A Socket for My Brain

2012 Part 3: My Food Experiments

2012-12-31T23:14:00.000+08:00

I've always enjoyed cooking. Back when I was living in a dormitory, I would try to think up interesting stuff to cook every day, using whatever ingredients I could find in the fridge. Sometimes I'd try to follow recipes I find online for special cooking projects (paella, clam chowder, etc.). I even have a food blog somewhere that's been abandoned now (for reasons related to this blog's long hiatus).

I haven't been able to cook much lately, ever since I moved back to may parents' house. Every day is now a long commute to and from the office, a problem that would have been solved if only I was able to move to an apartment this year (see Part 1). Still, I did find the time to help out with the cooking during some weekends, and even made a few special things:

Jajangmyeon - On the night of April 14, in celebration of Black Day, I cooked a plate of 자장면 and ate it on my own, just like many other lonely, single people who know about this South Korean informal tradition. It was a bit salty... like the tears I cried after my first girl-related heartbreak this year... but it was delicious! And low-fat! Take that, fat-laden chocolate-eating, disgustingly sweet love birds! Oh wait... speaking about fatty and sweet foods...
Cheesecake - I made cheesecake for the first time this year. So far I've only done three no-bake ones: a blackberry & blueberry cheesecake, a peanut butter cheesecake, and a peanut butter+Butterfinger cheesecake. Because peanut butter!
Okonomiyaki - If studying the Japanese language doesn't make me look Japanophile enough, I've also been looking into Japanese cooking this year. I decided to make Hiroshima-style and Osaka/regular-style お好み焼き after watching these videos. I wish I could have bought some nagaimo/yamaimo (it was so hard to find... even in Japanese shops!), but I was pretty satisfied with the results, especially the Hiroshima okonomiyaki (the egg and yakisoba made it ultra special :-D).

I hope 2013 will give me plenty of opportunities to cook (and eat!) a lot more great food. いただきます！

2012 Part 2: Some More Negative Things

2012-12-31T23:09:00.002+08:00

So last time, I talked about how my big plans for 2012 ended up. Most of that was depressing, and I apologize, but that really was the overall atmosphere of this year for me: depressing. Here's just one more list of sad things that happened in 2012 before I move on to more positive things.

My dog Summer died of some unknown disease early this year. She was five years old. I felt like such a bad pet owner because I never bothered to let her have regular veterinary checkups.
I found that I've lost the energy to participate in Catholic apologetics. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from losing faith. I even read apologists' blogs on a regular basis. But this year has been kind of a dark year of the soul for me. To my fellow Catholics, please pray for me. I really need it.
The drama of Philippine politics. Oh God, the drama. From controversial laws that sparked tons of angry ~~debate~~shout matches (Cybercrime Law, Sin Tax Law, RH Law) to the things the government did to persecute (rightly or wrongly) the past administration.
Major tragedies, natural and man-made, both local and international. It even made some people take the Mayan Apocalypse bullshit seriously.
The stupid, stupid Mayan Apocalypse bullshit.

*sigh*

And now, some trivial stuff that still contributed to my overall feeling of depression, no matter how silly they are:

I had to stop my master's degree studies for most of the year because of scheduling problems. I'm now back on track...maybe.
I failed to enter Mensa for the second time.
Some highly anticipated shows and movies were big disappointments. I might talk more about that later.

2012 Part 1: Big Plans, Little Achievements

2012-12-25T12:25:00.004+08:00

First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the hilarity of my last post here being about downloading the Blogger app for Android, then having a blogging hiatus for more than a year. You know what, I'll just leave that post there for the lulz.

I'd like to say I've been super busy these past twelve months and so didn't have time to blog, but that would mostly be a lie. The real reason is that I've been in an almost constant state of depression this whole year. I started 2012 with such high hopes and a number of big plans, but then it all went to shit very early on, and I never quite recovered since.

I began 2012 planning to find an apartment so I could start living on my own. After being convinced by a really determined salesperson one day, I ended up purchasing a condominium unit that I was promised would be completed by now. It looked like a pretty sweet deal. The unit was fully furnished, the building had a gym, a pool, and a mall. It was located along EDSA and was even connected to the MRT. Turns out, I won't be seeing the inside of my unit until (maybe) some time next September, because of all the delays in construction. And I've been paying for it monthly for almost a year now.

I also had plans to learn how to drive so that I could be one of the "cool kids", and now the year is about to end with me only knowing how to drive automatic, with our newly-bought second-hand KIA already scratched in various places, and with my confidence still at around beginner level. Who knew that poor eyesight, poor memory, clumsiness, and nervousness are bad for driving, eh? ;-)

I thought I could at least start conversing in very basic Japanese after self-studying for a year. Frankly, I still can't, because I've spent most of the year memorizing basic kanji and their multiple readings, almost neglecting the grammar side of things (except for basic particles and conjugations). A colleague of mine who hasn't even learned hiragana yet but who practices forming Japanese sentences daily (in frickin romaji) could probably survive being alone in Tokyo far longer than I would. And the JLPT N5 I took a few weeks ago? I fully expect to receive the results in a small envelope by March (those who passed would get a large envelope containing their certificate).

Finally, and perhaps what may be the greatest contributor to my depression, I began thinking about getting in a serious relationship for the first time in my life, and had my heart crushed repeatedly over the course of several months. No, I will not elaborate on that. Suffice to say that I am now moving to another company just because of a frickin girl, and that I will never believe in stupid things like serendipity and fairy tale endings, ever again.

***

Well, there was one big plan that sort of came out all right. I've never been on a plane before, and this year I finally went outside the island of Luzon and saw clouds up close for the very first time when my family and some friends went to Palawan for a four-day vacation. That was pretty cool. Maybe next time I'll choose an international flight instead, perhaps (dare I say) a 2013 trip to Japan?

Blogger for Android

2011-10-31T13:15:00.001+08:00

For some strange reason, the Blogger app for Android isn't available in the Android Market for users in the Philippines. Good thing the apk file can be downloaded from other sources. And I didn't even need to root my phone.

Speaking of which, I probably will root my phone next month once I get the Ice Cream Sandwich update. Then I'll have some serious fun geeking around. :-)

I just hope the ICS update does arrive in November. The excitement is killing me!

What's been up

2011-10-15T22:42:00.001+08:00

So... after that last, really long and excessively serious blog rant back in February, a number of things happened in my life, most of which didn't seem like they were worth blogging about at the time. But now I need an "I'm still alive!" blog post, so might as well use them. Here are the highlights:

1) I finally decided to buy a personal laptop. It's got an Intel Core i5 processor and it didn't have an OS installed when I bought it. I, of course, promptly put Ubuntu Linux in the thing as soon as I got hold of it, and I've been enjoying it ever since. It's only the second computer I've ever bought. The first one, a Pentium 4 PC that I bought eons ago, has been lying around broken in our house for the past couple of years or so, and I've been too lazy to repair it.

So, what spurred my decision? Well, ever since our PC died on us, I've been reliant on a bunch of company laptops. My mom's Windows XP laptop has degraded faster than I've expected (even for a Windows machine), and my dad's laptop has 512MB of RAM and Windows Vista installed (*shudder*). I was lucky enough to have Linux on my own company laptop, but I've decided I didn't like working for my company anymore, so I figured I might as well buy a non-crappy laptop of my own before I left. Which brings us to the next item:

2) I moved to another company. Nothing too exciting, it's just something I thought I needed to do. I've spent my first four years as a grown-up in my previous company, and I thought perhaps I had to move on. On hindsight, it would have probably been better if I waited until I finished my Master's degree before getting another job. The atrocious schedule that resulted from having to be a newbie on probationary status and a graduate student at the same time was one of the reasons I stopped blogging for a while; definitely not something to emulate.

