A lost luxury ship

Pop star Lady Gaga was said to have been sued for copyright infringement for allegedly lifting her hit single "Judas" from a song written by an aspiring singer named Rebecca Francescatti.
Lady Gaga's song "Judas" was released earlier this year and featured in her latest album "Born This Way," according to the Indo Asian News Service which carried the story.
The news agency, quoting the online contactmusic.com, said Francescatti claimed that the tune of Lady Gaga's song "Judas" has a striking similarity with the piece "Juda" she composed in 1999.
In the lawsuit filed with a federal court in the US, Francescatti pointed out that her former brass player is now working for a music company that was responsible for creating 17 tracks for "Born This Way".
Her lawyer Chris Niro said that although the songs are of different styles the composition is the same and the chorus has the same melody. The bottom line of the case is that Francescatti wants "recognition of what she created".
The story stopped short of what kind of recognition she wanted but presumably it could be compensation for royalty.
The story, posted online by Yahoo!, caught my attention because it reminded me of my previous blog "Christianity must be a way of life" in which I wrote lengthily about our ego, the core of our being human.
Not that I find Francescatti driven by her ego when she filed the lawsuit. Probably it was more on the financial side - to be paid for royalty - or it could be both. Either way, she has all the rights to claim for "recognition of what she has created."
Our sense of pride makes it natural for us to make a living so that we would not be a burden to anyone. Nobody wants to be a pauper, nobody wants to lose one's self-respect. It would be different if we make unnecessary waves to attract public attention.
That brings me back to Lady Gaga, who wants to project herself as an illuminati or enlightened. Since my teenage daughter told me months ago that Lady Gaga was an illuminati, I could not help think how swift the world has changed.
Our relativist outlook seems to have muddled our sense of right and wrong. Seeing her video showing her almost naked and reading an article in which she was quoted to have said that she is a cheap date, I could not imagine how she could be an illuminati.
Some bloggers call her "illuminati puppet" with the insinuation that she is being manipulated to help project the "dark side" of the world. Without the religious undertone, I think "illuminati puppet" describes her well. I always associate enlightenment with the brain and not with the flesh, much less not with being an easy lay.
Lady Gaga is a perfect symbol of the crass materialism that has eroded our values over the past decades. Shedding off old-fashion worldview, we don't care anymore about the feelings - and the lot - of other people as long as we get financially wealthy.
It is ironic that our civilization seems to have advanced only in terms of technology but has lagged behind in the task of lifting human values. Although we are now in the digital age, our nature has not evolved far from where we came.
In the jungle of sky crappers, we are no more than cavemen playing the same game of survival of the fittest. In our neatly walled and carpeted offices, we often step on the toes of others just to get ahead in the corporate ladder. It is akin to science exploring our outer world without first conquering our inner space.
Even our sense of reasoning has become warp and weird. Logic is supposed to guide us to the path of clear thinking, but we have been using reason subjectively to justify our biases and self-interests. Most, if not all, of our lawyers are putting more premium on their fees than pursue the noble cause of justice. We condider others to be objective in their worldviews only when they cross over to our side.
This easily reminds me of the debates on religion. In a previous blog, I have pointed out that debate on religion is an endless exercise in futility. However tall is our claim to reason, we always tend to become emotional in the process. Because that's what we are. We have both the rational and emotional side of our being.
I am sure that atheists, who have held the view that we are an accident of time, will disagree that human nature, which is one of life's many mysteries, is designed - for whatever purpose, we can make an endless guess. Was the world designed to be a purifying furnish for the soul? And why? Until science finds the elusive absolute truth, the questions will be endless.
That's putting my position clear that I digress with the scientific postulate (neuroscience in particular) that the soul is a mere illusion created in our brain. Some, if not all, atheists feel some degree of spiritual yearning that they turn to other beliefs like pantheism. Well-known psychologist Susan Blackmore, who turned to Ten Zen for meditation, said in her essay "Why I have given up" parapsychology that abandoning the study "does not mean abandoning spirituality or spiritual practice".
The emotional side our lives convinces me that we could not rely on reason as the singular tool in our search for the absolute ttruth, which I believe we will discover in life after death. Reason, without spiritual compass, is a luxury ship lost in high seas.





