21/06/08

i lost my bag today
together with my wallet, handphone, water bottle, scarf, book, pouch, keys, and a skirt i got for my friend's birthday celebrations tmr.

along with my wallet my student card, singapore IC, atm card, OSHC card, Scott's printing card and some cash.

along with my keys my USB and laptop lock keys.


and then my housemate dropped her keys into the lift shaft on the way home. she had to pay $200 to get people to get it out cos i don't have the keys too!

another friend lost somebody else's key this week too which has never happened before.

another friend's house got broken into this week too.

wow. what a series of unfortunate events.




anw.
cancelled my atm card and ordered a new one. suspended my phone line. reported police report. the shop had cameras so the police will get to it. will wait a week to see what progress there is, but not holding my hopes high though.




so
now my laptop will be permanently locked to my table unless i get the keys back or ... don't think too much.

so
i lost my USB again. this time i didn't leave it anywhere. i lost it from right under my nose.

so
this nalgene waterbottle didn't have the same affinity as the previous one.




no wonder
i had the sudden urge to read the book last night.
God knew i would lose the book today.

no wonder
i had little success getting the dress, the right one, in the right size.
God knew she would never get to wear it. she probably wouldn't fit anyway.





thankful for quality QT this morning that kept me through this trial.
thankful that i have more than the material things of this world. my treasures are in heaven. my soul is saved for ever.
thankful for a warm home, nice housemate and her friend, wonderful friends always there to help and care.
thankful for experienced people around me to guide me on the steps i need to take.




Looking back, God knew. God moved.
Looking ahead, God knows. God moves.

1Pe 4:12
Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you[
Jas 1:2-4
My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;
Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.
But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
i was here at 21/06/08 2:23 PM be careful little tongue (0)

20/06/08

this is a bit hard to get
ARGUMENT 4: CONSCIOUSNESS

The human body has a conscious soul that is different from its materiality (we are not walking zombies). If our emotions are material, can you weigh your "thoughts" or bottle "love" or "envy" and sell these "chemicals" at your local Wal-Mart? Are chemicals to be held responsible for people falling in love? Even Einstein confessed "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love".

Some sceptics try to deny that there is any logic in the world and that there is nothing that is truly "knowable". This was the view popularised by influential philosopher Immanuel Kant who maintained that, "you can't know anything about the real world." The fatal flaw in this position, which Kant never explained, is how does he know what the "real world" is then? Also, his claim is self-defeating, as by claiming you cannot know anything about the real world; Kant claimed to know that the real world is unknowable! This reminds me of the story of a student who asked his philosophy professor: "How do I know that I exist?" The learned professor looked down from his notes and fixed his eyes at the young man and replied, "And whom shall I say is asking?"
i was here at 20/06/08 12:41 PM be careful little tongue (0)

20/06/08

this is new
ARGUMENT 3: MORALITY

"Ah," a sceptical student questioned, "Is there not too much evil in the world to be a God?"

"But, surely," said Zacharias, "when you use the term "evil" you are pre-supposing good and if there is objective good then there must be a moral law to reflect this. But when you admit there is a moral law, then you must admit a moral law giver - but then that's what you are trying to disprove and not prove!

So if there is no law giver, then there is not good or evil - so what is your meaningless question?"

If there are no absolute morals, can child abuse ever be morally neutral or even good? Is choosing to engage in racism, slavery, and torture really no different to a preference for strawberry instead of chocolate ice cream? Yes, morals can be taught as well as innate but does that negate their objectivity - does teaching mathematics make it subjective?

No atheist has ever explained how an impersonal, amoral initial cause through a random amoral process has produced a moral basis for human life, while at the same time denying any objective moral basis for good or evil.

"There are no morals in nature. Try to find a compassionate crow or an honest eagle - or a sympathetic hurricane."
- Dave Hunt

Atheist Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins accepts the moral relativist consequences of atheism and adds:
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music."

Leaving aside how in a world, as described above, Dawkins can deduce what "design, purpose, evil and good" is, why do we care and why do we know then? Do computers know each other? Do computers sympathise with each other? Maybe Dawkins would like to tell the victims of Hitler that he was just dancing to his DNA! What kind of criminal justice system would we have if courts were told that criminals just danced to their DNA? Why has the Western world jut fought a war with Bin Laden if he was just dancing to his DNA?