3) Girls. Dorky awkwardness. Heart break. Typical Francis. I'll change the subject now before I break into another emo song.*

4) I recently bought a Nexus S. (Yeah, I've had a pretty expensive year so far.) To tell you the truth, I wasn't really excited about the whole smartphone concept when it first came out more than a decade ago, thinking of them as expensive distractions for rich people to waste money on. Sure, I liked reading about them and admiring them in theory, but I never really lusted after all those high tech eye-candy. Over the years, though, my stance has been softened by my exposure to PDAs (I have an old Palm m130 that's now, sadly, quite dead) and to relatively low-end smartphones like the Nokia E71 my previous company lent me while I was working there. I realized that I liked being able to read e-books, check my inbox, and look things up on Wikipedia anywhere I go (though, no, I don't care about Angry Birds).

I decided I wanted a very basic Android phone**, preferably one that's high enough on the geek factor but not very high on the price factor. My calculations and window shopping lead me to the Nexus S. Its status as a "Google phone" automatically makes it a dream geek gadget in my eyes (Google fanatic that I am), yet at the same time it's not as expensive as some other Gingerbread phones out there. I'll probably be kicking myself once the next Nexus phone (Nexus Prime?) comes out, but who knows when that one will be available here in the Philippines. Besides, I'm pretty sure the Nexus S will get the Ice Cream Sandwich update. Or else. (Kidding!)

Alright. You've caught up with my life at this point. I expect to be able to blog more in the coming weeks, for the enjoyment of all my readers.***

Good night!

--
* Too late.
** I humbly submit that I am not cool or trendy enough for an iPhone. May Steve's soul rest in peace, etc.
*** Um, both of them.

Dissenters: "My Conscience Tells Me To Sin!", My Head: Explodes

2011-02-18T22:05:00.015+08:00

Some members of the faculty of Ateneo de Manila University, a school run by Jesuits, have posted a statement regarding the Reproductive Health Bill:

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/views-and-analysis/10/22/08/catholics-can-support-rh-bill-good-conscience-0

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1) Those faculty members of Ateneo who wrote this statement (and who from here shall be referred to as "the Ateneans") mentioned some parts of the RH bill that are not about contraceptives and that are in fact quite laudable ("comprehensive emergency obstetric care", etc.). That is well and good, but one cannot excuse an immoral law just because it has some good parts. We all want the good things included in the RH bill, but the solution is not to pass the bill as it is (warts and all), but rather to revise it into a bill that retains the moral parts and not the immoral ones. Note that some will say that the word "immoral" does not apply here, because they think contraception is moral. Well, they are free to believe that (just as we are all free to sin), but they are not free to call that a Catholic belief. This brings us to my next thought:

2) The Ateneans uses irrelevant statistics ("one in three married Catholic women support contraception") to try and bolster their claim that contraception is not contrary to being a faithful Catholic. Nobody is arguing that contraception is not popular*, but Catholic doctrine isn't a popularity game. A religion without the authority to dictate religious truths that might be contrary to popular sentiment is a worthless religion, because a religion that only follows its own followers will obviously be wrong once its followers go wrong. As Chesterton put it, "We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong." Catholicism, as it happens, is a religion that claims such an authority. When the Church's teaching office formally states something as against Catholic belief, people who call themselves faithful Catholics are not free to willfully claim otherwise without lying about their faithfulness. The Ateneans' repeated appeal to the popularity of contraception, a thing already defined as evil by the Church almost from the very start, is therefore by its anti-magisterial nature basically anti-Catholic, and no faithful Catholic should listen to it.

3) If people wanted a religion that would allow them to pick and choose whichever doctrines they like at the moment, well, there are plenty of such religions out there; they may even invent their own, if they want. But the religion they are "calling on to", the Catholic Church, was founded by a man who, when a majority of his followers abandoned him for saying something unpopular, asked the rest "Are you also going to leave?" As we know, one of them (someone named Peter) answered "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:53-68). The Ateneans claim to follow that man, but it doesn't really show.

4) It's disturbing how contraceptives are presented as pro-women when in fact they are enablers of the enemies of women. Based on the twelfth paragraph of their statement, the Ateneans seem to think that the solution to the problem of abusive husbands who rape their wives (i.e. force their wives to have sex even when they don't want to) is to enable the husbands to continue raping their wives without the "bad" consequence of pregnancy. Apparently they think the problem isn't that women are being treated with indignity (since contraception will not stop that kind of treatment but will in fact likely worsen it), but that another set of economically-undesirable parasites have joined the gosh-darned surplus population. Personally, I think that the solution is to discourage such sexual abuse, and that objects that actually empower male perverts shouldn't be celebrated, but that is just my obviously misinformed opinion.

5) Speaking of forcing one's sex-related choices on others, the Ateneans are forgetting that government-sponsored contraceptive distribution and promotion will require money, which will be coming from tax-payers' pockets. They talk of "choice". Well, if the RH Bill passes, can I choose to opt out from financially supporting what to me is an immoral law that is against my religion? Without having to leave the country or evade my taxes? No? Didn't think so. Also, will this bill have a conscience clause to allow health care providers to refuse to provide contraceptives on religious or moral grounds? If the makers of this bill are anything like the radical pro-contraceptive legislators of Western countries, don't bet on it.

6) The funny thing about this debate is the confused reasoning that people go through in order to justify the claim that the government needs to distribute contraceptives to the poor. The poor need contraceptives, they say, because the poor reproduce far too much. But why do they reproduce too much? Because the poor are not properly educated about the biological, medical, economic, and social issues about reproduction. Fine, we can all agree about that. But in order to convince the poor to use contraceptives, they must first educate the poor (mindlessly throwing condoms at uneducated people will only lead to disappointment, as we have seen in Africa). And so they include clauses in their RH bill providing for better reproductive education. That's the funny part, because once they educate the poor about the pertinent issues, once the poor becomes aware of the risks, the supposed reason why the poor reproduce too much would suddenly disappear, along with the supposed reason why the poor need contraceptives in the first place! The first point these pro-contraceptives are missing is this: if the root of the problem is a lack of good education, then the solution is to reform the state of education in the Philippines. There is a second point they are missing: once the average Filipino is educated enough not to engage in risky sexual behavior, the government would not need to provide him with cheap contraceptives. At least, I am assuming that they simply missed those points, and that they are not deliberately turning the people away from the fact that their precious contraceptive mentality isn't really necessary to solve our population problem.

7) I find the tactic of claiming to be faithful Catholics (or at least, talking about "faith" a lot) while completely ignoring basic tenets of the Faith to be, frankly, quite disingenuous and insulting. I mean, who do they think are they kidding? It's like a bandit saying "I really am a pacifist at heart, but give me all your money or I'll blow your brains out!" It's as if they think words don't have any real meaning, that "being Catholic" is somehow the same as "ignoring the authority of the Catholic teaching office". Sometimes I wonder why people like the Ateneans still claim to be Catholics in the first place. Why not admit their break with the Church and formally join whichever religion or irreligion they want to join instead? I heard the Episcopalians are recruiting.** I'm sure they'll feel quite at home there!

8) Contrary to the Ateneans' statement, the NFP method (a form of natural birth-control) is not contraception ("against conception") for the obvious reason that couples may use NFP to actually conceive, and so by definition is not against conception. It is a way for couples to plan when they want to have offspring without having to use anti-reproductive objects that truly are contraceptive. Of course, NFP is just a tool. The Church does not excuse fornicators and adulterers just because they used the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy. In the end, the Church teaching about chastity (which is not just for celibates) trumps all sorts of excuses and rationalizations: treat sex as sacred, fight impure thoughts, and you'll be in the right.

