Month: February 2010

Commentary – Love, really?

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Rony Tan has certainly not only caused a great rift among Christians and practitioners of other faiths with his comments on them, he has also caused a small rift within the Christian community itself with his remarks on homosexual people.

Whatever objection to the manner Rony Tan present his comments, I will take the matter up with him in person. I would not write a lengthly blog post condemning him, or ‘conduct a trial by social media’ – something which I have been against for a long time. While I will make no apology for Christianity saying that it is the only religion with the answer (to morality, the question of life and everything), I will admit that it is offensive for Rony Tan to ridicule how other religions present their answers. I do feel some shame and anger, because in spite of all the reminder from our own leaders to be sensitive to another person’s faith when evangelising, a leader of the Protestant Christian faith has done the exact opposite.

Other than with a few of my fellow believers, I have kept from discussing the matter with anyone from another religion. I would have kept it that way, until a chat with a non-Christian friend led to that topic.

With some apprehension I told this friend that Rony Tan has criticised two other religions, and that the remarks themselves were made readily available on the public domain. I told him my opinion that Rony Tan is not the first, nor would he be the last to make similar comments. I had expected nothing more than an angry reaction from him for my indifference to such a serious matter.

What surprised me was his reaction when he said, “I don’t really understand why are all these people upset. What he has said is something that a large part of the population would have considered as correct. All I could say was that he put it on the Internet so he ‘dai sei’ (Cantonese 抵死 – meaning ‘deserved to die’). What I meant is that all religions are somewhat closed in nature and I would find it news if a medium for a certain Chinese deity tells one of the followers looking for an advice to go seek a second opinion from Jesus Christ.”

Upon hearing his ‘second opinion’, we broke out in laughter. Though I doubt my friend was suggesting that all religions are intolerant of one another, he was simply pointing out that no religion (or someone of a certain faith) would actually suggest that another religion has a better answer. His comments hit me with the realization that those ‘crying for blood’ over Rony Tan’s comments suddenly don’t look very ‘open minded’ anymore.

Still, it is my opinion that an apology should go freely only to the Buddhists and Taoists. Anger will make them to close their minds to the message of Jesus Christ and they are lost to God forever. In spite of the Christian opinion of their beliefs, Christians do not deny that a large part of those beliefs also teach them to be morally upright people. In fact, I am in the opinion that these people ‘do by nature things required by the law (of God)’ (Romans 2:12).

However, on Rony Tan’s remarks on homosexuality, I cannot and will not stand with those who would go so far to spread a message of appeasement – especially in appeasing those who demand the right and the legal right to do what God has considered abominable.

The ‘message of appeasement’ masquerades itself as the Christian message of love. In some version of this false message, we are to close a blind eye even to sin – as long as it happens away in privacy and among consenting individuals or we should ‘leave them alone’ because they are ‘they simply seek to love’. The fact is Christians have always ‘left them alone’ and we only began to speak up when there is an attempt to legalised their deviant sexual acts or teach it as normal. Have pastors constantly preach against homosexuality before the furor surrounding the repeal of Section 377A and the fiasco at AWARE?

A brother-in-Christ once asked me this after reading another version of this false message, “Will you love someone so much that you will not tell him the truth simply because that truth might hurt him or offend him?” It is a question that those who spread the false message should bear in mind. The failure to warn someone from danger which could result in his death is a sin – the sin of omission. Do not forget that the Christian message is not entirely about love, it is also a message for us to repent, i.e. to turn away away from sin and seek the forgiveness of God.

In another version of the message of appeasement, someone has said we have failed to love our neighbours. And in explaining who our neighbour is, he cites Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25 ~ 37). The phrase ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is first found in Leviticus 19:18. I would like to point out in Leviticus 19:17, it is written: ‘Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.’ It is somewhat amusing that the proponent of the false message applies his definition of neighbour in Leviticus 19:17 only against fellow Christians, but not against the rest of the world. It probably also never occurred to the person abusing Jesus’ parable that the love referred to here simply means meeting the needs of one’s neighbours.

