The Great Disappointment

On this day 164 years ago (22nd October 1844), the followers of William Miller gathered in homes and churches eagerly awaiting the Second Coming of Christ. Thousands gathered in many locations outdoors to watch the sky to "meet the bridegroom." But Jesus did not appear to them, and the day became "The Great Disappointment" to the Millerites.

Miller established the year 1844 by taking Prophet Daniel's eighth chapter which speaks of 2,300 days. Miller took these days to stand for years, like the 490 years (the seventy "weeks" mentioned in Daniel 9:24). Then he subtracted the 490 years, which were "cut off" from the 2,300 years. It is left with 1810 years. It was assumed that Christ died early in 31 AD. With 3.5 years of Daniel's 70th week still to run, adding those 3.5 years to 31 AD brings us to late 34 AD. Then 1810 + 34 brings us to 1844. Other considerations placed the date in October 1844.

Miller never taught that Christ would return on 22nd October. Samuel S. Snow was the originator of the date of October 22, presenting the topic in the Boston Tabernacle on July 21, 1844. Then in August he presented his material at a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire. After that the idea spread like wild fire. By October 22, as many as 50000 Millerites believed Christ was coming on that day. Many sold their goods or quit their jobs, not expecting to need them after October 22.

Miller never gave up his belief in the Second Coming of Christ; he died on December 20, 1849, still convinced that the Second Coming was imminent.

Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. (Matthew 25:13)

Faith Needed for All Things

Faith is needed for everything in life, for religion, for science or even investment. When you read that an apple dropped on Isaac Newton's head and he discovered the Law of Gravity, you accept it by faith, because most of us probably cannot understand the mathematics that he used to prove it.

When you got lots of money to invest, you went to DBS, that very reputable Singapore Bank. The relationship manager recommended DBS High Notes and told you that it is capital guaranteed. You buy it by faith, because it is DBS. And your faith in DBS let you down.

Since faith is so dangerous and yet we need it, we should try to mitigate the bad effects by asking a few questions. Like the DBS High Notes example, you could always ask who guaranteed the capital and how it was guaranteed.

Likewise in religion, do not just believe because someone preaches to you. Do not think that all religions cannot be proven because it is about after death, or about another dimension. This is not true. Like the DBS High Notes, you can ask some questions. Ask if there is something in the religion that when proven false, the whole religion will collapse. The preacher should be able to answer such questions. If not, do not believe this preacher. Go and ask another.

God and evil

This is how Epicurus argued about God and evil, "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"

We can present this problem from another angle. Either God is all wise or you are. If God is all wise, you will have to accept that He will eradicate evil in His own way at His own time, which is the best way, since He is the wisest. If you think that the current way is unsatisfactory and your way is better, then you are wiser than God.

And you got to prove it.

Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct Him? Let him who argues with God give an answer. (Job 40:2 HCSB)

Remember what happened long ago, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and no one is like Me. I declare the end from the beginning, and from long ago what is not yet done, saying: My plan will take place, and I will do all My will. (Isaiah 46:9-10 HCSB)

Then I saw a great white throne and the one who is seated on it. Before his face both earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them. I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. Another scroll was opened too; this is the scroll of life. And the dead were judged on the basis of what was written in the scrolls about what they had done. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and Death and the Grave gave up the dead that were in them, and people were judged by what they had done. Then Death and the Grave were thrown into the fiery lake. This, the fiery lake, is the second death. Then anyone whose name wasn’t found written in the scroll of life was thrown into the fiery lake. (Revelation 20:11-15 CEB)

Good times, bad times

You cannot really know a person, until you have been through good times and bad times with him. If the person can maintain his integrity in good times and bad, then he is truly a man of integrity. One person who was tested in wilderness and in prosperity was King David of Israel. When David was hunted by King Saul like a partridge in the mountains, he became so desperate and that he decided to take refuge with the enemy of Israel, Achish king of Gath (1 Samuel 27:1-2). When David became King of all Israel, he fell into the sin of adultery (2 Samuel 11:2-5) and murder (2 Samuel 11:15-17). So David failed both tests.