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Christianity must be a way of life

Visiting the blog of Sam Harris, a self-professed atheist who wrote the bestsellers "The End of Faith" and "Letter To A Christian Nation," I have chanced to read what he said was a manifesto of Norway's so-called fundamentalist Christian Anders Behring Breivik who killed at least 77 people in a murderous rampage in his country on July 24.
Reading the manifesto, I cannot imagine how Breivik has been hastily labelled as a Christian when there was not a trace in his writings, much less in his deeds, that he has been following the teachings of Jesus Christ after whom the Christian Faith was founded. Breivik has even confessed that he was more of a secular man than being a man of Faith.
I quote: "I'm not going to pretend (that) I'm a very religious person as that would be a lie. I've always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment. In the past, I remember that I used to think religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point of believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself?"
Even Harris did not believe that Breivik is a "Christian fundamentalist", to borrow his own words. Says Harris: "Having read parts of his 1,500-page manifesto (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), I must say that I have my doubts. These do not appear to be the ruminations of an especially committed Christian."
Indeed. Christianity is not a mere label, a tag that we receive after baptism or inherited from our forebears. It is living the teachings of Christ which is quite difficult as His teachings are often against the ways of the world. It is probably the reason why the Bible has admonished us not to love the world but to live in it.
To be a Christian is to be committed to the Christian values. Without that commitment we can be no more than nominal Christians. We cannot simply go to church every Sunday and abuse our maids at home. Christianity must be a way of life. It is following, or trying to follow, at least the two basic teachings of Christ - love God above all and then our neighbors.
The two basic teachings sum up the 10 commandments which the Bible says had been handed by God to Mosses on a stone tablet. Regardless of whether we have doubts on that Biblical story, the 10 commandments have been the cornerstone of our moral values. If we love God and our neighbor, we will neither steal nor commit adultery and the other prohibited acts.
Our human nature, which is more attuned to the worldly ways, makes is difficult for us to follow Christ'a teachings. Our ego, the core of our being human, makes it easy for us to love ourselves more than anyone else and drives us to work for our self-gratification. Our ego makes us pursue the standard worldly dream of gaining wealth, power and fame, fair or foul.
Our pursuits for self-gratification prompt us to bend rules. Instead of strengthening our Christian values, we adopt new social ethos that suit our worldly ways. We try to exorcise our sense of guilt when we carry an affair out of wedlock with a justification that there is nothing wrong with consensual acts. It is ironic that in much of the so-called advance societies, it has ceased to be a virtue for women to remain a virgin at 30. It is being prudish.
We have been reading in the papers how corruption has thrived in many countries, from India to Pakistan, Indonesia to the Philippines and so on and so forth. In the United States, there have been grumblings about how politicians have been serving the interests of the financial giants at Wall Street at the expense of the ordinary citizens, to return whatever favors they get from the Wall Street billionaires.
To be a Christian, we have to tame our ego. Without putting our ego in harness, we will never learn to love our neighbors, we could only see them as tools for self-gratification; we will never learn to see the virtue of humility, which is one of the many teachings of Christ. As I see it, one of the great lessons that we can learn from the Passion of Christ it is the lesson in humility.(Please see my previous blog "Lessons to learn from the Passion of Christ).
Without taming our ego, we can hardly find peace with ourselves and in the world. The likes of Breivik and of nations that go to war in search of peace have proven this. The only way to peace is love, the core teaching of Jesus Christ. The sword may be a good tool for defense but never an instrument of peace.

Please visit my other blog Fun in Life hyperlink salt-funstories.blogspot.com

Practical religion

"In life's journey, I use reason as my rudder but faith as my compass."

Lifted from the Introduction of the book "The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays".