Based on the Good Samaritan Parable, which Christian has been like the priest or the Levite who refused to help the homosexuals in need? Is there any church which would bar a homosexual from just coming to church and listen to the message of Jesus Christ even though it may preach against their deviant sexual act?

What differs between Christians and homosexuals is the definition of needs. Christians believe that the homosexuals need to turn away from their deviant sexual acts and learn that it is considered sinful by God. While Christians have long lost the fight against sexual immorality, it does not mean that we won’t continue to fight when it threatens to expand its influence into our daily lives. After all, even non-Christians would stand up and resist when prostitution extends itself from its traditional strongholds into our neighbourhood!

If homosexuals disagree with the above perspective, there can be no compromise. Love does not extend into condoning or endorsing deviant sexual acts / sin. Do not expect Christians to give or calling us hateful because we are only defending the values that we hold dear. Homosexual activists make it sound like Christians are taking away some of their so-called ‘rights’ which never existed.

It is sad that even some Christians fall for that which I considered the greatest deception of our time and joined them in propagating that falsehood. Be warned, there are serious consequences in leading Jesus’ sheep astray.

Recommended Reads:
Insanepoly: Dare To Be Daft

Anti-Social Media – Facebook Friend Lists

2 comments

An active user on Facebook would inevitably gather a large number of friends. Yet not all friends will share the same opinion with the user or even one another. So at times the wall postings end up a common battleground between friends on a different end of the divide. It also become a chore to do damage control and peace keeper among friends, and it becomes annoying and time wasting when certain idiots incessantly rant on without getting the point in ‘agreeing to disagree’ or ‘just shut up and shove it up the other end of their alimentary canal’.

Fortunately, with privacy settings and ‘friend lists’, you can now create lists so certain exceptionally pesky individuals can be shut out of your wall posts, or target wall posts and specific users. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to create ‘friend lists’, and how to manipulate the privacy settings in Facebook to deny your wall posts to certain users, or to deliver them to a group specifically.

This is exceptionally useful if you can’t stop yourself from the urge to say something about your colleagues or your employer, which might later come back to haunt you later or cause you to lose your job. Personally speaking, I would prefer no one say anything about his work on social media platforms be it Facebook or any micro-blogging facilities like Plurk or Twitter. After all, there is no reason to take the risk that Facebook won’t make certain changes which have the drastic effects of exposing stuff previously hidden from certain groups or individuals.

1. Click on “Account” on top right corner in Facebook, then select ‘Edit Friends’. This will load the ‘Friend Page’.
2. The ‘Friend Page’ is where Facebook recommend people to add as friends (usually friends of other friends), or where you can search the address books of Yahoo, Windows Live Mail etc for friends. Any list created will be on the left sidebar on the ‘Friends Page’. A truncated example of mine show here.
3. Assuming there were no list already created, click ‘Friends’ on the left sidebar to have all your friends listed. ‘Friends’ is the first item under ‘Lists’ on the left sidebar. When the browser finish loading the first page of friends, the following will appear on the top of the list (see below.)

Click to proceed with creating a new list.
4. A small window appears inside your browser. Give your list a name and select the contacts for this list and click ‘Create List’ when done.
5. The name of the list just created will appear on the sidebar. Click it to list check who are listed. Beside the names of contacts in the list, it will also indicate how many other list they are already in.
6. Having create all the lists required, click Home on the top right corner to return your feeds page. Then click in the box for add links or to input the status. Immediately below the input box, a set of icons will appear on the left, and small ‘Lock’ icon and the ‘Share’ button will appear on the right.
7. To shows default privacy settings, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon.
8. Click on ‘Lock’ icon and select ‘Custom’ to edit settings
9. Example: This is what I do if this wall posting should only be visible to the list named ‘Premier Soccer’ but hidden from ‘Island Paradise’. Do not that you do not have to type the full name of the list. Facebook will suggest it as you type in more letters.

To hide from a list is to explicitly deny it from viewing this particular wall post.

