Worry Is An Adult Sin

By Hugo McCord, via BulletinGold

Youthful lusts (2 Tim. 2:22) do not cause older people to sin, but Satan besets older people with a special sin: worry.

The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets forth principles by which worry and anxiety may be eliminated. Those principles are set forth in a prayer written by Reinhold Neibuhr and adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous:

“Dear God, give us strength to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. Give us courage to change the things that can and should be changed. And give us wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”

That which should and can be changed, do it! Many of life’s problems are solved by work and application. Abraham’s large entourage, both human and animal, was badly in need of water in Palestine’s Negeb desert. Worry would not settle the problem, but hard work in well digging did.

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The Parable of the Tares

By David Bragg, Editor, BulletinGold

Among Jesus’ many parables the Gospel writers have preserved for our instruction is the one commonly known as the parable of the tares. After the farmer’s long, tiring day of sowing, with seed bags empty, the fields tilled and full of potential, and his heart overflowing with a sense of satisfaction he reclined for the evening of well-deserved rest. Little did he know that deceitfulness was afoot in the darkness of his unguarded field (Matt. 13:24-25). When the farmer arose from his rest in the morning there was no indication of the mischief that had been perpetrated while he slept.

The “tares” in Jesus’ parable were really weeds, probably the “bearded darnel,” which is difficult to distinguish from wheat in early stages. While scholars disagree on the level of danger the tares pose (poisonous or not), all agree that it was some time before the field hands could recognize the work of their enemy. By then the roots of the wheat and tares would be so entwined that the tares could only be uprooted at great loss of the wheat. Our enemy, Satan, is not only evil, he is industrious. He will use every means at his disposal to sow his seeds of temptation and sin in our lives. This calls for greater diligence in our own lives and clearer instruction to those we can teach about the danger of sin and the great hope Jesus provides. This is the central theme of this month’s BulletinGold.

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Only One Kind of Sound Matters Most

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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“The Song Bernadette”

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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My Father

Today is June 22^nd, seven days past the day they have set aside to honor fathers all over the world. Too late to be remembering the man who gave me life, but who said that a late celebration to honor a past life is an unforgivable sin? My father, always forgiving to family faults including the neighbor’s, never complained of tardiness.

I know my father to be one who would always admit faults. He never glorified sin, for he had lived it— big sins, small sins. On our way home from his shop, he and I would pass by a small Catholic chapel in a barrio in the town of Cadiz, and he would call on the priest to demand his right to confess. A ritual he would do once month when I was five, he batted for perfecting it when I was seven, and by this I mean he did his confession to his favorite “padre” at six p.m. every Friday afternoon. Very regular, as long as it did not rain. I understood this actuation to mean he had been burdened by his many sins.

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Worries

Minds at work (meaning your mind, or mine) could be busy processing 10,000 thoughts per day, so says the book titled Mind, Body Medicine: How to Use Your Mind for Better Health (by Daniel Goleman and Joel Gurin). 10,000 thought data per day means 70,000 thought data per week, or 3.65 million thought data per year. If these thoughts were printed on paper, you could be crushed by its sheer weight alone. If they are bad data and they remain as electronic data in your brain, they could either make you a lunatic or a killer.

Can harmful thoughts harm other people? University of California-Berkeley professor Herbert Morris posits the premise “that unless acted upon, thoughts by themselves can have no extra-personal effects, so that if thoughts are of public, specifically legal concern, it is only because of their link to harmful action.”

That premise has been challenged by a fellow professor Meir Dan-Cohen in a paper, who says “Can one person’s mental states, such as intentions or emotions, affect others even in the absence of any action or expression on that person’s part? Contrary to a widely shared assumption, I argue for a positive answer.” Professor Morris says they cannot; Professor Meir Dan-Cohen says they can.

I argue that firstly harmful thoughts can harm the person who harbors those thoughts. Medical doctors such as Keith Schenert have made studies that reveal that “for many Americans, our thoughts do more harm than good” to us. This is contained in his 1980 publication titled Stressed/Unstress. His report says that as a result of their harmful thoughts, “25 million Americans have high blood pressure,” “1 million have heart attacks,” “8 million have stomach ulcers,” and another “230 million filled prescriptions for tranquilizers.” These are figures over twenty-eight years old; don’t think that they have decreased.