I came across this phrase "Believe in God, but lock your car" in a blog of Masterwordsmith. The phrase strikes me because it capsulized the idea that religion should be practical - one that we can apply to our daily lives. I can't relate to preachers who dish out memorized phrases like the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Calvary has "washed our sins with His blood" without giving it any practical application. I am not saying that it is wrong, but it isn't just within the grasp of human reason.
As a former atheist who have reembraced the Faith, I believe that religion should be practiced within the bounds of reason and human experience. We cannot simply tell people that if we have faith we can command a mountain to be "lifted and be thrown into the sea." Although it's written in the Bible (Matthew 21: 21-22), I just can't find myself interpreting Jesus Christ literally. I know that faith can move mountains if it is taken in the context that we can do a Herculean task or what others think is impossible if we put our heart into what we want to do.
This is a dictum that I'm sure many of us have proven. I have experienced it myself when I left Romblon, a remote province in the heart of the Philippines, to pursue my dream of getting a college education after graduating from high school. Without any support from my uncle's family with whom my sister and I had lived after our father's death when I was 13, I went ahead with just "a little prayer in my pocket", as a song goes, and P75 (about $2) that I hid in my sock. Though the odds were great, I became a journalist, way beyond my expectation.
Many people lose their faith in God because many preachers send wrong messages that do not jibe with human experience. I remember a Christian preacher who, during an Abu Sayyaf hostage crisis in the Southern Philippines, boasted publicly that he would go to Basilan Island not only to convince the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers to free the hostages but also to convert them from Islam to Christianity. His invocation of Faith backfired; he suffered a stroke when he himself was held hostage. Luckily, he was released unharmed.
This kind of preaching as well as those of a group of Christians from the United States who went to the Philippines last May to warn people of doomsday on a particularly day of that month often stigmatize religion. Demonstrating the Faith in such ways makes many people think that religion is for the clowns and not for people who use their brains. This is one reason why some people disassociate themselves from religion and opt to describe themselves as spiritual.
Religion is not a badge to let people know that we are righteous. It we look at religion that way, we may end up self-righteous which is not in keeping with the religious teaching - the teaching of Christ in particular - about humility. I consider religion as a guide in our life's journey to warn us against the perils of worldly ways - untamed obsessions for the flesh, material riches, power and fame, in particular.
People have different world views, particularly on religion. Even among Christians, we have different ways of looking at the Bible. Some Christians insist that the Bible should be taken literally, which I don't think is possible. I could not imagine reading Revelations without any interpretation. And if I read the Bible literally, I will find many contradictions in it. These contradictions sowed the seeds that later undermined my Faith and drove me to abandon God when I was exposed to Darwin's theory of evolution.
Though many Christians may disagree with me, I have learned to read the Bible by themes. For instance, in the story of Adam and Eve I don't focus on sin or indulge on the debate on free will. I look at such debates as useless polemics that serve no purpose at all but feed our egoistic cravings to showcase our intelligence. Which is what I see as the theme of the story: human pride. Eve disobeyed God because she succumbed to the temptation that she could be greater than God if she would eat the fruit of knowledge.
I think this theme sounds familiar to many - if not all - of us. I leave it to your imagination.
The Bible is replete with themes that we live by day to day - themes about love, pride, charity, humility, forgiveness and so on. The Biblical story that I often remember is the "Parable of the Sower"(Matthew 13; 1-23) because it is about the worldly temptations - symbolized by the weeds - in our lives that often makes us abandon the spiritual side of our existence.
The themes serve as my guide in life's journey. I have no quarrel with the Christian teaching that the blood of Christ has cleansed our sins. I take it as a church dogma that I do not have to question in the same way that Darwinists consider "natural selection" as a given in the evolutionary process. Living with the themes in the Bible makes me feel more human with a practical view of my Faith.
Yes, I believe in God but I would certainly lock my car when I park because I am aware that there might be other people who have thrown their religion into life's garbage bin.


Please read my other blog "Fun in Life" link salt-funstories.blogspot.com

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The river of life

"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Genesis 3:19

My memories flew back to the past when Roxanne sent me a message on Face Book early this week. Raxanne is a daughter of Primo Eniong, the husband of a distant cousin. She is now in Florida in the United States and saw my Face Book account when she searched for some long-lost relatives. Through her, I was able to contact Primo Eniong after more than two decades without any communication.
I first met Primo Eniong when a mutual friend recruited us to help run a newsletter during a Boy Scout Jamboree in a place called Mat-i in Romblon, a province in the heart of the Philippines. He was a teacher who was good at writing. At that time, I had just left the university and had decided to stay in Romblon for a rest after having contracted tuberculosis in the city.
I remember Primo Eniong as a jolly guy who would immediately engage you in a conversation as soon as you shook hands. Although I was the silent type prone to smiling than talking, I felt that he was a long-time acquaintance. We struck a fraternal bond, despite our age gap.
The moment we were introduced I instantly called him Iniong, a nickname for Eugenio. I added the appendage primo to his nickname when I learned later that he was the husband of a cousin, though a distant one. Primo is a Spanish word for a he-cousin, a tell-tale clue that the Philippines was once a colony of Spain.
We crossed path once again when he moved to Manila with his family to work as a writer for the Ministry of Information. I was already working for a newspaper then. Since we lived near each other, I often visited him in their rented apartment where we often talked about our jobs and daily lives over a few bottles of beer, but never about migrating to another country. Our occasional rendezvous ended when I moved to a new place far from where they lived.
Our latest meeting, this time in cyberspace, gives me a sense of disquiet to think that life is transient, fickle and fleeting that before we realize it we are already in the twilight years of our lives. Primo Eniong, who was in his 40s when we were in Manila, is now 75 and has retired in Canada without my cousin, Prima Nesia, also a teacher who died back home more than a decade ago.
Beyond the memories of Primo Eniong I could look back to the small village where I grew up in Romblon and where life was quite rustic. This makes me ponder about life as a river so calm on the shore but becomes turbulent and uncertain as we go mainstream. It's a river that won't allow us to go back to the past, however you wish to when the going gets rough, because you are ordained to finish the journey home.

