September 11 Links

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“I’ve gotten soup in the WTC mall in the winters when it’s cold.”

“And moments later, we heard another small popping sound. And the second tower crumbled to the ground.”

“They simply were no longer there.”

“Shock turned to grief and anger in the United States following the series of terrorist attacks Tuesday morning that destroyed four hijacked commercial airplanes, the 110-story twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and collapsed part of the Pentagon.”

“Please pray for my friends. I’m crying because one of my good friends from college works at the MSDW office in WTC.”

There is soot falling out of the sky outside my apartment in Brooklyn.”

“He said there were burning bodies flying out of the sky.”

“Even if you had the technology to do so, how many minutes or seconds would you have between the time air traffic controllers realized something was wrong and the time you had to fire or risk downing the plane over the city?”

“It just so happens that today is An International Day of Peace, declared so by the UN.”

“We hear reports of ppl from the 50th floor escaping, there is hope. Hope. That’s all we have right now.”

“All we can think of here is films and television and cartoons. When have any of us seen anything like it in real life?”

“What do you feel when the heat of fire and the bruising of propelled debris is only separated from you by a picture tube?”

“When it rains, it pours.”

“I’m so scared right now. I don’t want to hear any reports of Americans grabbing the nearest Arab and beating the crap out of him or her. Don’t do it. Please.”

“The United States can hardly declare war on militant Islam without targeting or destabilizing countries with which it needs to remain on good terms.”

“You can’t protect yourself from this. You can’t build a building that will stand up to a plane crashing into it. America is vulnerable.”

“How do we now tell our children that the world is a safe place to be? How can I convince them of something that I no longer believe — at least not at this moment?” (lots of Diary-X quotes. Very much worth reading.)

9-11

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Oh my God, what a disastrous day it has been on the opposite end of the world. I have just watched, on TV, the unthinkably catastrophic scene of two hijacked passenger airliners crashing into the World Trade Center, utterly destroying both towers. In Washington DC, and possibly elsewhere, similar attacks have occurred or are occurring.

Who did this? What will America do about it? You folks in the United States, I hope things go well for you and your loved ones. I will be praying.

“You will hear of wars and rumor of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” (Matthew 24.6) But today, oh my God, oh my God, please protect the people of America, and console the many who have lost someone in this awful, awful terror.

Blog and Blogger.

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Before I retire for the night, I wish to address a small techie pet peeve: the difference between a BLOGGER, and a BLOG. I’ve seen a few people saying on discussion boards, “Oh, I have a blogger on my website,” and that’s terminologically incorrect! The webpage is the blog (or weblog), and the person updating the blog is the blogger (or weblogger). The word blog can also be a verb, referring to the blogger’s act of blogging to a blog. The blogger is not blogging to a blogger. That’s just wrong. The blogger is the one blogging to the blog. The blog is blogged by the blogger. Blog blogs blog. Okay?

Lacson and Marcos — Hello?

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Excerpt from a month-old Inquirer editorial on Senator Ping Lacson, who is suspected of money-laundering and drug-trafficking…

That Lacson considers Marcos the greatest president the country ever had speaks volumes about the senator’s values and sense of right and wrong. As members of the younger generation would say, “Hello?” Never heard of the decision of a Hawaii court validating the slaying and torture of close to 10,000 victims of human rights violations during the martial law regime? Doesn’t he know that Marcos and his heirs are facing several cases for the recovery of billions of pesos in ill-gotten wealth? Never heard of the citation in the Guinness Book of World Records of Marcos having committed “world-class theft”? Doesn’t he know that Marcos during his 14-year dictatorship corrupted, debased and destroyed the country’s institutions, from the Supreme Court down to the military and the police?

Broken Battery

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Let me admit that Index 36, the graphic that appears on it, and my ill temper of yesterday are all related. Yes, it’s a broken Nokia Lithium-Ion phone battery, which flew off my phone when I threw it to the floor in anger during a tiff with, um, Tiff.

But don’t worry. We’re fine now, the phone’s still working, the battery was an older spare, and I have more. At the very least, it made a cool graphic.

Dowager’s Hump Exercises

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Those of you who’ve met me in real life have probably noticed that, because of poor childhood posture, I stand with a severe stoop, shoulders hunched and head pushed forward like a vulture’s. Continued slouching can lead to a condition called Dowager’s Hump, so I’m now taking measures to correct my slouch, with these exercises from this book on posture and pain.

Update, Oct 2004: I’ve compiled a list of books on posture and back health, since the book linked above seems to have gone out of stock:

Check them out; many of the exercises are good for people who suffer chronic headaches from sitting at a computer all day, and are neither demanding on your time nor embarassingly conspicuous.

What the Dickens?

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Earlier this year, I resolved that I would not reach 25 years of age without ever having had the experience of Dickens. Despite the great author’s reputation in the literary world, his works had never been assigned to me in school at any level. As such, I was free of any bias arising from association with him on an academic plane, and I could select and read Dickens’ books at my own leisure.

Quite unwisely, I decided to start with Oliver Twist, for its relative ubiquity and earliness in Dickens’ repertoire. Quite underestimating the Victorian writer’s capacity for lengthy and high-faluting exponunciation, and more accustomed to the comparably earthier work of Thomas Hardy, I had been expecting an easy and straightforward read.

