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Monday, Mar 13, 2006 - 22:14 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

On a Ball, a Shirt and a Book

Saw someone actually bouncing a basketball while walking up the steps of the overhead bridge today. Man, that takes some confidence to pull off, since one bad bounce might result in an unwanted trip all the way back down - or worse, having the ball end up on the road.

Apparantly (after a quick home trial) it's not impossibly hard if you keep your mind on it, but the guy did it extremely naturally. Oh well, I'll be sticking to perfecting my around-the-world trick with a ping pong ball. One revolution followed by maintained control is pretty common now. It's the reverse cycle that's challenging.

Fast forward to the economics lecture, and got a guy with his T-shirt inside-out sitting in front of me. Rewind to my NS days, when that happened to me once - didn't have a clue with a grey shirt in the dark. I don't know what others thought of it, but for me it was... oddly refreshing. Not that I would do it on purpose, of course.

Later, I got a glossy publication, "Beneath that smile", from a friendly distributor standing in one of the high-traffic throughfares near Computing. Turns out that it's by the Singapore Campus Crusade for Christ, in partnership with the Covenant Evangelical Free Church, and focused on Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code - which I have happened to have read, like your average bushman in the Kalahari.

It is fully understandable that they are intelligently trying to refute the erroneous claims in that bestseller, which otherwise may confuse the unwary. A clear improvement over the iamrightyouarewrongrepentorburn argument that religious organizations too often employ simply because it is in their arsenal, at the very least.

I have to applaud the professionalism of the layout, the liveliness of the writing and the impressive objectiveness of the material. Unfortunately they could not refrain from introducing fact to justify faith. Example:

"The Bible was written by more than 40 different authors, and across a period of 1,600 years. Yet amidst the diversity of authorship, there emerged a single unified story - the salvation plan of God for a sinful humanity. To get a picture of how miraculous a task this is, listen to this simple parable:

A master carpenter assigned seven of his discuples to make a table. He gave them each a part of the table to design. One was in charge of a leg, and another the drawer. They were given one week to come up with their designated component.

Can you imagine what an impossible task it would be for the different parts to come together and fit precisely? One leg would be longer than the others, and the drawer may not fit. The result - a total disaster."

For the life of me, I can't see what is at all "miraculous" or "impossible" about that feat, unless all the writers had no opportunity to peruse the work of their predecessors. Correct me if I am wrong, but that seems unlikely. Otherwise, the numbers mean nothing at all.

Later on there is a similar appeal to logic, proferring several alternatives - that Jesus claimed to be God, and either his claim is true or it is false. If it were false, then he was either liar or lunatic - unsavoury titles, to be sure. The article ends with C.S.Lewis saying, "...either shut Him up as a fool, kill Him as a demon, or fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Now I realise who George W. Bush emulated when he declared all those not with him, were against him. It is exactly this moral absolutism that has caused the world to come to grief, more than once.

Piers Anthony said it best in Tarot, after all - "Maybe the origins... are suspect, or maybe it is all a great libel. It doesn't matter! What matters is what the religion is today. Many worthy religions have foundered when their adherents forgot their original principles - but here is a religion that became greater than its origin!..."



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1 comment

wenhoo said...
yah i read that too
IMO, they use some facts but try to blend opinions into the facts


March 13, 2006 - 23:57 SGT     

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