Why do many people talk about hypocriticism like it's the worst sin of all? Yes, hypocriticism is bad, but as long as people strive towards goodness there is bound to be hypocriticism. After all, humans are weak and fallible, thus consistency in ideals is something that's impossible for us to achieve. The only way people can be totally unhypocritical, the way i see it, is to be consistently bad, and is there a point to doing that? Is being consistently bad and thus unhypocritical any more morally sound than being inconsistently good? So it's okay to persist and persist in a wrong point of view because it's hypocritical to change your mind?
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowy learning.
Can't find the short story collection, The Beast who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. I is sad.
Last night Zhuang Mao and i were talking about idealism. He said he found it admirable to pursue one's passions after graduation; to defy society and escape the banality of a normal working life. I said it was darn irresponsible, because what we do affect not only ourselves, but others around us too. We should not be thinking only of our own desires; we have to also consider the happiness of those bound to us, like our parents.
I remember in one of the books by Orson Scott Card, Theresa Wiggin was fretting that her son Peter was too busy trying to achieve great things, and neglected his personal life. She hoped that he'd find a girl, settle down, and have children. It may sound awfully petty to you; what is an everyday family life compared to saving the world? But she claimed something along the lines of, there's no lack of great, ambitious people in the world, great things achieved will perish with time, and that you've not truly experienced the cycle of life until you have kids, giving yourself wholely and unconditionally to their welfare. To know what it's like to love someone more than yourself.
It's the kind of theory that appeals to me. Like, a meaningful life is not exclusive to elites alone. You struggle trying to be intellectual and great, but at the end of the day, the value of life lies in the basic and the commonplace. 'Indeed, there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.'
Just finished watching Nobuta wo Produce. It's about two guys trying to turn this painfully shy girl, whom they nicknamed Nobuta, into a popular girl. Along the way they come across obstacles that threaten their friendship and lifetyles, and change their perspectives on life. It's a pretty touching show; have not stopped crying since the 4th episode.
There was one morning Kelly was listening to the radio, and someone from something health-related was talking about H1N1. He was saying that unlike SARS, H1N1 should be encouraged to spread. Kelly said the mentality was that those without immunity would die off, leaving the human race as a whole improved via selection of the fittest. Anyway, the source of humour for her was him saying 'And those without immunity...', realising too late that what he's about to say would not sit well with the audience, and then trying to save himself by continuing, '...would get immunity.' Which she said sounded obviously ridiculous.
It kinda upset me a little though. Would you sacrifice people so that the human race on a whole can develop immunity? Yes, in the long run the entire human race would benefit, being able to step onto a crowded train with confidence, being able to have a fever of over 38 deg celsius without crying in their sleep (something i did once when i had a fever). But in the short term people would be sacrificed, people who are precious to other people, people with souls and emotions and things they cherish.
Zhuang Mao and i were talking about it, and he mentioned this verse that goes something like, what we cannot express in words, the Holy Spirit helps us express in groans. I thought about the word 'groans'. Groaning is not a language; it expresses what we feel like how crying expresses sadness. So i thought, must Tongues necessarily be a language? Must each syllable we utter actually mean something in itself?
So i thought, could it be that Tongues, for some people, are just another form of crying/shrieking/smiling/etc/etc?
Kelly once said that people with overly strict parents tend to be passive aggressive. I guess it's because of all those years of not being able to voice out one's objection, and yet needing some way of dealing with one's reluctance to follow others' will.
The reason i thought about them was because Miss A. Tan was upset that someone killed a lizard, and that someone was christian to boot. I told her that we christians don't believe that animals have souls, and that we eat meat anyway, to which she replied that we eat meat for sustenance, whereas the killing of lizards was unnecessary cruelty.
But i thought, the argument that killing for meat is justifiable is iffy. Afterall, how does one define sustenance? Since humans can survive on vegetables alone, is the killing of poultry still considered necessary? If i only need a pound of meat a day to survive but i eat two, is that still considered sustenance? Besides, isn't killing lizards killing for comfort, which, like killing for meat, comes under the broad category of killing to satisfy the human need?
Plus, whoever said that the human survival justified all actions? Don't we applaud martyrs in history because they were able to put some worthy cause over their own survival?
And then A. went on to talk about how pain is an important factor in deciding whether something is cruel or not. Like squashing a mosquito isn't, but squashing a lizard, with nerves and a beating heart and all, is. But i thought, perhaps pain is meaningless without a soul. Perhaps pain is like beauty or value, which holds meaning only to a sentient mind. While it can be argued that pain has a great physical component to it, but then, so does sadness, when your heart tightens and your tears come out, and emotions are only meaningful to a sentient mind.
And while i was walking to the library, i thought, pain is qualia. That means that pain is private and cannot be communicated directly to other parties. It's like colours, you cannot communicate to a blind person what green is. When teaching little children about colours, you can only refer to these colours via some shared experience, i.e. 'Green is the colour of grass.' But you can never be sure whether they are really experiencing the same thing. They may be getting the blue sensation when they look at grass, only that adults have taught them to put the name 'green' to it.
So it's like, can we can say that pain for a lizard is the same as pain for us? Perhaps when a nerve is stimulated in a lizard, the lizard feels quite something else. Perhaps we are imposing our experiences on the lizard, demanding that what is the case for us must be the case for it. Perhaps it is less unpleasant for a lizard to be squashed, afterall, with a body prone to squashing, they must have something that mitigates the unpleasantness for them.