9) Finally, a properly formed conscience is one that conforms to the moral teachings of one's religion, otherwise it is far too easy to equate one's conscience with whatever one desires, whether immoral or not. Asking "Is it not possible that I was obeying my conscience when I opted to use a contraceptive?" is like a murderer saying "I felt in my guts that killing this person is the right thing to do. I killed him in good conscience!" The answer to both is no. When there is a voice in your head telling you to do immoral things, you can bet your ass it ain't your conscience talking, but someone else entirely.

Of course, I'm just one of those simple-minded, ignorant sheeple who blindly follow evil pedophile priests in fear of being assassinated by albino monks from Opus Dei. What the hell do I know, right?

--
* Well, ~35% isn't exactly a majority, but it's a big chunk nonetheless.
** Just kidding. I stopped caring about what Episcopalians are up to after they basically defined marriage as "Anything you damned well want it to be."

Twisting the Pope's words: MSM does it again!

2010-11-22T15:14:00.012+08:00

Why is it that every time I see L'Osservatore Romano being quoted in the news, it always seems to be something palm-facingly embarrassing? I doubt the editor-in-chief of the Vatican's newspaper is an anti-Catholic in disguise, but with such displays of incompetency, maybe he needs to be replaced just to be sure. At any rate, its latest misadventure involves an excerpt taken by the Osservatore from a new book about Pope Benedict XVI that mainstream news sources around the world are now interpreting as an endorsement of condom-use:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

My first reaction was, "How the hell could this be seen as pro-condoms?!" But then I remembered what we are dealing with here. Understandably, people who already have a low view of the Church could not be expected to analyze something further (in the sense of trying to understand what it is really saying and viewing it in context) when at a mindless glance one could catch something so temptingly sensational as "Pope endorses condoms!!!"

The last two sentences of the excerpt show quite clearly that Pope Benedict was not being pro-condoms at all, but what is he really saying? Why give an example about the Responsible Prostitute at all if condoms are intrinsically evil...period? Should we not be condemning all prostitutes, even if they try to do good while performing their evil profession? Well, the thing is, Catholic ethics if far from the merciless be-perfect-or-we'll-hate-you type that some people (including some Catholics) think it is. We are taught by the Church to love everyone as our brothers and to fervently hope for their salvation. And hope is exactly what the pope is expressing here. A male HIV-positive prostitute using a condom to prevent his customers from infection is a man doing a certain kind of evil on one hand yet conscientiously attempting to avoid another kind of evil on the other hand. What the pope is saying is that such a man is far closer to Christian holiness than someone who has no qualms about doing any kind of evil at all and happily spreads his infection everywhere. Thus, we have hope that this "less immoral" prostitute, if he continued on this trend towards trying to choose goodness, would one day realize the evil of the occupation that has made condoms seem necessary to him, and finally reconcile with God.

I'd like to use the analogy used by Dr. Janet Smith to clarify this issue. Here's a hypothetical scenario: If you are planning to rob a bank, you need to make sure that the people in the bank won't do anything that could thwart your robbery attempt or otherwise put you in danger. The common solution is to scare them with a gun, which you already possess. But it just so happens that you are the kind of bank robber who abhors the idea of killing people (let us call you the Responsible Robber). You are aware that guns are known to discharge by accident, and so to keep things safe, you remove the bullets from the gun, hoping to deceive the people in the bank into doing whatever you ask them to. Sure, deceiving people is still bad, but that's nothing compared to outright homicide, right? Therefore, using a non-loaded gun (as opposed to a loaded one) is the moral way of robbing people, right?

The problem with that last question is that it misses one very important point: robbing other people is in itself immoral. Whatever else you do while robbing someone does not change the fact that you robbed him. You certainly shouldn't expect to be forgiven just because you used a gun with no bullets. On the other hand, the fact that you made a moral choice of not killing anyone gives your Christian neighbors hope that you may one day make another moral choice: to give up on robbery. When that day happens, you will also realize that using a gun to scare other people, whether or not it has bullets, is also immoral. Likewise, a person who realizes that fornication is evil (as the pope says, it dehumanizes sexuality) will also realize the evil of contraception, even if contraceptives were an aspect of the "less immoral" choices he made as a fornicator. At least, that is our hope.

It is the malicious twisting of the pope's inspiring expression of Christian hope and charity into something sensationally heretical that really, really angers me about the current "controversy" invented by these so-called journalists. It is during these times that I am sorely tempted to see these people, not as fellow human beings, but as monsters that need destroying. But of course, if I fell for such temptations, I would be disobeying the very same Church doctrine that the pope is trying to teach here.

Yes, it really is tough for regular sinners like me (not just sinners with sensational sins like heresy or sexual deviation) to follow the Church's teachings. This is probably why G.K. Chesterton said "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

Update: Mark Shea has his own analogy that, in true Shea form, is over-the-top and quite amusing. The Force is strong on that one!

On Violating the Separation of Church and State (Part 2)

2010-10-03T14:50:00.002+08:00

In continuation of the discussion I referred to in my previous post, my friend gave this response:

I explained how D does not violate a person's right to practice his/her religion. Again, the RH bill would only make access to contraceptives easier to people. It would not force them to use contraceptives which would be against their religious beliefs. I would like you to explain how D violates the separation of church and state to contradict my statement.

About the CBCP having a voice about the government, I would like to explain again that separation goes both ways. Since you like letters, an object A (let's call this the state) cannot be separated from object B (the church) if object B keeps on meddling with what object A does. If the State does not comment on how church should handle its followers then the church should equally not be allowed to meddle in how the state governs the people. I'm not against bishops voicing out their opinions as individuals, but when they, as a whole, use the name of the church as their identity would be violation of the separation of church and state.

My response:

You did not think about Exhibit D very thoroughly. It is not an unknown occurrence in Leftist countries for Catholic establishments to be persecuted and closed down by the government for not complying with laws that are against Catholic moral conscience. On one hand, the government does have the obligation to enforce its laws, and so the RH bill, if passed, will be used to enforce the contraceptive distribution policies in *all* health care establishments. On the other hand, such laws that would legally persecute a business-owner for following his religion is a violation of the principle of the separation of Church and State.

Speaking of which, you are still muddled about the separation of Church and State thing. Philippine legislators are in no way legally bound to give in to any kind of meddling. Anyone can meddle all they want (in fact it is their right!), but the act of actually legislating is the sole responsibility of the legislative branch of government. Your argument that meddling renders A inseparable from B is therefore false to facts; A has always been able to ignore B's meddling if he so wants. That's why we have condoms of all kinds legally sold in the country despite the Church's meddling. Or do you claim that non-religious kinds of "meddling", like the lobbying done by various secular groups, should also be banned?

And, forgive me, but your suggested compromise is rather baffling. Are you saying that non-religious groups may lobby as a collective, but the bishops cannot? What is your basis? You may daydream all you want about the the destruction of the Catholic bishops' right to form a conference in this country, but it won't make it a reality.

Finally, what is your answer to my Exhibit C? Do we not have the right to protest to the government if it is trying to use the tax money of the people to promote acts that we denounce as immoral? As contraception is legal in the Philippines, people have the right to choose it if they want, but God forbid I help them with my own money, or that my money goes to actually spreading the practice!