Life's driving force called passion

A Filipino who lives in the same building as ours has a passion for tinkering with his car. Everyday I would see him either adding decorative paintings or fixing something.
Once, when my wife and I saw him fixing his car, my better-half blurted out a side comment: "I don't understand this guy, there's seems not a day in his life that he does not do something with his car."
"It's a passion. Things that we love to do but don't know why," I told her. "It's just like my passion for writing."
"But you are a journalist so you have to write," she retorted.
"I do some blogging which is not part of my job," I said.
I cited blogging purposely because it's my passion that she always complains about, saying that I could have used the time I spent for blooging to take some rest or do other productive endeavors.
I kept on telling her that blogging is some sort of theraphy after a week's work that is focused more on the technical side of journalism - layouting that does not interest me much, editing, rewriting or writing stories that you don't like to write.
Journalism, which I enjoyed when I was young, has become a job. I remember Filipino consul Jose Jacob once telling me when he was still assigned here in Jeddah that our job becomes work when we lost the passion for it.
I forget my job and the world when I start blogging, pouring in my ideas into words, a passion that goes back to my high school days when I used to write verses that I passed on for poetry or love letters I slipped into the books and notebooks of the girls in our class and relished their wondering on who the letter writer could be.
My late cousin, an engineer, once dubbed me crazy for using the dictionary in writing love letters to the village lasses who had not even reached the primary grades during the summer school breaks. I shrugged off his comment because I was not really interested with the girls but with the wonders of playing with words that seemed to beat with the rythm of my life.
Having cast my eyes to a career in engineering, I had never thought that my passion for writing could lead me to journalism. Call it destiny but I dropped my dream to become an engineer when I realized that, as a working student, the course was too expensive and I couldn't afford to buy even a slide rule.
While many people find fame and fortune out of their passion - Newton, Einstein, the Wright brothers, Shakespeare and an endless array of names that we cannot count with our fingers and toes - I don't expect much out of my blogging. Yes, I do entertain possibilities that it may give me some passive income later on but until then I have learned to leave such cares to fate.
Passion, which is closely tied to our search for self-gratification, is one of life's mysteries that drive us to keep on going through the doldrums of daily living. It's an anathema to reason that assures us that we are more than atoms.


Please see my other blog Fun in Life salt-funstories.blogspot.com

Religion, like life, is better lived than debated

I followed with amusement an online debate on religion at the webpage of the Worldwide Filipino Alliance. I had lost track of it when I went on vacation in the Philippines and a tour in Hong Kong and Shenzen in China. Back from my vacation, I was amazed to find out that the debate is still on.
Personally, I have no appetite for a debate on religion which has been going on for a long time but has gone nowhere. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had predicted that Christianity would have been gone a hundred years from his time but the religion is still very much around.
Erstwhile unknown neuroscientist Sam Harris shot to fame with his books "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" but his popularity loses steam after the initial fervor for his tomes waned. Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, author of the bestseller "God Delusion," has stopped debating with the theists.
Despite the advances science has achieved since Copernicus had disproved the Church's belief that the sun revolves around the earth, most people have not abandoned the faith. It's simple because spirituality has been part of human existence.
Darwinists believe that religion is a byproduct of human evolution. Anthropologists like Barbara King, for instance, argue that the religious mind developed in keeping with the growth of the hominid brain that tripled in size at its peak about 500,000 years ago.
Darwin's theory of evolution has undoubtedly made a big crack on the religious belief that Adam and Eve are the descendants of the human race but has not stopped people from their spiritual pursuits. Materialist science has breed such movements as theosophy, a mix of theology and philosophy, and intelligent design, a movement led by scientists who believe that human evolution is guided by divine hands.
This is because science has its own shortcomings. Darwin's theory of evolution has not given an adequate answer to questions like why do birds have wings, spiders have eight legs while some animals have four. Neuroscience, which has been trying to prove that the soul is an illusion created in the brain, has been stuck in the problem of qualla or people's subjective experiences.
Every discovery that science has made has always been followed by more questions that continue to beg for answers. Science has discovered black holes and dark energy but has no explanation on why they are there and what role do they play in the whole cosmic scheme. Science is an infant being bedazzled by life's mysteries.
Debate on religion often brings animosity. In the debate at the WFA website, some atheists call the creationists morons as if they have the monopoly of the human intellect or wisdom. Throughout the debate, both sides traded insults.
Religion is a sensitive issue that, despite our claim to reason, would draw out our emotion. Until we find the elusive "absolute truth", our faith is better lived or practiced than being debated. Our belief or disbelief is but a product of our individual experiences.
My poltergeist experience (please see my previous blog The Poltergeist Mystery), the strength and peace of mind I draw from my Faith, our intuitive mind and life's uncertainties always remind me that there's more to life than what science and human reason can offer.

