The Armenian genocide is controversial. The Armenians and their supporters believe that many, many Armenians were exterminated by the Ottomans and that this counts as genocide. The Turks and their supporters deny at the least that it was systematic policy of extermination (genocide). So there is debate about the historical facts, and, as is natural with genocides and national shame, is very heated.

I don’t know whether the Armenian genocide really happened. What concerns me is that the French government could ban an idea.  I realise it’s not just the Armenian genocide. Holocaust denial is also illegal in France. But they shouldn’t be.

Now some ideas should be fought, because they are wrong (like holocaust denial) and some ideas are even dangerous (like fascism). But making those ideas illegal is not the way to do it.

First of all, if you ban an idea, you actually shoot yourself in the foot. You prevent yourself from being able to articulate real reasons why the idea is wrong or dangerous. How can we explain to future generations who did not personally experience the horror of Nazism the problems with fascism if we do not find ways to argue against it. If there can be no defence of Nazism, we will make no defence of freedom.

Again, banning the idea promotes a conspiracy theory instead of squelching it. If we had the facts and the data to prove that the 1915 genocide happened, or that the Holocaust was a real event, then we could employ those facts. The fact that we hide behind government legislation instead of forwarding a real defence suggests that we have no defence. We are safer from bad ideas when we attack the idea, not criminalise the proponent.

The deeper, more philosophical problem with banning ideas instead of disproving them is that it promotes wrong perceptions of authority. The government has decided that this idea is wrong, or unhealthy, and the government will enforce this. But the government is not the proper authority on truth. The truth or value of an idea does not comes from the government, or from any other institution.  This is dangerous is because governments change and governments can get it wrong. If a modern government can ban fascism today, why can’t a future government ban democracy later?

No, governments do not establish truth, and therefore they should not patrol truth. Reality determines truth, and we discover reality through facts and reasoning. Therefore we should depend on these to silence the bad and the wrong ideas.

This can be uncomfortable. It can mean that ideas many find extremely painful, like the idea that the Armenians were not murdered en masse, get a lot of publicity or even acceptance. It can mean that we have to deal with political or social opponents whose philosophy we know is truly terrible, like fascists.

But to silence these ideologies by law is the lazy option, and an option which is opposed to truth and freedom. Which is ironic- it was our dedication to truth and freedom which led us to oppose ideas like fascism and genocide denial in the first place.

There is a thought which stops thought. That is the only thought which ought to be stopped.
-GK Chesterton

It’s 2012. So naturally it’s cliché to write about the end of the world.

However, I do enjoy the sound desk and I understand the more technical (not that it’s that technical) side alright, so it’s all good. Last Sunday I was operating the sound system and had a friend sitting next to me running the powerpoint (I was teaching her how to run the sound and the powerpoint- she shows much promise!). Afterwards, we were talking about how it went and she joked that she’d be happy to do it again, but only if I didn’t sing! Apparently during the worship she could really tell that my voice was  a) too deep, b) out of tune and c) wavering. In short, that it sounded very bad!

I wasn’t really surprised.

Then this morning my sister, Jessica found this music clip entitled Christmas Carol Nightmare. It made me feel much better about my singing abilities. Listen to the clip. It’s hilarious. In fact, before you read on, do listen to it. It’s three minutes of the worst singing I have ever heard. It was laugh-out-loud quality.

Also, check out the comment thread.

One commenter who really got me thinking, said:

 a) this is why I don’t sing in church.
b) This is the guy behind me.

So what about singing during the worship in church? Is it best left to those who can actually sing? Or should people who can’t sing (like me!) sing a little quieter, maybe, if only to preserve peace and harmony in the body of Christ?

It’s Christmas time. It’s probably the time of year that we pay most attention to what we sing. It’s also the year we might sing the most songs in church, or at least trundle out our most beloved favourites. And why do we sing?

We sing to glorify God. I used to find it hard to understand why singing platitudes about how nice God is makes God happy, as if He’s some sort of massive egoist up in the clouds. But we sing, like we do everything else, to tell God, to admit to Him and to declare, that He is in charge. That we recognise that He is:

Wonderful, Counselsor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

In the old days the servants and subjects of a great king or lord would go to the throne room and bow there to recognise that the king was in charge. Today, Christians go to church and sing songs, hymns and yes, carols, to recognise that “The LORD, He is God!”

So while my singing voice is still a little embarrassing for me (and probably painful for those in the immediate vicinity) I’m not going to stop singing along with the worship, because it was never about the singing. It’s about praising and recognising God. And we can do that in any tune.

Photos Copyright (c) http://www.123rf.com’>123RF Stock Photos

It’s true that if we got into the habit of communicating clearly with our colleagues, we would get more done. It’s fair to say that effective people know how to use their time wisely and regularly seize the initiative to fix problems before they arise. It’s common knowledge that successful people are positive thinkers who look for the best in a situation, instead of being paralysed by negativity.

