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.

Propaganda that Kills by Ching Cheong

The following article appears in Strait Times on 30th September 2008: Propaganda that kills By Ching Cheong (程翔), Senior Writer, The Straits Times (2008-09-30) HONG KONG: The tainted milk scandal shows China lacks something that even its years of spectacular economic growth cannot make up for. What is missing is a moral dimension in the country's growth without which China cannot hope to command respect or admiration from others. But this moral dimension would be hard to come by unless the country resurrects the human values it lost during the decades when class struggle was the order of the day. Despite calls for a people-based policy, the lack of political reform has allowed inertia to set in. The political system continues to put the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leadership first, never mind the people and human values. This latest milk scandal bears striking similarities to the deadly Sars outbreak in 2003, both being the by-products of an archaic political system. When the first instance of Sars broke out in the autumn of 2002, the CCP was about to hold its 16th national congress to decide on its top leadership. The event was deemed 'a matter of great significance in the political life of our country', according to the CCP's Central Propaganda Department (CPD). To create a favourable socio-political environment for the congress and the National People's Congress in March 2003, the CPD issued a list of dos and don'ts for the nation's media. One of the don'ts was not to report on epidemics. Flu was in fact specifically mentioned in that document. The directive effectively blacked out news on the looming disease. As a result, the deadly Sars spread far and wide. The CCP at first denied that there was a serious outbreak. Ambulances carrying Sars patients played hide-and-seek to dodge World Health Organisation inspectors in Beijing. A retired army surgeon and veteran CCP member, Dr Jiang Yanyong, wrote a letter to Time magazine to reveal the magnitude of the Sars epidemic in Beijing. He sent his letter to Time after it was ignored by a state TV station. His simple act of telling the truth did much to stop the spread of Sars and began the process of containing the epidemic. In the milk scandal, it is now reported that the problem came to the notice of Sanlu, China's major dairy producer, as far back as December last year. When Sanlu's foreign partner, New Zealand's Fonterra Cooperative Group, found out about the contamination in August, it sought a product recall. This move came just days before the Olympic Games were due to start on Aug 8. Months earlier, the CPD had again instructed Chinese news media against reporting 'negative news' that could mar the Beijing Games. It was said not just to be a premier sporting event but also 'an important political event' for China. For this reason, Sanlu could do little and local authorities kept mum about the milk powder contamination cases. Weeks passed until New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark intervened and told her people to alert the authorities in Beijing directly that the tainted milk powder cases had come to light. In both the Sars and tainted milk cases, many lives could have been saved if the Chinese media had been informed and allowed to report the truth. Aside from remedying the problem in the milk industry, which is now taking place, the CCP must get to the crux of the problem. It should seriously reconsider its long-established propaganda policy, one that has brought harm, not just once, to both the people of China as well as many other countries. Professor Jiao Guobiao, a former lecturer in media studies at the Beijing University, blasted the CPD publicly in 2004, listing 14 grave consequences of its propaganda policies. One of them was 'sabotaging the country's rise'. Two years later in February 2006, a group of retired CCP veterans well versed in CPD operations - including Mr Li Rui, Mao Zedong's former secretary; Mr Zhu Houze, a former CPD boss; Mr Hu Jiwei, a former editor of the official People's Daily; and Mr Li Pu, a former deputy head of the state-controlled Xinhua news agency - jointly signed a letter to President Hu Jintao asking him to ease rigid media censorship as a means of building a truly harmonious society. The milk scandal once again testifies to the truth of their appeals.