If David, the man after God's heart, the Ancestor of the Messiah can fail, we dare not trust our own integrity. It is by the grace of God that we are still preserved and we have no merit or works that we can boast of our own.

Judge threw out God suit

Read in the news on 17th October 2008 that a judge in Nebraska, Marlon Polk, has dismissed a lawsuit that was filed against God because the defendant has no address and legal papers cannot be served. The suit was launched by Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers in September 2007.

Does the good judge think that his court has jurisdiction over God? Or anybody can sue anyone in Nebraska? Can Queen Elizabeth 2 of UK be sued in Nebraska? She has an address and legal papers can be served.

Contentment, you and Adam

If you were given the whole world, except for one tree, would you be very happy? I would be. Many people had tried to own the world. Alexander spent his whole life trying to conquer the world and he did not succeed. Genghis Khan also tried his luck, but failed. The British created the world's largest empire to date, which, at its peak under King George V in 1922, covered only 25% (36.6 million square km²) of the world's land.

One man was given this opportunity to own the whole world, except for one tree. A brand new world. A paradise. He was given more than what the British, the Mongols, the Romans, the Greeks ever got and dreamed of. But he was not satisfied. He coveted the one tree. For attempting to conquer that one more tree, he lost his paradise. That man was Adam.

Monetary Value of Services

Singapore's Government use money to value their services. They try to make sure that most services would pay for itself. There should be as little subsidy as possible. Welfare is a bad word. But there are many things that the Government get free. Air is free. (Environment maintenance is not.) Love and loyalty are not quantifiable. All these are distortions when we use money to value services.

Daily Bread

Copied from C. H Spurgeon's Daily Check Book:
October 15

Sustained by Feeding

As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me (John 6:57). We live by virtue of our union with the Son of God. As God-man Mediator, the Lord Jesus lives by the self-existent Father who has sent Him, and in the same manner we live by the Savior who has quickened us. He who is the source of our life is also the sustenance of it. Living is sustained by feeding. We must support the spiritual life by spiritual food, and that spiritual food is the Lord Jesus. Not His life, or death, or offices, or work, or word alone, but Himself, as including all these. On Jesus Himself we feed.

This is set forth to us in the Lord's Supper, but it is actually enjoyed by us when we meditate upon our Lord, believe in Him with appropriating faith, take Him into ourselves by love, and assimilate Him by the power of the inner life. We know what it is to feed on Jesus, but we cannot speak it or write it. Our wisest course is to practice it and to do so more and more. We are entreated to eat abundantly, and it will be to our infinite profit to do so when Jesus is our meat and our drink.

Lord, I thank Thee that this, which is a necessity of my new life, is also its greatest delight. So, I do at this hour feed on Thee.

Wrong beliefs leads to wrong solution

When Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury secretary, announced his plan for a $700 billion financial bailout, he opted for government purchases of toxic mortgage-backed securities. This is because of the Republican philosophy of minimum government intervention.

When Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister outlined a bold plan where four major British Banks were effectively put under government control with planned capital investments by the government, he is true to his Labour Party’s ideology of nationalization.

While neither nationalization nor privatization is always right, beliefs may cloud one’s vision and caused the obvious solution to be rejected.

Communism - how it may be revived

With the income gap between the rich and poor getting wider, could communism, the discredited ideology of mass struggle be revived? One possible way is to return to the fundamentals, i.e. return to Karl Marx. About 20 years ago at the Library in University of Essex, I read an article in a magazine, published, I think, by the British Communist Party. The author of this article argued that Soviet Union and China were not true communist countries. Rather, they were State Capitalist. So the democracies were Private Capitalist, exploiting their workers, Soviet Union and China were State Capitalist, exploiting their workers and without the rights associated with democracies. The workers in State Capitalist had a worse deal. I could not believe my eyes. In one stroke, the author exonerate communism from all its ill. So no communist state has been created yet, and communism has not been proven wrong. Following this line of argument to its logical conclusion, communism can be repackaged by stripping it of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, leaving only Marx and Engel, and we have the a revived communism - Fundamentalist Communism.