Yet, these are all verbs, “doing words”. A habit is not primarily a verb. It is first a noun, and then becomes a verb. It is first a belief system, and then it becomes an action. That’s when we start to see our habits in operation, and realise that we’ve developed them. However, those actions won’t really become typical until we hold beliefs which advocate these activities.

But there are some people, nevertheless- and I am one of them- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.”

GK Chesterton in “Heretics”, chapter : Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

It is more useful to know the philosophy of a lodger than his money, because his philosophy determines how he will spend that money. And it is more important to know an enemy’s philosophy than his numbers because the philosophy will dictate how he will use his numbers. And again, it is more important to determine your philosophy in order to be effective, than to determine your activities like communication or taking the initiative.

For instance, Stephen Covey’s first habit in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is not actually a verb, but a belief, a philosophy of responsibility. He calls his first habit “proactivity”. This does not mean taking the initiative or planning ahead; it is first and foremost a belief that I am responsible for my actions and for my life.

Nobody forces you to act.

Proactive people do not accept the deterministic lie that “I have to go to the party” or “he makes me so angry” or “she made me do it”. Being proactive means believing that your actions and your life is your problem. We choose to party and we choose to get angry. Once we start believing that what happens to us is because of our choices, then we start to make good choices.

Once we believe that it is our responsibility to have a prosperous future, we start planning ahead. Once we appreciate our responsibility to solve the problems that plague us, we start to take the initiative in searching for solutions. People who believe that their problems is another person’s fault or simply outside of their control, will not act with initiative or proactivity, because they do not believe in responsibility.

Habits are most of all beliefs about what the world is like and how we should act in that world. The actions we normally define as a “habit” such as taking the initiative are simply the physical reaction to our beliefs. To create a habit therefore means probing and changing our beliefs and attitudes before we change our actions.

Stephen R. Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” has been a great read for me. So far I’ve found lots of insights into, well, being more effective. How he broke down a habit into three areas has been especially enlightening for me.

Knowledge: To form and maintain a habit you need to know what you want to achieve. I know that I want to wake up at 5:00, have my devotions, exercise, shower, eat and then do my jobs. I know that I will need to stop reading over breakfast because that slows me and distracts me from what is important. I know that I will need to go to bed early if I am to wake up early.

Skill: There is no point knowing what you need to do if you are not capable of it. Particularly if I go to bed early, I am capable of actually getting myself out of bed early in the morning. That’s a skill (of sorts). I know that I am capable of organising my night-time activities to allow myself to go to bed early. That’s not so much a question of “skill” as “making it possible”. So I guess you could call this category “capability” or “ability” as much as anything.

Desire: For my early morning routine, this is the hard one. You can know what you want to, and be able to do it, but unless you want to do it more than you want to do anything else, you’re not going to do it. It’s not just a case of wanting to change. I want to start my days with a bang. It’s just that often, I want to read the news even more! The desire to read is stronger than the desire to stay focused.

You have a habit when you know what you want to do, are able to do and want to do it, that is, when you have knowledge, skill and desire combined.

I really like this definition of a habit because it breaks it down. I started this post saying “I struggle to develop good early morning habits”. Now I know why I struggle.

It could be because I don’t know the best way to go about this morning routine (I really should exercise before I eat because running on a glutted stomach is not nice).

could be because I don’t have the skills or the capacity (I’m staying up too late watching TV shows like The Mentalist).

In reality, I know it’s because I don’t desire it strongly enough. Reading is more attractive than starting my day on target.

Now I know what I need to change, I can start developing strategies to change it. Unfortunately, I suspect desires are the hardest parts of a bad habit to change.

What happened was that a two-year old Chinese girl was hit by a truck in a market in southern China. Eighteen people, including another vehicle (which also ran over the girl) passed the crushed toddler without stopping to help or save her. They literally decided to look the other way, walking within metres of the dying girl’s body.

This has sparked outrage among Chinese netizens, some commenting,

“This society is seriously ill. Even cats and dogs shouldn’t be treated so heartlessly.”

And another:

“Really, what is up with our society? I saw this and my heart went cold. Everyone needs to do some soul searching about ending this kind of indifference.”

These worthy netizens are right. But they are only right in a shallow way. It’s not just that the Chinese society is sick. It’s that it’s sick in a certain type of way.

It’s sick with those two revered traditions of the westernised world; justice, and capitalism.

I say justice because in China, litigation has become so bad that the Ministry of Health warned last September to not rush to the aid of injured elderly people, because the risk of being sued for what happened to them is too high.

Now litigation is about fighting for your rights and seeing that those who contravene them are punished. The left has often fought for the rights of the downtrodden and the oppressed. So litigation is a good thing, and probably owes more to the left of politics than the right.