Click ‘Save Setting’ when you are done on who can and cannot view this wall posting.
10. To confirm list visibility before posting, mouse over ‘Lock’ icon again. Click ‘Share’ after you are sure this is what you intended.
11. To identify the a wall post’s visibility setting after it has been posted, look at the information displayed under it.

The example on the right shows the information displayed beneath a wall post visible to everyone. (Note: No ‘Lock’ icon at all!)
The example below shows the information of a wall post with visibility settings. Mouse over the lock to show visibility settings.(Note: Except indicate the list which this particular wall post is hidden from.)

Here’s a crazy idea that I thought up when discussing the above matter with a friend. Assuming that your girlfriend does not like you partying with a group of friends, you can now create a list for your girlfriend and mutual friends, and one for the partying gang. In your Facebook profile, you can then still share photos and comments with your otherwise ‘not approved’ activities with your partying gang without your girlfriend knowing.

Isn’t that cool?

BlackBerry Storm I – My Gripes

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I have been using a BlackBerry Storm for quite some time now, and I have only recently updated the OS to 4.7.0.186 after meeting up with Nicole to check out the Storm 2 passed to her for review. Don’t get me wrong, upgrading the device OS to 4.7 won’t make your Storm a Storm 2, because in the core the Storm 2 is a different creature entirely. The Storm 2 also comes with WIFI and I had always complained about Research in Motion [RIM] releasing models that are 3G but not WIFI-capable and WIFI-capable models which are non-3G. Whatever RIM’s business strategy is, it is my considered opinion that a manufacturer should just put in everything available, as long as it does not cost them significantly to do so. Whether the area support the technology provided, or whether the user uses is no reason to remove a feature.

Anyway, I liked the Storm 2 a lot better than the Storm. The feel of the SurePress touchscreen on the Storm 2 was definitely way better than version 1.0. Nicole subsequently informed me that even DK also agrees the successor is way better. He was so annoyed with the Storm previously, he just passed it to her for review after a few minutes.

Anyway, the reason I haven’t gone all the way to OS 5.0.0.451 on the Storm is because there isn’t yet an East Asian version available. No East Asian means no Chinese text input and I won’t go without that. Nicole and I had several chats on the Storm / Storm 2 and she came to the conclusion that as far as these two models of BlackBerry Smart Phones are concerned, a user will either love it or hate it. To add on, the Storm is a product I will use, but one I probably won’t recommend to others. The reason is not because it’s terrible, since it had met all my usage requirements. It is just my personal opinion that some users might find their experience very unpleasant when using it.

In short, unlike iFreaks who have 101 excuses to justify for every bad thing about the iPhone, I will follow my conscience and talk about some of the features I didn’t like – for e.g. Copy & Paste, and zooming, not to mention the long start up time when you reset the phone. Anyway, I did not play with the Storm 2 long enough for me to tell whether it has significantly improve over these features, so do not take my rants into consideration until you see the Storm 2 for yourself.

It will be difficult for me to put down in words everything I dislike about the Storm’s Copy & Paste and zoom feature. So I did a series of screen shots to make it easier for me to explain it.