The Chronicle Review's take on current financial crisis

Found the following on The Chronicle Review. But I am not sure if their analysis is right or wrong.
From the issue dated October 17, 2008
The Real Great DepressionThe depression of 1929 is the wrong model for the current economic crisis
By SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.

The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.

In Central and Eastern Europe, times were even harder. Many political analysts blamed the crisis on a combination of foreign banks and Jews. Nationalistic political leaders (or agents of the Russian czar) embraced a new, sophisticated brand of anti-Semitism that proved appealing to thousands who had lost their livelihoods in the panic. Anti-Jewish pogroms followed in the 1880s, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Heartland communities large and small had found a scapegoat: aliens in their own midst.

The echoes of the past in the current problems with residential mortgages trouble me. Loans after about 2001 were issued to first-time homebuyers who signed up for adjustablerate mortgages they could likely never pay off, even in the best of times. Real-estate speculators, hoping to flip properties, overextended themselves, assuming that home prices would keep climbing. Those debts were wrapped in complex securities that mortgage companies and other entrepreneurial banks then sold to other banks; concerned about the stability of those securities, banks then bought a kind of insurance policy called a credit-derivative swap, which risk managers imagined would protect their investments. More than two million foreclosure filings — default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions — were reported in 2007. By then trillions of dollars were already invested in this credit-derivative market. Were those new financial instruments resilient enough to cover all the risk? (Answer: no.) As in 1873, a complex financial pyramid rested on a pinhead. Banks are hoarding cash. Banks that hoard cash do not make short-term loans. Businesses large and small now face a potential dearth of short-term credit to buy raw materials, ship their products, and keep goods on shelves.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. Among his books is Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American legend (Oxford University Press, 2006).
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The Chronicle ReviewVolume 55, Issue 8, Page B98

Faith Needed because of Our Incompetence

We need faith because we are not competent. Faith is dangerous because it believes in things that have no proof.

Holy Spirit as Guide for Truth

In my earlier post on 7th October 2008, I quoted from C. H. Spurgeon's "Daily Check Book", that the Holy Spirit is our Guide for Truth. But this will bring about the same problem of Faith and Subjectivity faced by other religions whose foundation is not the Truth. We read the same passage from the Bible and interpret differently. We both claim subjective guidance from the Holy Spirit.

Compliment

Kanagaraj Singam wrote on 20th September 2008 at 3:13pm in my Facebook "to a man who always took the blame and shared the praises". I take it as a compliment.

Truth needs a guide

Copied from C. H Spurgeon's Daily Check Book:

October 6
The Leadership of Our Guide

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth. (John 16:13)

Truth is like a vast cavern into which we desire to enter, but we are not able to traverse it alone. At the entrance it is clear and bright; but if we would go further and explore its innermost recesses, we must have a guide, or we shall lose ourselves. The Holy Spirit, who knows all truth perfectly, is the appointed guide of all true believers, and He conducts them as they are able to bear it, from one inner chamber to another, so that they behold the deep things of God, and His secret is made plain to them.

What a promise is this for the humbly inquiring mind! We desire to know the truth and to enter into it. We are conscious of our own aptness to err, and we feel the urgent need of a guide. We rejoice that the Holy Spirit is come and abides among us. He condescends to act as a guide to us, and we gladly accept His leadership. "All truth" we wish to learn, that we may not be one-sided and out of balance. We would not be willingly ignorant of any part of revelation lest thereby we should miss blessing or incur sin. The Spirit of God has come that He may guide us into all truth: let us with obedient hearts hearken to His words and follow His lead.

Ancestor Worship and Buddhism

Ancestor Worship and Buddhism are basically incompatible. If Ancestor Worship is true, then Buddhism must be false and vice versa. If Buddhism is true, then reincarnation is true. Then your ancestors were already reborn as something or someone, your worship is meaningless. It may even be ridiculous. Consider the chicken that may be offered to the ancestors. It could be your own great grandfather now reborn as a bird. Now you have the chicken killed and offered the chicken, which is also your great grandfather, to himself. But yet many altars in Chinese homes have Kuan-yin and the Ancestor Tablets side by side.

