then asked me rhetorically why she would bother to take the tong home and forget to bring it to the office, as her manager suggested she might have done. As well as why her colleague would take her tong because that was akin to theft. She was quite upset over the incident. I was bewildered because this was the first time she had spoken to me for so long, but I knew she wanted to vent her frustrations. So I listened. She left a while later.


Yesterday, I took the transport van home. The driver started talking to me, and so I asked him about himself as well as his family. He's Malaysian and has Singapore PR status but does not want to become a citizen here because he does not think highly of our government. He runs his own vehicle repair workshop in Johor Baru (most of his customers are Singaporeans), and rides his motorbike to Singapore every night around 10pm to help his brother out with his night transport business. He usually takes about three transport trips per night, and earns S$500 per month from his brother. But he said that on days when there is heavy rain, he would call up his brother and tell him that he will not ride up to Singapore.

He has one son, 27, and two daughters, 23 and 19. His wife and children are Singapore citizens. He owns a home in Singapore and has a place in Johor Baru near the Second Link. I told him that once his youngest daughter starts working, he can look forward to retirement. He just smiled. I asked him whether his son was interested in his business, and he replied no and that perhaps when he dies, his son may then want to take over. Before I knew it, the van had already reached my void deck. He said bye and happy new year and told me to look out for his brother the next time I took transport because his brother also has a shaved head. I looked at him and asked him to drive safely and wished him a good night.

Such encounters always leave a deep impression on me because I experience the richness of human communication. I don't know why (I'll ask God) but people seem to open up to me easily and I seem to be able to talk to people easily as well most of the time. It's a gift that I'm very thankful for because I realise that makes me unique in a sense, and offers me the chance to lend a listening ear to people in need or the chance to know about another person's life and how he/she is getting along and God's hand in his/her life. And I learn so much more about life in general through their words and their experiences.

Freedom, choice and dignity

Yesterday, I wrote a letter I felt had to be written to a friend. I had prayed about it beforehand and within the contents of the letter, the Holy Spirit led me to pen these words by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

I read those words only for the first time yesterday, and they brought tears to my eyes because of the way these men rose above their situation and made a difference in other people's lives through their responses. To me, this was a profound celebration of the indomitable human spirit. And their actions were extremely encouraging to me because they showed that although they were in the deepest pits of hell on earth, they had the clearest sight of heaven in their hearts.

The extract was from Viktor Frankl's book - Man's Search for Meaning. I'll probably look for it at Kinokuniya over the weekend.

Isaiah 61:1-3
"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
Because the Lord has anointed me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that
He may be glorified."