On Violating the Separation of Church and State

2010-10-03T02:20:00.002+08:00

Recently some guy named Carlos Celdran decided to publicly insult the Philippine clergy for their stance on the Reproductive Health Bill by going to a cathedral during Mass and calling the presiding bishops "Damaso" (who is a priest villain in Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere) and shouting "Stop getting involved in politics!"

A friend of mine defended Celdran with these words:

I am aware that they have the right to exercise their authority. But I believe that they should only exercise that right within the bounds of the church. When they cross that line and start meddling with the creation of laws, that is in direct violation of the separation of church and state.

My response:

I think you are distorting the meaning of "separation of Church and State" to advocate the wrong idea that a certain group of our fellow Filipinos (the bishops of the CBCP) have no voice in the government. As a matter of fact, the ideal of Democracy dictates that the voice of everyone, no matter their religion or standing, will be given consideration.

You say that the bishops should be limited within the "bounds of the church". That is a gross underestimation of their authority. Spiritual leadership does not stop outside the four corners of a building. After all, the Church is, in fact, every single baptized Catholic, not just the bishops. Which brings us to the other fallacy implied, that only the bishops oppose the RH bill. Do you think that if the bishops are silenced (by whatever means), no one else will take a stand? Do you honestly think that orthodox Catholics won't know how to be faithful to their religion without the bishops? If so, then you learned the wrong lesson from your Noli and El Fili classes.

The separation of Church and State, as well as freedom of religion, means that the State can never force a person to do something against his religion. In a country where multiple religions (and forms of irreligion) exist, this means that none of those religions will be able to oppress the others via legislation.

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present as evidence the following:

Exhibit A: A video of a Frenzy Party Condoms advertisement that is regularly shown on Philippine TV despite the CBCP's anti-contraceptive stance.

Exhibit B: A billboard containing an image of a girl not covering her head, shown to the public despite the sensibilities of devout Filipino Muslims.

Exhibit C: A payslip, showing the amount paid by an anti-contraceptive Catholic employee to the government as tax. Part of this tax will be used to distribute contraceptives if the RH bill is passed.

Exhibit D: A receipt from a Catholic health care establishment. If the RH bill is passed, the government will enforce contraceptive-related policies that all health care establishments will have to follow, or else be punished by law.

From these we can deduce who really is violating the separation of Church and State. The religions of this country have not, but the government is planning to.

I rest my case.

Chesterton on the Difficulty of Marriage

2010-08-10T20:06:00.001+08:00

After reading a recent fluff piece* about some woman's ideas on the ideal mate, I was reminded of one of my favorite scenes in G.K. Chesterton's novel "Manalive". The character Michael Moon has just proposed marriage to Rosamund Hunt out of the blue, and Miss Hunt is afraid such an "imprudent" marriage might fail:

"[...]But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment--you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't be pretty much longer--"

"Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael. "And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed. I, for one, don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute--a tower with all the trumpets shouting."

"You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?"

"My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman. "What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It's not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man--that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself--yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--and never satisfactory."

The secret behind the ideal mate is that there is no ideal mate. If you are not able to follow God's basic command to love your neighbor, then you are already married to yourself and will of course find marriage to another person quite difficult no matter how "perfect" your spouse might be. Damn, I could go on and on ranting about this (I actually did; I just changed my mind and rewrote this post), but I will let you enjoy the quote instead. You might even want to read the book. It's awesome!

--
* What? I was bored at the time.

The Brights and Their Superior Knowledge of History... snicker

2010-07-28T11:28:00.003+08:00

Here's an amusing tidbit I found, left by a commenter in John C. Wright's recent blog entry regarding his latest debate against an "Evil Christianity is Anti-Science!!!" guy (you know the type):

I had my brain melted by a particular instance of this; in a comment thread I read where various Anglicans got stuck into one another over the Church of England’s current difficulties regarding the introduction of women bishops, one person out of nowhere launched into a screed about how Galileo was prosecuted by the Church for his theory that the earth was round. This was proven by the Bible, and that’s why the Pope forbid anyone to read the Bible. But it wasn’t all the Pope’s fault, because the kings and lords forced him to do this, because if their serfs and peasants knew that the world wasn’t flat (and hence that they wouldn’t fall off the edge of it if they went too far), then they would simply pack up and leave, and the kings and lords couldn’t oppress them any more.

Galileo. Earth round. As economic theory of feudalism. In the seventeenth century.

Against that kind of notion, the stars themselves fight in vain.

Maybe Mark Shea is right: find a person who worships the Intellect (e.g. the Brights) and you'll find someone who doesn't use it all that much, at least when it comes to attacking their favorite enemy that is the Church. Sure, intellect doesn't necessarily equate to detailed knowledge of European history, but it does equate to recognizing that you cannot attack an argument you do not even understand. If you don't know what Galileo was put on trial for, or what the actual level of knowledge Galileo's contemporaries had, how do you expect to use the story of Galileo to attack the Church?

Oh, silly me, I know how: by inventing laughable fantasies and strawmen.

Except it's not so laughable when people start to believe them.

The "AyPad"

2010-02-03T22:12:00.003+08:00

So, Apple's over-hyped tablet device came out last week. They call it the iPad. Unlike Microsoft's Tablet PCs (which recently evolved into multi-touch-capable Slate PCs), the iPad has no multi-tasking, no way to copy-&-paste, and doesn't even have Flash.

Naturally, those outside Steve Jobs' reality distortion field are unimpressed. In fact, from the moment Jobs showed the device, the blogosphere was filling-up with jokes at the expense of its name* and the fact that it looked basically like a giant iPhone.

Still, I'll have to give Apple credit for not simply installing OS X on the thing and adding some touch stuff into it. Instead, they used an OS with an interface designed specifically for multi-touch. This is something Microsoft clearly doesn't understand: desktop operating systems that were designed with mouse-pointer devices in mind do not fit touch screen environments very well. When you're using Windows 7, for example, or Snow Leopard, you interact with the user interface by guiding the mouse pointer to desired locations and clicking (sometimes double-clicking) on one of multiple buttons. There are many UI elements in those OSes that show this mouse-pointer-centric paradigm: some elements change when a mouse pointer hovers on them; things are resized by dragging on corners or edges; people rely on what the mouse pointer looks like to determine context (one pointer appearance signifies text entry, another signifies resizing, etc.); most elements have context menus accessible via a right-click; so on and so forth. Well, none of those factors apply in a modern multi-touch environment that is manipulated through one's fingers: there is no such thing as hovering, stuff are resized by pinching or stretching, etc. Basically we are already dealing with different metaphors and different navigation techniques, therefore the desktop OS UI naturally doesn't feel right on this.**

Of course, it would have been ideal if Apple took advantage of the increased screen real estate and increased processing power of the iPad to bring in more powerful ideas to the existing iPhone UI (as I mentioned, even a simple multi-tasking feature would have been cool). Well, okay, to be fair they did include some stuff that weren't in the iPhone like side-panels and drop-down menus...but those just aren't very interesting, are they? Right now the iPad is just a device with lots of potential, and the best I could say about it is that I'm looking forward to iPad 2.0.

--
* Aside from the sometimes gross feminine hygiene jokes, there are other ways to make fun of the name. For example, the title of this post comes from the fact that some languages (like Filipino) don't distinguish the 'ɒ' sound in "iPod" from the short 'a' sound, the ambiguity leading to confusion when someone gushes about the new "AyPad". It's funny. Laugh.

** Yes, I know that multi-touch is now already being introduced in the desktop environment. Both Microsoft and Apple have been experimenting with multi-touch mice (with Apple already releasing a product). This is really cool, but it's mostly just something to augment the mouse, the way the scroll wheel/center-button augmented it before. If they really wanted to replace the mouse with, say, a multi-touch pad as the main input device on the PC, they'd have to make a complete UI overhaul that would include the removing of the mouse pointer. This may or may not be a good thing.