Rather, I was utterly drowned. Social commentary and even narrative continuity were difficult to pick out from the maze of complex-compound sentences and tangential prepositional phrases. I could see parts where Dickens had aimed at a kind of wordy irony, but it was, to my perception — and I hesitate in my choice of adjective — terribly pretentious more than anything else. At one point, I found it necessary to extricate myself from the tangle of words (rather easy to do, since the story had failed to inspire within me any kind of attachment to most of its characters), and return to Oliver Twist fresh from the start, a few weeks later. The second time around, I managed — rather laboriously — to reach the unsatisfactory conclusion.

Undaunted and unbroken, I resolved next, to tackle an even more esteemed Dickens work: A Tale of Two Cities — written three decades after Oliver. Armed with a basic history of the French Revolution (and a scattering of quotes from Star Trek II), I commenced to read — and was pleasantly surprised.

More than thirty years later, an older, wiser Dickens had produced an engaging work of historical fiction, with endearing characters, riveting conflicts, and a knack for satirical wit which far outshone his initial attempts in Oliver. A Tale of Two Cities was equally wordy in many places, but this time skillfully so, endowed with an almost poetic rhythm which drew me along in its color and lucidity.

The character of Sydney Carton, however, was to me, insufficiently developed as that of the despairing, unvirtuous wretch which Dickens made him out to be. Perhaps it is the discrepancy between the values of the 21st Century and those of Victorian England, yet I found myself wishing that Carton was a little less perfect, a little less ruly, despite the story’s attestations that he was mired in a sinful life.

Well, having finished A Tale of Two Cities, I suppose the next step should be Great Expectations. What do you Dickens fans out there think?

Faith and Deeds

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As an evangelical Christian, I hold firmly to the bible’s teaching that we are saved only through faith in Jesus Christ; that simply by trusting in His propitiatory sacrifice on the Cross, we are forgiven our sins and born to eternal life. Call it sola fides, call it fundamentalism, call it by whatever label you like, but it is what the Bible, the true Word of God and the foundational text of Christianity, tells us clearly.

Jesus himself says, the will of his Father is that he who looks upon the Son and believes will be raised to eternal life. (John 6.40) “Looks upon the Son and believes.” Not “looks and believes and does good deeds,” or “looks and believes and is baptized,” but simply “looks upon the Son and believes.” Paul’s epistles, as he writes in the Spirit of God, make it even more plain, stressing again and again across different letters that believers are imparted a righteousness from God that is not of the Law, but is through faith in Jesus Christ. (Romans 3.22)

All you need to do, to be saved into the redemption of Christ, is to put your faith in him, the Son of God. All else will follow once that is affirmed.

Solo Dios basta. When you have Christ, there is no need to put faith in other things. (i.e. good works, prayers to saints or *ahem* mother figures, TV shows by earthly charismatic teachers…) because Christ himself is sufficient and perfect, both to our eternal salvation and to provision for our daily lives.

On the other hand, adherents to a theology of salvation-by-works often refer to the Epistle of James the Brother of Christ, where he says at one point that “we are not justified by faith alone.” (James 2.24) Were we to take this verse at its word by itself, we’d have a quandary on our hands, because not only are we told that we are no longer saved by Christ alone, but there would also be an open contradiction with other Gospels and Epistles which openly state that salvation is through faith and not by works of the law. (Galatians 2.16)

Fortunately, a clear reading of the passage associated with that verse in James makes it clear that good deeds are the necessary completion of faith, and not a source of redemption in themselves. It’s extremely telling that, in their two different letters, Paul and James both make reference to the same event in the book of Genesis: Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac (Genesis 22), and the declaration that Abraham’s belief was credited to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15.6) This is the Bible, the Word of God; these two men, Paul and James,were guided in their writings by the same Spirit, so it is only given that they are in harmony. The fact that both refer to the same story means that they are both expressing the same truth — or, more probably, two like facets of the same truth.

Sure enough, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans makes mention that by believing God, Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness: that righteousness was given him because of his belief in God. (Romans 4.3) James expresses the same thing similarly: that in Abraham’s obedience, even to the point of the near-sacrifice of his dearest son, the prophecy was fulfilled that said Abraham had been credited righteousness. (James 2.23) That is, by putting his faith in God, Abraham was given the righteousness which bore his good works.

There are many ways to say it, but they say the same thing: the righteousness is from God, not from our own actions. And that is in harmony with the doctrine of salvation: it comes only by faith in Christ, and will be completed in works. Not the other way around. The person who understands what faith does to him once he believes, will understand then that the whole issue of “faith and works” is academic, because it is simply given that the one must produce the other.

There is a valuable lesson to be learned here for those who have been saved through their faith in Jesus Christ, but continue to live their lives as though nothing had changed. James says it frankly: Faith without deeds is dead. (James 2.26) If a person has been saved, but he continues to live a life of idolatry and dissipation, then what has he been saved from? What answer will he give when the master asks what has become of the talents given?

But remember the thief on the cross, who, a hardened felon, crucified for his crimes by the Roman state, cried out to the Savior who hung near him, “Jesus, remember me when you enter into your Kingdom!” And just with that, he was saved. “I tell you,” said his bleeding, dying Lord, “today you shall be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23.42-43)

Never mind what your life has been like, whether good or bad. Jesus is your Savior regardless, and the certainty of salvation is given you if you ask him. And it is promised, as James says it was prophesied of Abraham, that you will be credited righteousness, given the ability to do good works, and, at the day of the Lord, to stand before Him, washed clean and spotless without sin.