This is the Chinese people's religious tolerance, or should I day, religious apathy. They are interested only in Face and Money. They do not seek the truth. For this reason, China has technology, but no science.

Creative Snippets

Saw a van that passed by, with a soldier carrying a mop, and the big words on the side "Mop Squard". It is a cleaning company. Nice and creative name.

Saw hanging at the back of a car: "You kiasu, I kiasi".

Printed on an angpow - "Think maths, do science".

New Technologies

Writing was with us for as long as we know. It would be difficult to imagine writing as a new technology. It was. Like many things that we take for granted, writing has to be invented. It was a new technology to the great Greek philosopher, Socrates. Socrates fears writing and favours speech. In the Phaedrus (Greek: Φαίδρος), Plato described Socrates' fears that writing will cause memory to atrophy and that writing is more susceptible to "abuse" than speech. Future generations will appear to be wise because they read much without being properly taught. Socrates himself never wrote anything; all his ideas were written down by his student, Plato.

Likewise today, we fear new technology. We prefer to rely on established traditional methods to manage our knowledge. We prefer physical books, files, signatures, something which Socrates considered as susceptible to "abuse". We are puzzled by Socrates' view that speech is more reliable than writing. Do we not always have contracts in writing with signature and seal? Imagine a spoken contract! Future generations would wonder why we consider books more reliable than digital storage, wikis, search engines and other knowledge-based infrastructure, jsut as we wonder why Socrates value speech more than writing.

I do not know what the Chinese reaction to the invention of abacus was. But I remember the reaction of our school authorities to digital calculators. Calculators were already invented when I sat for my examinations. However, we were not allowed to use them. We have to use the slide rule and logarithm tables. How many among today's student is able to use the slide rule and logarithms table? They all use calculators. Basically, the Ministry of Education just delay the use of calculators. They could not stop it.

When I proposed to my company to use Mediawiki as a mean to manage our internal knowledge, an e-mail came back to say that we have to consider carefully, the main considerations will be the Non Disclosure Agreements. Anyway, this is the expected reaction, just like the Ministry of Education or big multi-national company. Actually, the wiki may be a bit dated, being about five years old. I think there may be better ways, but I am not fully aware of them.

Big companies that do not change can look to the fate of the Ottoman Empire or the Ching Empire of China. You may break into pieces and die (like the Ottoman Empire), or you may float around like a broken boat without a rudder for many decades (like China) and hope for a new management to rescue you. For small companies, they can look to the small countries, which have existed and died, without history remembering them, which is why I cannot give you the name of any of these countries.

Saved by Grace - so easy and yet so difficult

Read this in Daily Bread 30 Sep 2008:

One day, while Wim was in the marketplace in the Netherlands, he struck up a conversation with a woman who remarked that you can get to heaven by doing good works.

His attempt to explain that it is by God’s grace that we are “saved through faith” (Eph. 2:8) brought a smile as the woman repeated confidently: “and . . . by doing good works.” Then another woman volunteered, “You can hope you’ll go to heaven, but you can’t be sure.” Wim’s assertion that he did know for sure was met with a muttered, “Nobody knows for sure.”

Wim then showed the woman what 1 John 5:11-13 says. He explained: “See, it doesn’t say hope there, it says know.” Unconvinced, she said, “Like you, my pastor says that we have to have faith, but you really never know whether you’ve been good enough. You may think you have, but who can be sure?”

To some, Wim’s confidence may seem incredible. But he based his words on this statement: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works” (Eph. 2:8-9).

It’s true. We can’t be good enough. We can never do enough good things. But we can be sure of heaven if we simply believe on the Lord (Acts 16:31). — Cindy Hess Kasper

We cannot earn our way to heaven
By word or work or worth;
But if we trust in Christ to save us,
Then we’ll enjoy new birth. —Branon

We are saved by God’s mercy, not by our merit—by Christ’s dying, not by our doing.