Geek says to movie fan: "Elementary!"

2010-01-21T21:38:00.000+08:00

As a response to a query about whether or not Sherlock Holmes really ever said "Elementary, dear Watson" in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, a Slashdot commenter demonstrated his own modern powers of investigation:

As a Holmes nut and a believer in free software and free information, this is an easy question to answer with a one-liner:

$ echo; wget -q -O - http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/advsh12.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2350/2350.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/108/108.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2097/2097.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3289/3289.txt | egrep -o -i 'elementary, my dear watson' | wc -l
0

Of course, the word 'elementary' isn't forbidden:

$ echo; wget -q -O - http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/advsh12.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2350/2350.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/108/108.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2097/2097.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3289/3289.txt | egrep -o -i 'elementary' | wc -l
5

For those who didn't get it, those commands basically search through the Sherlock Holmes stories found in Project Gutenberg (a website that hosts e-books that are in the public domain), counting how many lines contain a certain phrase ('elementary, my dear watson' in the first one-liner and 'elementary' in the second).

One thing I love about Linux is how empowering it is to think up these creative ways of solving problems using relatively small tools provided by this operating system*. In this case, the combination of a tool that obtains data from the web, a tool to search for text, and a tool that counts lines makes what might at first seem like a daunting "needle-in-a-haystack" problem actually quite trivial. Yes, it's just a silly little fan-boy problem about a fictional character, but the environment that promotes this same creative-thinking (here applied "just for fun") allows geeks like me to do much more serious and complex work that would otherwise be tedious (or impossible) in just a short amount of time. I can't even count the number of times I've saved time (and saved my ass!) in the office by using a one-liner in a Linux command line.

Of course, this particular solution for the "Elementary" question wouldn't even work if websites like Project Gutenberg didn't exist. Not only does this environment of openness and sharing in the Internet help the spread of knowledge, it is also probably one of the most important tools of our modern day Sherlocks. And by this I do not just mean the amateur detectives, but every single person with an inquisitive mind, a thirst, even obsession, for understanding and exploration. In other words, the geeks in general, and the hackers in particular.

Now, the word "hacker" might mean someone who breaks into systems for naughty or troublesome reasons, but that's just a narrow view of what a hacker in general really means. One definition (which I got from Wikipedia, another excellent source of shared information) of the word is "A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system." Sure, such people might turn out to be Professor Moriarty-types, those who use their ingenuity without regards to other people's rights. Yet who else could save us from the modern Moriartys of the world, with their Internet-enabled Linux* machines, but the modern Sherlocks who are similarly equipped and equally skilled?

They may be labelled as "freaks" for delighting in things that other people ignore or take for granted (just like how Sherlock makes it a point to notice even the tiniest detail in a crime scene), but when a problem arises in a system and everyone else is wondering if a solution could ever be found, it is these same geeky hackers, passionate as they are about understanding the system, who end up exclaiming proudly: "Elementary!"

--
* There are other operating systems that were deliberately made to be hacker-friendly. It's just that Linux is the most successful of those operating systems, and this post is already long-winded and nerdy enough without me referring to those.

Things I'm looking forward to in 2010

2010-01-01T02:16:00.000+08:00

Happy new year, everyone! To start 2010 off on an optimistic note, here's a list of stuff that I am quite excitedly anticipating this year:

Nerdy toys:

New Android phones (especially the Google-branded one)
Golden Sun DS (tentative title, hopefully)
Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver
Apple's supposedly-soon-to-be-announced tablet device.

Movies and books:

Iron Man 2
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (though I wish they'll be more creative w/ the title)
The Last Airbender
The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya movie, plus Volume 10 of the Haruhi light novels

I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, so I'll update this later. On a personal note, I am looking forward to finally getting to use my U.S. tourist visa. I need to catch up to my little brother, who's already been there twice in two years!

Cool improvements in Google Suggest

2009-12-13T10:59:00.000+08:00

Google Suggest, that nifty little feature seen on Google's main page where it shows you search suggestions as you type your search query, now shows additional info for special types of searches (e.g. weather, currency conversion, time, equations, etc.). From the Official Google Blog:

Let's say you're planning a vacation to Belgium for the holidays. Most vacation planning includes many simple questions: What's the weather? Is my flight on time? How many euros can I get for $100? For a long time we've provided answers to these kind of questions in one simple place with universal search features on the results page. Building on the improvements we made to Google Suggest earlier this year, now we're adding these features to the list of suggested search terms beneath the search box.

Sample pics:

On a related note, I noticed that Google Chrome already has Suggest incorporated in its Omnibox, and it even has the Calculator built-in (but not the other Universal Search features). What with Chrome now also getting extensions (in beta), I've decided to make it my default browser for now.

Michael Flynn Tears "Science Vs. Christianity" Arguments To Shreds

2009-10-21T15:16:00.001+08:00

Michael Flynn, author of the amazing sci-fi novel Eifelheim, recently came upon an essay by a guy named Jim Walker, spouting the usual arguments as to why Christianity is anti-Science (you know the type: the usual mindless shouting of "Galileo!", "burning at stake!", "Dark Ages!", etc.). Flynn proceeded to systematically refute the arguments in such a way as to leave the poor Mr. Walker looking like a poorly-educated village atheist (or like a typical Bright; couldn't really tell the difference).

Here are my favorite parts of Flynn's rebuttal:

7. Walker writes: "When Christianity took over Europe, scientific and engineering advancement virtually stopped."

In no particular order: watermills, windmills, camshafts, toothed wheels, transmission shafts, mechanical clocks, pendant clocks, eye glasses, four-wheeled wagons, wheeled moldboard plows with shares and coulters, three-field crop rotation, blast furnaces, laws of magnetism, steam blowers, treadles, stirrups, armored cavalry, the elliptical arch, the fraction and arithmetic of fractions, the plus sign, preservation of antiquity, “Gresham’s” law, the mean speed theorem, “Newton’s” first law, distilled liquor, use of letters to indicate quantities in al jabr, discovery of the Canary Islands, the Vivaldi expedition, cranks, overhead springs, latitudo et longitudo, coiled springs, laws of war and non-combatants, modal logic, capital letters and punctuation marks, hydraulic hammers, definition of uniform motion, of uniformly accelerated motion, of instantaneous motion, explanation of the rainbow, counterpoint and harmony, screw-jacks, screw-presses, horse collars, gunpowder and pots de fer, that there may be a vacuum, that there may be other Worlds, that the earth may turn in a diurnal motion, that to overthrow a tyrant is the right of the multitude, the two-masted cog, infinitesimals, open and closed sets, verge-and-foliot escapements, magnetic compasses, portolan charts, the true keel, natural law, human rights, international law, universities, corporations, freedom of inquiry, separation of church and state, “Smith’s” law of marketplaces, fossilization, geological erosion and uplift, anaerobic salting of fatty fish (“pickled herring”), double entry bookkeeping, and... the printing press. (Yeah, some of the innovations are political and economic.) .
+ + +

10 Walker writes, "Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance when people began to question religious authority) did the physician Andreas Vesalius translate Galen's texts to Latin."

This is either an argument from ignorance or a flat-out lie. Gerard of Cremona not only translated Galen's Medical Art at Toledo in the 12th century, but he also translated ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, al-Razi’s Book of Divisions, and twenty-four other texts on medicine.
What Vesalius gave us (which was a genuine advance) was the Renaissance invention of perspective in art applied to anatomical drawings. De Luzzi, de Chauliac, and others had "done anatomies" before -- which is why they had begun to doubt Galen -- but Vesalius's drawings are masterful, especially when put up against the anatomical drawings in Chinese and muslin texts.