I loaded up one of my Plurks on the BlackBerry Storm as an example. (By default, my BlackBerry Browser is in ‘Pan’ Mode.)
Same Plurk shown here. Tap the screen once and it brings up the little ‘toolbar’ below. (Yep, don’t have to press or do anything, just tap it.)
Let me bring up the menu and toggle ‘Select’ mode.
As a long time BlackBerry user, I tapped the screen once to indicate where I want to start selecting text, and then slowly slide the finger across the screen. Just like what I would have done using a track ball / track wheel cousin.
FAIL!! I had only moved slightly to the right and then everything on the screen was selected. Frankly, for months I still haven’t figured out how to select text in this mode. I have tried tapping it at one corner, then another but to no avail. (I scrolled up the screen so the other selected text will be visible.)
Let me tap the screen once to bring up the ‘toolbar’ and change to ‘Cursor’ mode instead. (The ‘Cursor’ mode is very much like using the track ball or track wheel on earlier BlackBerry models.)
Noticed the icon change on the ‘toolbar’ after I changed mode? I brought up the menu and toggled ‘Select’ mode again.
SUCCESS!! I did exactly the same thing as I did on ‘Pan’ mode but this works. I joked with Nicole that by now, an iFreak would have finished cutting and pasting at least 10 times on his iPhone. (Again, I scrolled up the page so the text which are not selected are shown.)
Now if I want to copy the text I just need to press the icon ‘Copy’ (highlighted) on the toolbar and it will be done.
Next, I move on to demonstrate the ‘Zoom’ feature. To zoom, press the icon ‘Zoom’ (highlighted) on the screen.
Now it’s zoom in, dead center.
If I hit zoom again, this is what I will see, and this is the most it will ever go. You can’t zoom anything more than that.
If you want to zoom in at a particular area, you need to press on the screen at the area you want to zoom into. (In my case, around the word ‘install’. This is where it is zoomed once.)
Similarly, this is the largest it will zoom. In short, there are just two zoom levels, medium and large.

Anyway, several hours after I finished the screen shots (and the first version of this post), I discovered a easier way to copy a block of text in ‘Pan’ mode. All I need to do is tap once on the start, then at the end and it would selected the text desired. Not surprising, since FoxTwo told me the Palm already have a feature which allow you to click on one point, and on another to select the text in between a very long time ago. Shameful that it took me so long to rediscover this. The price of not reading the manual and assuming that I have used BlackBerry Smartphones so long I don’t need to read it *slaps forehead*. I had forgotten that a touch screen smartphone would behave like… a Palm, the ancestor of all Palm sized handhelds. After all, most smartphones these days arrange icons in a grid, and on touch screens our fingers have replaced the stylus.

Whatever the case is, the BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen has this non multi-touch feel. The absence of the ‘pinch and zoom’ (or reverse a zoom) features aside (since it is patented by Apple and thus RIM cannot reproduce that on the Storm), selecting a specific area to zoom-in is not available. On top of which, the ‘pinch and zoom’ feature is available on the Nexus and Palm Pre, so there is a question of how much that patent actually covers.

While a friend pointed out that ‘pinch and zoom’ is nothing more than meaningless gesture to make the iPhone look high tech and revolutionary, the best I can do is still zoom dead center on a pre-selected point just twice (large, then larger) on the Storm! Granted that zooming in on the point I tapped is actually isn’t significantly different from a ‘pinch and zoom’ as that also zooms in on a point, the main difference here is that the user cannot control the ‘depth’ of the zoom. That inevitably makes a user feel the technology on the Storm to be ‘ridiculously outdated’. Thus, if the Storm did not have much impact in the touch screen smartphone competition, I am not really surprised. In a separate discussion with FoxTwo, he mentioned that if a feature is available on another device and you are a device in the same class, it is best to make that feature also available, unless it has been condemned to be utterly stupid or useless. It doesn’t really matter whether the user use it or not, just put in it and make no excuse like iFreaks do for the iPhone when they are confronted with the obvious handicaps.

Thus, these are the reasons why I won’t recommend the BlackBerry Storm to anybody, even though I personally find it good enough for my usage. It will be hard to convince the user of today – ‘pampered’ by all the other feature packed smartphones – to consider the Storm. The best I can do would be to offer my set to my friends to evaluate if they want to know more, and let them decide whether they can live with it.

The only good news is I heard is RIM has acquired Webkit and it will soon release a new browser for the BlackBerry smartphones. I hope the new browser will do more to improve user experience on not just the Storm series of BlacBerry smartphones, but even on their qwerty-keyboard based products.

By the way, I also told Nicole my ‘crackpot idea’ of sticking a track pad at the back of a mobile phone with a large screen, and that would still give us a smartphone with capabilities almost similar to a touch screen. I thought of this when I was working on my BlackBerry Storm one day, and my idle fingers were just roaming all over the back cover. I thought that would be cool since we won’t soil the screen anymore and we won’t be spending our time wiping it. Nicole mentioned to me that such a product – the Motorola Backflip – already exists. Apparently, some times even ‘crackpot ideas’ are conceived in big companies.