In our eagerness to protect our rights, we demand that every time our rights are trespassed somebody be punished, fined and hauled before the court, because somebody must be responsible for the contravention of my rights,

even if the person we sue is not responsible. This is wrong. If we want rights, we must have responsibilities. We must realise that if we are grownups, then we are responsible for our own lives and mature enough to handle the cruelty of fate. My tragedies can be tragic without being someone else’s responsibility.

Secondly, I say capitalism caused this Chinese travesty. One of the drivers who ran over the girl with his vehicle claimed that he did not stop because,

“If she’s dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan ($3200), but if she’s injured it may cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan.”

Capitalism is a good economic system (as China proves) but when it starts to determine moral right and wrong, then we have a social disaster. In capitalism, what makes money is good, what threatens the bottom line is bad. Helping people risks a court fine, so it risks losing money without profit. By the dictates of capitalist morality, saving that’s girl’s life was not worth hundreds of thousands of yuan. When we serve Mammon, we do not love Man. You cannot serve two masters.

So what’s “seriously sick” is not some phenomenon in communistic or heartless China. What is seriously sick is the Western success story. We have gone too far.  The freedom to make money and the right to stand up for ourselves are wonderful things, but they are wonderful limited things. As concepts operating in a framework that we are human beings, responsible for our own lives and being human, are beyond any price, they are wonderful.

But when they are our moral guidelines, then society becomes nasty, brutish and cruel. Just like this.

But there is absolute truth, I’ll rant. There is logic and reason. It’s not all airy-fairy mystic mysteries. God says there is absolute truth that is always true - you can’t reduce it to a set of unknowns that everybody has to explore for themselves, and maybe find out different answers from each other. There is one answer, I’ll declare, one answer for all humanity written and decreed by God, who never changes.

That’d be my normal reaction. But since I’m the one who wrote this title, I better explain why I do actually believe in a “touch of mysticism.”

To use the word mysticism, I mean the word as its root suggests; suggestive of mystery, of things we cannot understand but accept by faith. Mysticism has come to mean belief in only mysteries, just like logic has come to mean only using logic. I am not attacking logic. I am simply saying there is more to life than reason (and there is more to the universe than mystery).

Humans cannot understand everything. The human mind is limited. We cannot understand the concept of eternity; we cannot understand how free will and predestination could possibly both be true; and we cannot understand how Jesus could be both fully God and fully human at the same time. These things are impossible for the human mind to grasp.

One group of early Christians, the Nestorians, did attempt to grasp everything with their human minds. That is to say, they were humanistic. They attempted to understand, humanly understand, logically and reasonably understand, how it is physically possible for Jesus to be both entirely divine, and at the same time, entirely human. If you do the mathematics, as the Nestorians did, you find that that equals 200%, which is more than one whole. You cannot fit two things into one space at one time.

The Nestorians then did the only logical and sensible thing. They ditched Jesus’ divinity (at least to some extent.) Some Nestorians went so far as to say that Jesus was not divine at all - only a very good man. Others said He was a man who became God when the Holy Spirit entered Him at baptism. Either way, they denied the divinity of God.

But if Jesus was not fully God, then He could not be perfect (because every human is sinful) and He could not be the unblemished lamb “slain for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:6). The entire point of Jesus dying on the cross and redeeming us, the whole idea of redemption at Easter, falls apart. There is no Christianity.

Where then, did the Nestorians go wrong? They went wrong when they refused to accept that there will be things that we, as finite beings, do not logically understand about an infinite God. You cannot fit a big thing into a small human mind.

The solution to these contradictions is not reason, because they are beyond human reason. The solution is mysticism, which Christians normally call “faith”.

We believe by faith what we have not seen (Hebrews 11). If we accept that there are mysteries (the root word of “mystic”) that we shall never understand, then we can live with these contradictions content in the belief that God understands it and it all works.  If we refuse to accept that we shall never understand it, then we shall either go mad attempting an impossibility, or create a heresy that does make sense but isn’t true. I know which one I prefer.

We all need a touch of mysticism to understand the things that are bigger than ourselves. As GK Chesterton writes,

“The general fact is pretty simple. …reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion… To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

Orthodoxy, chapter two, “The Maniac”

Call it the fallacy of the ubiquitous madmen- that we call every misunderstood fanatic “mad”. But they are not mad; we are simply too lazy to understand their thinking. And what you do not understand, you cannot counter.

Now I partly understand Ahab’s claim to insanity- he certainly is in an unusual and unhealthy mental state. A big white whale chops his leg off, and so Ahab decides to run around the world chasing the most deadly marine monster known to man simply because it bit his leg off.

Call me fish food...

It’s unhealthy, foolish and unwise to be sure, but I doubt it’s mad.