+ + +
12. Walker writes, "As for the scientists, Christians burned the priest Giordano Bruno to death for the charge of holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith."

Execution for treason are not unknown. But what has the execution of Bruno for heresy got to do with scientists? Bruno was no scientist, but a mystic of the Pythagorean sort. The translator of his Ash Wednesday Supper commented wryly that, if they had ever bothered to read it, the Copernicans would have burned Bruno. Time and again he shows that he did not understand astronomy, but rather tried to fit it into his wacky worldview. Even so, keep in mind that for seven years the inquisitors and his brother Dominicans argued and debated with him to get him to change his mind. He was the L.Ron Hubbard of his day. Of course, nowadays, we don't like to execute people even if they were spying for Stalin; but treason, both secular and religious were once capital crimes.

+ + +
14. Walker wrote: "Recently, scholars found an ancient text written by Archimedes that revealed that the Greeks knew about the concept of infinity and calculus long before the advent of Christianity. Ironically a monk had ... washed out the Archimedes text and wrote supernatural nonsense in its place. ... Without religion hiding and destroying ancient scientific texts, imagine how different the world would look today if the Church had not suppressed, just calculus alone, hundreds of centuries before Isaac Newton published the idea in 1693."

Archimedes did not invent calculus. The method revealed in the lost text was a refinement of the method of exhaustion that he had already written about. You cannot invent calculus using nothing but geometry. You need algebra, and that had not been invented yet. (The two combined produce "analytical" geometry, the threshold of the calculus.) You also need the theory of limits and that was not introduced until the Calculators of Merton in the 14th century began to reason on "first and last moments" and the nature of "beginning to be." cf. William of Heytesbury.

Secondly, the use of palimpsests was routine. The scratch paper was routinely scraped off (not "washed") using a razor. (A quo, Ockham's razor; a quo "eraser.") Paper was cheap (once its production was automated with waterwheels and camshafts) but perishable. So was papyrus in the East. Parchment was longer-lasting, but not so cheap that it wasn't re-used on every occasion. Those same monks (a monastery in the Sinai) who overwrote the Archimedes palimpsest were the ones who had copied the Archimedes in the first place. It was not an original from the Hellenistic era. At the time that parchment was reused, as we know from references, the complete works of Archimedes were in circulation and so there was no big deal in re-using a scratch copy. Most of the monastic palimpsests we have are overwritings of Christian works. The oldest copy of the Bible we have was erased and overwritten with the sermons of Ephraem the Syrian. Hand-made manuscripts are necessarily rare; and time and chance happened to knock off this one particular work of Achimedes. Walker cannot claim that the Orthodox monks living under muslim rule were trying to "suppress calculus" when at the same time they and others were busily copying all the other works of Archimedes (and everyone else!) .

+ + +
16. Walker wrote: "Interestingly, every one of the the scientists that Christians love to cite, lived during the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment when the Church began to lose its power and the populace began to wake up from its religious stupor. None of them lived during the Dark Ages [sic]."

Jean Buridan de Bethune. Nicole d'Oresme. Albrecht of Saxony, WIlliam of Heytesbury, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Bradwardine, Theodoric of Fribourg, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, Nicholas Cusa, John Philoponus, etc. etc. (William of Ockham showed little interest in natural philosophy.).

+ + +
22. Walker wrote: "Christian political leaders today, continue to place barriers against science. .... Many deny global warming, birth control, stem cell research and other scientific advances that could save millions of people, if not the entire human race."

Yes, and a hundred years ago they "denied" eugenics, which was also urgently needed to "save the human race." Notice that Walker has segued from science to policy and politics. Birth control is not a "scientific truth," but a public policy by which poor people should not have children. But you cannot deduce a public law from a scientific theory.

The Judas Iscariot Plan for Wealth Redistribution

2009-10-20T11:44:00.014+08:00

Recently, comedienne Sarah Silverman posted a video where she rants about the pope, claiming that he ought to sell the Vatican. Uh, huh. Of course, that idea has been proposed many times before. Mark Shea hilariously calls it the Judas Iscariot Plan for Wealth Redistribution (pick up your dusty ol' Bible and go to John 12:3-8 to find out why).

A few Catholic blogs have already pointed out John Allen's excellent rebuttal to the Judas Iscariot Plan. Let me quote the pertinent part here:

In the public’s imagination, the Vatican is awash in priceless art, hidden Nazi gold, plundered treasures from around the world, and vast assets tucked away from prying eyes in the Vatican Bank. Reality is far more prosaic. To put it bluntly, the Vatican is not rich. It has an annual operating budget of $260 million, which would not place it on any Top 500 list of major social institutions. To draw a comparison in the non-profit sector, Harvard University has an annual operating budget of a little over $1.3 billion, which means it could run the equivalent of five Vaticans every year and still have pocket change left over. The Holy See’s budget would qualify it as a mid-sized American Catholic college. It’s bigger than Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles (annual budget of $150 million) or Saint Louis University ($174 million), but substantially less than the University of Notre Dame ($500 million).

The total patrimony of the Holy See, meaning its property holdings (including some 30 buildings and 1,700 apartments in Rome), its investments, its stock portfolios and capital funds, and whatever it has storied up in a piggy bank for a rainy day, comes to roughly $770 million. This is substantial, but once again one has to apply a sense of scale. What the Holy See calls “patrimony” is roughly what American universities mean by an “endowment” – in other words, funds and other assets designed to support the institution if operating funds fall short. The University of Notre Dame has an endowment of $3.5 billion, meaning a total 4.5 times as great as the Vatican’s.

But what of the some 18,000 artistic treasures in the Holy See, such as the Pietà, that don’t show up on these ledgers? From the Holy See’s point of view, these artworks are part of the artistic heritage of the world, and may never be sold or borrowed against. Michelangeo’s famous Pieta statue, the Sistine Chapel, or Raphael’s famous frescoes in the Apostolic Palace are thus listed at a value of 1 Euro each. In fact, those treasures amount to a net drain on the Holy See’s budget, because millions of Euros have to be allocated every year for maintenance and restoration.

You see, not only does Silverman somehow ignore the centuries of world history showing how much the Church cares for the poor, she doesn't even realize just how pointless it would be for the Vatican to sell most of its property. There is a difference between the genuine love for the poor that the Church has continuously manifested from the start, and the foolish iconoclasm of throwing away religious art for temporary financial relief. But of course, what else can we expect from Silverman, who worships the cult of Differently Different and Shockingly Shocking and Totally Radical Radicalism that is so very popular among the oh-so-very modern moderns of today*?

Oh wait, blindly following the fashionable fads of our Modern Moral Superiors contradicts the concept of Being Different? Oh, pish posh!

In the end we have to look back at the first person who suggested this supposedly charitable plan almost 2000 years ago. The Gospel of John says that Judas whined about expensive oil being wasted in the adoration of Christ instead of being "sold, with the proceeds given to the poor", not because he was particularly fond of the poor, but because he wanted to take the money for himself. If Silverman was truly moved, her heart bleeding and broken, for the plight of the less fortunate, then she would applaud the very real contributions of the Church in that regard. As it is, her actual reaction leads me to suspect that she, in her contempt for the authority of the pope, merely enjoys fantasizing about the pope going down, humiliated and exiled from his temporal base of power. And when the Vatican becomes open for looting, maybe then she could have one of the cooler Vatican treasures for herself and treat it as a status symbol.