Commentary – Rony Tan (II)

Rony Tan is in the news again. This time, he was reported to the police for comments which offends homosexuals in another sermon video.

The video, which is believed to have been uploaded to the church’s website in May last year but was removed from the homepage just one day after the apology was issued, had a new lease of life after it appeared on a blog maintained by Kenneth Tan (no relation to the pastor), a Singaporean working in Shanghai. In the video, the pastor attributed childhood abuse as a cause of homosexuality and linked homosexual people with paedophiles.

He further linked homosexuality with bestiality saying: “If you allow [homosexuality], next time people will want to get married to monkeys. And they will want rights. They’ll want to apply for HDB [a colloquial term to mean a government subsidised flat]. With a donkey or a monkey or a dog and so on. It’s very pathetic.”

Even though I don’t believed in it as a Christian, I joked with my friend that Rony Tan this year 犯太岁 (meaning: in conflict with the Chinese deity ‘Tai Sui‘) considering the kind of ‘bad luck’ he is getting. I even jokingly mentioned that he should hire the services of old ladies in Hong Kong to 打小人 (literally, ‘beat the vile character’) – a pagan ritual in which a paper effigy is beaten with wooden clogs and cursed. In fact, I even wondered if he was born in the year of the Tiger.

But jokes aside, I haven’t watch the video and I don’t intend to. After all, it is not uncommon for Christian pastors to speak out against homosexuality. From just what is quoted, it would appear to me that to accuse him of linking homosexuals with with paedophiles is a deliberate mis-interpretation of his words. The argument that the acceptance of homosexuality will open the door to the acceptance of paedophilia, necrophilia and bestiality has been a common point for many pastors, Christians and conservatives. Everyone should be aware that if Rony Tan is convicted for such an argument, everyone who has presented this argument in their rejection for more rights to homosexual, bisexual and transgendered (HBT) people will be in danger based on precedence.

While I do not know the entire context of his sermons, I will leave my comment regarding this remark at this. He could have been mean in presenting his views or even dismissive HBT people, but I do not intend to join the chorus of condemnation. Beyond that, I will question the motives behind digging out a 9-month old sermon, hot on the heels of his recent ‘coffee meet’ with the Internal Security Department [ISD]. As a Christian, I cannot help but feel there is a political agenda and objective here. Unlike what happened in AWARE which was a clear cut ‘power grab’ by Christians, this is outright persecution of what Christianity can teach as moral or immoral.

I believe the person who pirated the video from the Lighthouse Evangelist site and posted it on Vimeo also made the following commented on Fridae.com to justify his action:

“The Sedition Act prohibits speech that promotes ‘feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore’. This will be a good opportunity to test the government just what it means by ‘different classes’. Are sexual minorities considered ‘class’?”

Perhaps. But this person should be wary that everything can cut both ways. Someone jokingly commented after he read this comment: ‘They’re considered a criminal class, last I checked the statutes…’ While I do not endorse this statement, I do however find it funny when I considered it in the context of Section 377A – a law against sodomy between two males. Anyway, I am not sure whether anyone charged under Section 377A will be considered a criminal.

Now that I am on the point of sodomy (and in particular male sodomy), I must point out that fellow Christians generally loses the argument against the HBT activists the moment they are rapped with a discrimination clause. Though Christians won’t go so far as the Free Community Church in their view on homosexuality, most Christians failed to stand firm and argue that Christianity does not discriminate against homosexuals. It simply has a very strong moral stand against the act of sodomy. I will not go into specifics, since one can easily obtain these so-called ‘hateful’ Bible verses on pro-HBT websites on the topic of ‘homophobia’. (A word which I consider a misnomer since homo as in homo sapiens simply means man. I am not afraid of all mankind and homosexual-phobia would have been more apt.)