Hitler, Ahab and the Norway gunman were not mad; rather they were slaves to logic. Once the belief of Aryan supremacy was fully accepted, one had no choice but to build Auschwitz. Hitler wrote a whole book, Breivik a manifesto, on why they had to kill the Jews, or the Norwegians.

Mein Kampf: "My Life"

We call them mad, because their thinking is so strange, and so different. But we don’t take the time to dig deeper and see they produced reasoned (maybe poorly reasoned) arguments supporting their actions.

If their logic could convince them, it can convince others. The only way to stop others from learning their logic is to present counter-arguments. But why argue with a madman, when he can see a shrink twice a week?

Ideas have consequences. In 1629, a Dutch ship, the Batavia, was shipwrecked on a coral reef off the West Australian coastline. Marooned with over 300 other survivors, one man, Jeronimus Cornelisz decided that there was not enough food and water to go around; so he gathered a band of cutthroats to kill the other unarmed passengers in a reign of terror that lasted for weeks. They butchered everybody judged to be unhelpful for the murderers’ chances of survival- including men, women and children, even babies. How could this one mastermind, this Jeronimus, contemplate such an action? Simple: he believed that there was no Heaven and there was no Hell, and whatever man did, God had put it in his heart; therefore killing hundreds of unarmed people was the will of God.

About 200 people were killed- women, children, men, infirm and infants alike

Ideas have consequences. The danger in describing dictators like Hitler or mass murderers like Breivik as “mad” is that we fail to spot the ideas that caused the consequences. We must acknowledge these men as bad, not mad, men who thought and reasoned their way to murder and tyranny, and then wrestle with our own ideas to produce an alternative philosophy. If we fail to spot their dangerous ideas now, we will likely fail to spot those ideas again later, when they reoccur. That is dangerous.

People, including most Christians, have for the last 2400 years been seeing life as a hamburger.

Life was split into two parts- the Sacred and the Secular; and like the buns in a hamburger, they don’t touch. Sacred things- church, morality etc. had nothing to do with secular things like work, family or hobbies. And never the twain shall meet.  There was sometimes (often in the Church) also an attitude that the spiritual things, the Sacred bun, was superior to the sinful physical things in the Secular bun. The Christian goal was to escape the sinful physical world and reach the pure spiritual world in the heavens.

For the Christian, this is not so! In the beginning God created everything, and it was very good. Consider what “everything” means- literally, everything. That’s trees and plants and stars and biology and education and medicine and farming and politics and parenting and plumbing and carpentry. God created all these things for his glory and our enjoyment. If God (the ultimate spiritual entity) created these physical things, then physical things cannot be inherently bad things, just corrupted.

Certainly, sin has twisted all these things- they are no longer very good. But who is Lord of my life? God, or sin? If God is Lord of my life, then I live under Him, not under sin! God created everything, and is my Lord in everything; therefore there is no area in my life- study, work, family, hobbies- that is not ruled by God. The hamburger is destroyed.

That’s why it’s so important to read the Bible, and apply it to every part of our lives. We can’t say “that’s my secular life; I’ll keep my faith out of it”. God created all spheres, and he is Lord over all my spheres. How can I keep God out?

When I die, I know there will be a cross over my grave, and probably a cross over the preacher too. But I want to know, will there be a cross over how I live?

From the ABC*-

The Government’s lynchpin election promise of a National Broadband Network (NBN) has inched closer to fruition today, after a deal was struck with independent Senator Nick Xenophon.

Senator Xenophon had been refusing to back NBN legislation which would enable the separation of Telstra’s wholesale and retail arms.

He wanted the NBN business case released before promising his vote in the Upper House on the bill to separate Telstra.

The Government has now confirmed it has agreed to release a summary of the business plan ahead of a vote in the Senate.

The Government only has until the end of tomorrow to get the bill passed this year before Parliament rises for the summer break.

50 pages is better than none. But what is this?

Ms Gillard says the summary will not include any information that would cause market uncertainty.

So it’s all positive. How can you properly evaluate a project if you’re only given the good news? And if the whole business plan is good news, why so shy about it?

Gillard also said that the project is expected to cost 35.7 billion, instead of the previously forecast 43 billion. So we’re to support a 35.7 billion dollar project on just 50 pages of predictions and prophecy? That’s 714 million dollars a page.

Could you imagine walking up to the bank and saying, “Hi, I’d like to take a $36 billion dollar loan to invest in new technology, but I’d rather not show you how I intend to spend it. I’ll give you a 50-page brochure about it though!”

You cannot name a business, or a bank, that’d go along with that. So what makes this government so cocky?

*Links aren’t working for some reason- here’s the URL- http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/24/3075182.htm

UPDATE: Fixed mathematical mistake. Whoops!