Digital music: It’s the next best news after the cassette tapes and the Walkman. Its spread through the internet and through pirated CDs has been the subject of much fanfare. And many litigations. You must be happy downloading thousands of music that you could play on your digital music player— free to copy at the click of a mouse. Someone or some group on the Net, in their excitement to make the world happy, makes these songs available to all while riding roughshod over the rights of the copyright owners, and could cough up millions to pay if the litigants win their battle in courts. It ain’t nice to hear anymore— free music ain’t that free, really.
Digital music players have also been the subject of concerns by those who are victims of hearing loss, and this time the design of the music players and their earphones has been the target of lawsuits. It is now proven that while music could cause us to dance for joy, long-term exposure to it at a high volume could cause hearing impairment. In a sense, too much hearing results to inability to hear.
This is a world of noises— noises designed to promote and sell, plead and seduce, propagandize and deceive, push an idea and plug an advocacy. You hear it every day: Glutathione that used to be marketed aggressively now the subject of a pull-out from market shelves by the Bureau of Food and Drug (BFAD).
A business group has marketed a new technique of discovering your body’s illnesses by looking at your iris (“The window of the body is the eye”), and in the process you cough up thousands of pesos for consultation alone; what happened to their TV ads now? you would ask, for you never see the iris that used to drape your TV screen. Has man learned his lesson about being duped by noisy publicity?
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I watched this musicale at Cinema 1, SM City Mall. You may wonder why: I am out looking for unbelievabilities in your plausibilities. You who are disciples of “Mary the Virgin” and believers of the so-called vision at Lourdes, France, can’t say I have never given you a chance to prove your point. I do and I have. I can even listen to improbable stories the whole night long— I can do it out of respect for you.
I like the play, I like the songs, and I like the acting. The play tells the story of one little girl’s journey of faith—one little French girl who could not give even a single satisfactory answer to the doctrinal question posed by her catechism teacher.
The story came about when the religious of the lower rung in France kept hoping for faith and fell short of it, while they of upper rung who claimed religiosity and hoped they had faith had none of it. And as the show went on, it kept evoking pity in my heart for those Catholic religionists who suffered at the hands of their fellow religionists.
And I could vent my anger if not indignation for that catechism teacher (the nun who later became head of the nunnery) whose altruism and religious zeal run roughshod over simple minds in an effort to promote doctrine and instill faith. If you’re out looking for respect for individual rights and faith differences, you can’t find it here. Be thankful, however, that that nun, for all her bad mouthing and fire-spouting lips is not the general rule, otherwise religion would have no hope to convert other men of no faith, nor have any chance of perfecting those who are already of faith.
That simple child named Bernadette Soubirous became the adherent of one simple mystery that only she had seen but never understood. But that experience of hers is more of faith and less of reason. That is the kind of faith that is dependent on someone’s say-so.
Which brings us to the question of which is more important: Faith without reason? Reason without faith? Or faith tempered with reason?
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