Please visit my other blog Fun in Life at salt-funstories.blogspot.com

The boundaries of reason

I was happy to learn that more than 40 Filipinos reacted to my story "When God closes doors" which was published by the Philippine Daily Iquirer in its Global Pinoy page on Easter Sunday. Majority of those who posted online comments were believers while four were either skeptics or outright atheists.
It always gives me a pleasant feeling to know that people are reading me, regardless of whether they agree with my views or not. We can not expect all people to agree with us all the time. But one reaction that struck me was a series of questions: "Your god tested your faith? What kind of a god is that? Your god cannot even make his followers put up a church in Saudi Arabia."
The reaction struck a familiar cord because those were the same line of questions I used to ask when I became an atheist in my college days and a few years thereafter. I don't know the personal history of the guy who posted those comments and who signed himself as Edward E. And I don't want to speculate on why he lost his faith. He must have his own reasons.
But that made me hark back back to the time when I lost God myself. I was then fighting a bout of depression that started after my father's death in Bacolod City in the central Philippines when I was 13 and was forced to live with my uncle's family in a farm in Romblon up north. My depression led me to my search for meaning in life and my own identity. Who am I and why do I have to be born? I was a lost soul and, in my college days, had even written an epithet for my tomb - "Here lies the body of a man who never knew who he was and why he lived" - out of my desperation.
I lost my Faith after I enrolled in anthropology, which taught Darwin's theory of evolution, as an elective subject while I was pursuing a course in journalism in Manila. With my little background in philosophy, I found Darwin's theory more plausible than the Bible, which I found to be full of inconsistencies. But while I found "enlightenment" in science, I could not find meaning to my life.
My readings in philosophy and even pyschoanalysis did not give me the answers. I found solace in boozing, a vice that started when I was in high school, and coupled with my graveyard-shift job as a security guard that enabled me pursue a course in journalism on night classes, I contracted TB that forced me to leave my job and school.
With my illness, looking for a new job had been difficcult and I drifted from one odd job to another, including grinding tombstone, known as lapida in the Philippines, to survive. There had been times when I wanted to slash my wrist or take an overdoze of odinah - a brand of medicine for TB treatment that I failed to take regularly for lack of money - but I just did not have the guts to commit suicide.
One night, after a day's work of grinding tombstones, I blurted out a subconscious challenge to God, "If you are real, if you are there, I ask you to stregthen my life." It was a time when I sometimes entertained the notion that perhaps God was punishing me for my rebellion, an idea that I always dismissed as silly.
A month or so later, I found a job as a proofreader with the newly opened afternoon newspaper, The Evening Post. But several months into my job, the employees were required to undergo a medical checkup, including x-ray, at a mobile medical van parked outside the company premises. As expected, I was found to have TB but what was unexpected was that the company did not fire me.
When the medical results came a few weeks later, Kerima Polotan-Tuvera, the newspaper's editor-in-chief and the wife of the company owner Juan Tuvera, summoned me to her office and told me about my x-ray results. Instead of handing me my termination papers as I expected, she advised me to undergo medical treatment with the company taking up the tab.
That started my career in journalism and my journey back to the Faith, which was not easy because with my readings in philosophy, I have been accustomed to putting logic into my life. The book "Peace of Mind" by Jewish rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman helped me find God. Other coincidences later, including those I cited in the story "When God closes doors," streghtened my Faith and my belief that life often does not follow human logic.
When I read the online comments on my story, I know that it was part of the human quest to rationalize our lives. One comment, for instance, said that the story sent a wrong message that human achievements, opportunities and destiny are all dependent on God. Another comment suggested that it could have been better if the story ended with the fulfilment of our plan to go to New Zealand, as if life is like writing a fiction story which you can end the way you want it to end.
While I agree that we should plan our lives, as it is the most rational thing to do, experience tells us that life does not always go the way we want it. I want to agree with Shakespeare that our destiny is not written in the stars, but my experience tells me that my fate is not always in my hands; there have been times that I could not make things happen the way I want them to be.
I still asks the same hard questions that I used to ask before but have stopped arguing with my life. I have accepted the fact that life has a myrad of mysteries that have dazzled even science. In life's journey, I still use reason as my rudder but have learned to rely on Faith as my compass.


Author's note: Please read my blog "When God closes doors" to better
appreciate this blog.

The Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept things that I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Nieburh