"We love truth when it enlightens us but we hate it when it convicts us."
- Augustine
i was here at 20/06/08 12:34 PM be careful little tongue (0)

20/06/08

the classic evolution vs creation
ARGUMENT 2: DIVINE DESIGN

1. All designs have a designer.

2. The universe has a highly complex design.

3. Therefore, the universe has a designer.

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent being toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand those laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."
- Einstein in a 1929 interview

"An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence."
- Dr Charles B. Thaxton, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry at Harvard University

Chance can explain complexity, but not specification.

One scientist recently described a single cell organism as a high-tech factory made up of 10 million atoms and complete with "artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principles of prefabrication and modular construction... and a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of hours."
- Franklin M. Harold

"Each cell in your body, is selecting right now approximately five hundred thousand amino acids, consisting of some ten million atoms, organizing them into preselected strings, joining them together, checking to be certain each string is folded into specific shapes, and then shipping each protein off to a site, some inside the cell, some outside, sites that somehow have signaled a need for these specific proteins. Every second. Every cell. Your body is a living wonder.
- M.I.T. researcher Dr Gerald Schroeder

"Information is an entirely different kind of stuff from the physical medium in which it may be temporarily recorded. It would be absurd to try to explain the literary quality or meaning of a book as an emergent property of the physical qualities of its ink and paper. The message comes from an author; ink and paper are merely the media. Similarly, the information written in DNA is not the product of DNA. Where did all the information come from? Who or what is the author?

Physical laws cannot be the answer. These laws do produce some fairly complex structures, such as snowflakes and crystal. In such cases, the laws produce the same structure over and over again, with chance variations. Repetitive order has a very low information content."
- Berkeley Law Professor, Philip Johnson

"To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems i freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
- Charles Darwin

"The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."
- Prof. Stephen Hawking, physicist

Astrophysicist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago and Fermilab, describes the fine-tuning of the universe with a simile: "The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bulls eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side."

As one mathematician quipped, "Give chance a chance? No chance!"

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
- Charles Darwin

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life... because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door."
- Richard Lewontin, Harvard atheist and geneticist, on atheistic science's pre-suppositional bias against intelligent design

Atheistic evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups!
i was here at 20/06/08 12:18 PM be careful little tongue (0)

20/06/08

God and the Atheist
A lawyer assesses the evidence for the existence of God

A princess kissed a frog which became a prince and we call that a fairy tale. Atheists tell us frogs turn into princes and we call that Science!
- Anonymous

PART I
HOW DO WE KNOW THERE IS A GOD?

Often the charge that is leveled against Christians is that they blindly believe in faith. ... The truth is that our whole lives are based on faith. we have faith that our dentist and doctor are qualified to treat us, we have faith that the brakes in our car will work when we apply them, we have faith that our milk and sugar in our cornflakes have been produced to the standards claimed by the manufacturers. You cannot live life without faith.

ARGUMENT 1: COSMOLOGY

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
(The Law of Causality)

Imagine if Christians taught such absurd theology (something comes from nothing) - we would be mocked in every newspaper and science journal with "join the church that believes trillion of stars came from nothing by nothing!" or referred derisively as the church with a holy book that says: "in the beginning nothing created something."

2. The universe had a beginning.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

"The odds are against the right combinations of circumstances occurring to evolve intelligent life on earth. The odds are about 400,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion to one. Evolution is fantastically improbable. I believe that it did occur, but that it could never occur again on any planet or any other solar system."
- John Echols, a Nobel laureate in neurophysiology, 1968

now, that is FAITH!!
i was here at 20/06/08 6:11 AM be careful little tongue (0)

19/06/08

shout out
ahhh computers hate me and i hate computers. it is a vicious cycle.

i spent one hour trying to burn files into cds!! there's something wrong with my com so i'm doing it in school but there's always an error writing to disk! is it the cd? roarsss when will someone come up with a more stable program?

it is such a pain trying to get my portfolio together. boos.
i was here at 19/06/08 6:02 AM be careful little tongue (0)

17/06/08

do you live or do you just exist?

manifestations of love:
Joy is love on wings;
peace, with the wings folded;
longsuffering, love in the sick-room;
goodness, in business;
meekness, in society;
self-control, in the regimen of habit for the sake of others
i was here at 17/06/08 5:27 AM be careful little tongue (0)