I'd bet she thinks the Pieta would look nice in her back yard.

Edit: Let's not forget that the issue of selling the Vatican artwork is mostly a cultural issue rather than a religious one. As this article points out:

...suggesting that the Vatican should exchange its treasures for food in Africa is an impossibility due to international law...

In reality, he said, the Church "has the duty to conserve the works of art in the name of the Italian state." He affirmed, "It cannot sell them."

The prelate recalled an incident in the 1970s when a benefactor made a donation to renovate the Collegio Teutonico inside the Vatican, and the residence director wanted to give this person a small statue -- of a meager value compared to the others in the Vatican Museums -- as a gesture of gratitude.

The German benefactor had a lot of problems with the Italian state, as he was accused of taking goods that Italy was charged with safeguarding.

"In every country there are a lot of measures for the defense of works of art, because the state has a duty to maintain them," Cardinal Cordes added, noting that the Holy See treasures are also part of Italian cultural history.

--
* Who, incidentally, are mostly not very modern (in the sense of having new ideas), after all, since most of the arguments they proudly spout originate from very old heresies.

Chesterton on the Logical Consistency of Lunatics

2009-08-06T20:22:00.005+08:00

From Orthodoxy:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. [...] There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. [...] If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? [...] But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! [...] You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

---
Chesterton knew that logic depends on assumptions, and that perfectly logical arguments can still be flawed if the assumptions leave too much of the ordinary and sane and beautiful out of the picture. And as he showed, the best way to lure a man out of a crazy but internally consistent theory is to offer him a glimpse of sanity that his human nature longs for, but that is incompatible with his theory. He must be convinced that there is something more important to him than his theory. And the process of going about this rescue operation has very little to do with rational debate, but is rather more of a psychological battle to forcibly expose the crazy ideas that the man has taken for granted for too long, the crazy ideas that has made him blind.

The character Innocent Smith from Chesterton's novel Manalive used this method to jolt nihilists, communists and other sad, mad, but perfectly logical people back into sanity. Speaking of Manalive, there's a movie adaptation coming out this year, starring Catholic apologist Mark Shea as Innocent. Watch the trailer!

Job on Deceitful Apologists

2009-04-13T15:25:00.003+08:00

Got this from Eve Tushnet's blog.

"Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality.
Will not his majesty terrify you,
and the dread of him fall upon you?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,
your defenses are defenses of clay."

--Job rebuking his "comforters," Job 13:7-12

Lord, may I defend your teachings, but not with defenses of clay!

Chesterton on Christian Fun

2008-12-15T11:13:00.005+08:00

(I got this from the great guys of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping)

The Christmas celebrations will certainly remain, and will certainly survive any attempt by modern artists, idealists, or neo-pagans to substitute anything else for them. For the truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy.

All Socialist Utopias, all new Pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified. [...] But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation. [...] Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves.

Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter. Somebody said, and it has often been quoted: 'Be good and you will be happy; but you will not have a jolly time.' The epigram is witty, but it is profoundly mistaken in its estimate of the truth of human nature. I should be inclined to say that the truth is exactly the reverse. Be good and you will have a jolly time; but you will not be happy. If you have a good heart you will always have some lightness of heart; you will always have the power of enjoying special human feasts, and positive human good news. But the heart which is there to be lightened will also be there to be hurt; and really if you only want to be happy, to be steadily and stupidly happy like the animals, it may be well worth your while not to have a heart at all.

Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time. Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christmas customs destroy the human habits.

And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of a religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead. Composure, resignation, and the most exquisite good manners are, so to speak, the strong points of corpses. There is only one way in which you can test his real vitality, and that is by a special festival. Explode crackers in his ear, and see if he jumps. Prick him with holly, and see if he feels it. If not, he is dead, or, as he would put it, is 'living the higher life.'

--G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 11 January 1908.

(In case a reader doesn't get it, "philosophy" here means the cold, high-brow sort, the sort enjoyed by people pretending to be Nietzschean Supermen.)

Gmail Innovates. Y! and MS Makes Cutesy UI's.

2008-11-12T16:26:00.009+08:00

You can now talk to your Gmail buddies, a la the Google Talk desktop client.

You can even view their webcams while you talk.

Gmail rocks. I'm not even gonna talk about the many cool experimental features in Gmail Labs. As far as webmail goes, Google is king. Yahoo and Microsoft can shove their drag and drop Outlook-wannabes up their asses.

/end demented fanboyism

Update:

I just couldn't wait, so I went and grabbed the Gmail Video chat plugin:
http://www.gmail.com/videochat

/start shallow analysis

Let's talk pros and cons. First, it's good that you can do voice chats between Gmail and Google Talk, but this capability is somewhat hidden: when you hover on a contact (in the Chat panel) who is running Google Talk but not Gmail, then you click on "Video & more", there is no option to initiate voice chat. Instead, you'll have to start a normal chat session first, then click "Video & more" on the contact's chat "window", before you could find the "Start voice chat" option.

Nonetheless, voice chat w/ Google Talk buddies went well when I tried it. Audio is clear and the ring tone isn't irritating. I was on a Windows XP system, and I used both Firefox and Google Chrome (I'll let others test the less relevant browsers. Kidding! :P). I still need to test this with a web cam, though. Maybe I'll post a follow-up this weekend.

Other issues:

There is no ability to send voicemail from Gmail, yet (you can already do this in the Google Talk desktop client).
The new chat features are enabled via a plugin, so obviously compatibility is a problem. For now, Gmail Video chat only works on Windows XP or later.
Video chat is not yet available in iGoogle. I'm hoping the iGoogle team will use the same plugin if ever they decide to include Video chat in their Google Talk gadget. Wouldn't want to download multiple plugins for this on my slow work PC.

Update: According to Philipp Lenssen, there might actually be a Mac plugin, already. Still none for Linux. Oh well.

There is still Hope despite you, Mr. Obama

2008-11-11T12:28:00.003+08:00

“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”

-Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers

Chesterton on Naturalistic Morality

2008-10-27T11:46:00.005+08:00

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Google is the Borg

2008-09-28T21:59:00.006+08:00

It's been a while since I last talked about Google (you might think it was just five real blog-posts ago, but that also means it was back in May). Most of the Google news these past few months have deserved nothing more than a tweet or two, if that*-- though of course I still share blog posts about the company all the time-- but things are starting to get really interesting as Google's plans to take over the world, er, I mean their plan to organize the world's information... is taking them to new places (literally, in one case).

Google announced the Android platform last year, and now T-Mobile unveiled the first ever commercial smartphone that runs on it: the T-Mobile G1. I'm really hoping that such open platforms like Android and Openmoko become successful. The competition that could potentially be offered by these dirt-cheap platforms ought to accelerate the development of better, cheaper, more open mobile technologies. And with that, average people will begin to finally find some use in buying smartphones and not see them merely as expensive toys. We could finally be entering an era of smartphone ubiquity.**

Now, we knew last year that Google created a simple Webkit-based browser as part of their Android software, and that should have been a clue to the biggest bombshell they dropped so far this year: the Google Chrome browser. Cynical jokes have been made about how the Google Borg isn't content that people use their sites and is now telling people to use Google sites via a Google browser. You could almost imagine some digital monster crawling slowly but surely, first on a web page, then onto your taskbar... then suddenly you see a clawed, bluish hand reaching out from your monitor and grabbing your throat... Well anyway, Google says they created the open-source Chrome because they wanted to help others make better web browsers, because they want a better Web, because the Web is their home sweet home. Whatever their reasons really are, I'm already shamelessly using Chrome as my primary browser. It doesn't have extensions, but I just love not having to wait forever to load Firefox just to check my reading list. I'm also pretty happy with its intuitive Omnibox search features. Still, the thing is in beta.*** I use Firefox occasionally when needed, like whenever Chrome won't play nice with certain sites (the problems are usually CSS-related). Another problem is it sometimes stalls for a few seconds when switching tabs, which is quite annoying given the amount of multi-tasking I do at work****. All in all, I can't wait for the next Chrome version to come out.