To put it in an analogy, I do not discriminate against smokers, but I am certainly against (and I object to) second hand smoke being blown in my face. In a debate on smoking, am I thus discriminating if I stand and speak up for policies that limits or prohibits smoking? Similarly, we must not discriminate against Muslims when we speak up against the acts of terrorism committed by terrorists and extremists who profess to be one. (Not that I even consider the terrorist a person practising Islam to begin with!)

To condemn Christianity for their moral stand against sodomy as being discriminating against the HBT, is the equivalent of meat eaters demanding from religions with teachings against killing animals not to discriminate against them. In short, HBT activists and lobby should stop taking Christians as a convenient punch bag to further their own personal agenda. Christians in Singapore have no quarrel (and do not intend to quarrel) with HBT persons. Simply, most Christians want to say is:

We fully respect those with homosexual (or bisexual / transgendered) tendencies who manage to withstand the great trial that we not required to stand, but we will not legitimize those who do not overcome their ‘instincts’.

On top of which, after the fiasco at AWARE, some Christians here are now increasingly wary and alert to some of the tactics used by the HBT activists and lobby in the U.S. Christians like myself will not yet claim persecution of Christians for the action taken against Rony Tan, but we will make no excuse to condone sodomy.

The HBT lobby in Singapore should be reminded that if they push the Christian community too hard, they might not like it when the Christian community collectively pushes back. Note that a collective effort by conservatives in the U.S. has resulted in 31 states repealing homosexual marriage laws.

I would like to remind my fellow HBT Singaporeans of the freedoms they already enjoyed in Singapore. Do not forget that other than Thailand, Singapore is probably the most HBT-friendly and tolerant in the whole of South East Asia. Take Rony Tan to task for all I cared, but be careful when you start questioning why no Christians object to it. After all, setting a fire may produce warmth, but when out of control a fire might also consume the person who set it.

Recommended Read:
SG BOLEH: Black Sheep of Insurances – Why people hate insurance agents
Terence69: Rights Aren’t Always Right

Singapore Seen – Trolley “Thieves”

2 comments

Well, the fact that NTUC Fairprice loses 200 trolleys a month came as no surprise to me. What came as a surprise to me was it took it so long to publicise the matter because I knew it for almost 5 years that inconsiderate people has taken the trolley not return them.

The picture on the left was taken around 5 years ago in the lift of the block I stayed. It is an utter disgrace that I actually lived in the same block as such an inconsiderate scumbag. The sad part is, only a few months ago I saw another trolley, this time at the lift lobby. Clearly, a leopard never change its spots.

The sad part is, the NTUC Fairprice in the nearest mall was only 200meters away. While I would not actually mind the person taking the liberty to use the trolley for his own convenience (since he might have bought a large quantity of groceries or daily necessities), I am utterly pissed that he failed to return the trolley and even irresponsibly left it in a public place. That’s not mentioning that he actually managed to recover the $1 coin from the trolley which suggest that the mechanism to retain the coin may have been damaged in the process. Simply put, that trolley is a complete write-off.

Why am I so upset with that when I have nothing to do with the profit and loss of NTUC (or any supermarket)? I am upset because such abuse would indirectly translate into cost for other shoppers. Even if maybe just one more cent on one item every year – why the hell should I be paying for someone’s selfishness? I would be happier dropping that one cent into my toilet bowl and flush it down, because I could at the very least imagined I was dropping a coin into a wishing well to make a wish! That’s not forgetting that the missing trolley means another shopper – which could be you and I – will be inconvenienced.

While I thought that this person at my block was just a rare specimen of some of the most selfish shitheads in the country, my friends ran into these two (see below) last Friday. They certainly have a lot of gall to do so right after the news was announced. Can’t they just take a freaking cab or something?

Perhaps, the NTUC Fairprice should consider offering a delivery service at a certain price for purchases above a certain amount. It is certainly fairer to have some income from elsewhere to recoup the cost for these lost trolleys than to have it being passed on to people who mostly buy one or two items once in a blue moon!

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