The last bit of news is that the Philippines (among others) is now editable in Google Map Maker. I've been playing with it for the past few days it's been very, very educational so far. See, I once got lost in the middle of the very city I live in because all the jeepneys in the area were going to places I didn't know. Heck, I don't even know the names of half the streets in my small neighborhood. Reading all day and never hanging out with friends during the weekends does that to you. But now I can memorize all the main roads in Metro Manila without leaving the comfort of my house/office/dorm. They always say that travelling the streets and exploring places is good exercise for the body, and so I think I'll go travelling some more now. Let me just open another tab. There you go. Drag, drag, double-click... I can feel the health benefits already!

--
* Okay, okay... I'm just a lazy blogger.
** What can I say? I like to daydream. :)
*** Well, this is Google we're talking about. Most of what they do are in beta. What I meant was Chrome is in very early beta.
**** All work-related... if "work" is defined as "clicking on the mouse of the work computer".

Anarchy and Chance Part 2: The Small Laws

2008-08-23T11:46:00.015+08:00

(This is the second part of my ramblings concerning The Dark Knight movie. The first part dealt with the Joker, and here I deal with Two-Face. Just as with Part 1, I will treat the character, not as a realistic human being whose psychology could validly be analyzed, but rather I will treat him as a philosophical object. In the Part 1 I used Joker as a model of what the atheistic world view rationally leads to in terms of morality. Here in Part 2, I will use Two-Face as a caricature of someone enslaved by sin. I do this to describe my thoughts on certain concepts, not to describe actual people.)

"When you break the big laws, " says the philosopher G.K. Chesterton, "you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." This succinctly describes, I think, the central philosophical problem posed by the character in The Dark Knight film named Harvey Dent, also called "Two-Face". The villain Two-Face is a mad-man obsessed with little impromptu coin-toss-related laws that govern and dictate his every big decision. Yet even as District Attorney Dent, the White Knight of Gotham, he was already tainted with the seed of his future madness. For all his righteousness and courage and integrity, Harvey Dent already had a dent long before The Joker twisted him completely.

When Chesterton says "the big laws", he means Divine Law, specifically Christian doctrine. It is called big, not just because we believe it to come from The Big Man himself, but because it is always broad, all-encompassing, "catholic". For example, when we say "human life is sacred", we do not just mean the life of good Christians, or the life of decent law-abiding citizens, or the life of those who just so happened to be no longer dependent on their mother's womb. We mean all human life. Christian doctrine is also big in the sense that it is not limited by the ignorance, prejudices, and environment of its followers. An orthodox Catholic from the 21st century and an orthodox (and time-traveling!) Catholic from the 15th century might argue endlessly about politics, cosmology, music, and proper attire, yet their orthodoxy could still remain intact. A 27th century Vulcan might land his time-traveling spaceship in front of them, exhibiting vast knowledge and scientific insight, yet none of that could threaten their Faith one bit (the Vulcan might even become Catholic! Hello Bishop Spock!). When we call Christian philosophy a cosmic philosophy, we mean it!

Lastly, Christian doctrine is big because it is something that is whole. Like Health and Sanity, it is a balance and an intertwining of things in a way that one part cannot stand without the rest. And here we return to Harvey Dent. The problem with Dent, the problem of any typical heretic, really, is that he lost sight of healthy thinking because he was obsessed with one tiny part of sanity, breaking it away from the whole as if it was self-sufficient. Harvey Dent's obsession was basically the doctrine of Free Will, which in his hands degenerated into egotism and the irrational disregard for outside forces.

"I don't leave anything up to chance, I make my own luck."

Chesterton said in his book Orthodoxy that the act of believing in oneself, far from being an indication of future success (as so many self-help books claim), is rather often the first sign of a rotter. And the reason for thing is illustrated by the story of Harvey Dent's rotting. He poured all his hope and passion into a single sane idea, the idea that he has the power to change his environment, that he is not just a passive leaf going with the flow of the river. But he forgot two things. First, that we are all part of a bigger Plan (generally of God, though in this case, the movie makers are the gods :P), and just as there are things we can change, there are also things that are beyond us, no matter how much will we have. And so we have the prayer "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." Secondly he also forgot that other people have Free Will as well. He fell in love with his own Free Will, which is another way of saying that he's fallen for himself, which is simply the sin of Pride. And with Pride comes th Fall. Believing completely in himself, Dent was blindsided by the Free Will of an evil clown, and by the time Joker was done with him, that tiny piece of sanity left in him blew up in his face. The Worship of Oneself wasn't so self-sufficient, after all! And in his despair, he took the rest of what was left of his sanity, and smashed it to pieces, leaving behind a bunch of tiny laws and ideas centered upon the complete reversal of his first obsession:

We are all slaves of Chance. Our will, our choices and beliefs mean nothing once the coin has been tossed.
Chance dictates who is punished and who escapes to live another day. It is the only kind of Justice: "unbiased, unprejudiced, fair".
Right and Wrong are merely the opposite sides of the same coin. An action becomes considered right only by Chance.

And all it took was, as the Joker said, "a little push".

The half-baked belief, Free Will becoming mere worship of Self (the "I believe in Harvey Dent" motto comes to mind), shattered into even more fragile pieces, simple truisms that only the insane would call "beliefs". For example, the "slave of Chance" claim is useless because it is simply a sophistic restatement of something that isn't even an argument in the first place: the truism that "things happen" (which is just as insightful as another common truism used by some who enjoy small laws: "I like doing the things I like"). Or in another sense, calling yourself a "slave of Chance" is so useless that it becomes too useful, because just as it explains nothing, it explains everything away. Once you base your philosophy on a truism, all your thoughts can be excused, for you have already excused yourself of Thought itself. Why bother thinking of Ethics, when your best friend Chance has already showed you the way to what you want? Yet whatever sense of freedom such a philosophy gives, in the end it only enslaves the mind.

You think I want to escape from this? There is no escape from this!

For a man who embraces the small laws for everything will discover that everything has become so much smaller. Like a triangle that broke from the bonds of its three sides, he finds himself free from far too much. Having freed himself, for example, from the "chains" of Free Will, he is startled to discover that he can no longer say, among other things, "Thank you", "Please", "I don't like what you're doing", "Sorry", "I forgive you", and "I love you"... at least not without contradicting his philosophy. The man of Chance binds himself with polished, refined, high-class chains that will not even let him pass the salt-shaker if he pleases, and to be thanked for it. Is it any surprise that it won't let Harvey Dent kill a traitor? Chance, after all, is a two-faced friend.

And thus Harvey Dent became Two-Face, the mindless murderous peon of an unthinking coin, somehow imagining himself to be Enlightened, like the atheistic Brights of today who laugh and sneer at believers whilst trapped in their own little prisons.

Yet the Truth shall set you free.

--
Edit: Changed the title of the post to reflect the Chesterton quote. It's what I originally intended, but writing at 2am in the morning can be really bad for one's focus.

Edit: Added stuff to the last few paragraphs in a futile attempt to improve coherence.

Edit: After re-reading Orthodoxy, added another classic Chesterton saying.