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Of Mice and Men

Dr. John B. Calhoun, a research psychologist of the National Institute of Mental Health, set out to prove his theory on the dangers of population overcrowding. His brand of discipline is also known as ethology because it deals with the behavior of animals. In the process Dr. Calhoun also invented the term “behavioral sink” to describe aberrant behaviors he had noticed among the rodents, a term that has now passed on to common use.

His studies on rats and mice began in rural Maryland in 1947 and were to last for 15 years. Dr. Calhoun had chosen rodent species that are aplenty in North America, and are true omnivores— would eat almost anything—, have acute hearing, are sensitive to ultrasound, and possess a highly developed olfactory sense. A 2007 study discovered too that these rodents possess meta-cognition, a mental ability previously found only in humans and some select primates.

In one very interesting experiment, Dr. Calhoun built a steel cage nine feet on each side designed to be populated by 160 rodents only. He wanted to create a colony of cultivated rodents – rats with “values” as high as any human values. The cage was always cleaned, was well-stocked with food and water and was free from predators— indeed, an ideal habitat, except for its overcrowded condition. The rodents were deprived of privacy, with no time or space to be alone. Since there was no escape, Dr Calhoun was especially interested in how these animals would handle themselves in their crowded environment. Though their numbers grew, the size of their cage did not. He allowed them to populate to 2600, about 16 times what would be considered normal density. Dr. Calhoun’s studies reveal the following:

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The Diamond of Great Price

One day a buyer shopping drops by a large Gemolite chain store in one of those big buildings in Downtown Cloudburst. That store is a branch of a jewellery manufacturing company and exquisite “gemolites” are its main product, although it sells other gems too.

What are “gemolites,” you may ask. “Gemolites” are rock-hard man-made gems; unlike real diamonds which are natural and can be mined from the bosom of the earth, “gemolites” are perfect imitations of the natural. They have the color and the sparkle of the real. It is virtually impossible to distinguish a man-made diamond from the genuine. Natural diamonds are very precious, but a “gemolite” you can always afford.

But one gem, different from the others, catches the man’s attention. “I want that,” he says. “How much is it?”

“It’s not a gemolite,” the seller says. “It’s real, and very expensive. I’ll give you a discount; just get a gemolite. We have plenty of gemolite stocks. They cost only a fraction of the price of that gem.”

“No, I want that one,” the buyer insists. “How much?”

“A very large amount.” He looks onto the man’s eyes. “Very large.”

“You think I cannot afford it?”

“Well, many of my customers have been coming and going just to see that gem, promising me they will come back. If you’re determined to buy it, you can.”

“How much then?”

The seller pauses for a while. “Everything you have, sir.”

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The Beatitudes According to the Unspiritual

Happy are those who have friends in the high places: for by the click of their fingers they could silence the objectors, by name-dropping they could cut through red tapes.

Happy are the pushers: for by just pushing their weight they get on in the world.

Happy are the hard-boiled: for they never allow life and its threats to hurt them.

Happy are the greedy and those who hoard: for they have guaranteed themselves abundance of things in times of want.

Happy are the adulterers in the high places: for they still get the respect of the society.

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Lessons from Twins

Two sets of twins, one Spanish, the other Chinese, have kind of sorted their own lives, rectified human errors that caused their separation at birth, and sued their hospitals for damages.

The Chinese twins are suing a hospital in Beijing because an alleged mix-up (hospital’s fault, so they say) had led to their separation for two decades, with one of them believing someone else was his identical sibling. They lived with that unknown lie for twenty-one years “until a strange series of circumstances led to the truth,” so says Yahoo! News. “The real brothers grew up not far from each other and when mutual friends of both men began commenting on how similar looking they were, they decided to introduce them to each other,” Yahoo! News says further. Suspicions got started and both guys had blood tests. The results: The separated brother known as Xiang Nan, brought home as their baby by another family, was a 99.999 percent match for Wang Yiwen, who as a baby had been brought home by his real family with another baby the hospital thought was his twin. The kid who grew up as Wang Yiwu, Wang Yiwen’s twin brother, “had absolutely no biological relationship to the people he knew as his mother, father and brother,” Yahoo! News says.

The real siblings and their parents have demanded more than $150,000 in damages, but the Beijing hospital isn’t interested in a settlement; its spokesman calls the incident “hypothetical” and that much time has passed for a case to be made.

On the other hand, the Spanish twins (no names given, but they are women) who got separated at birth by hospital error and reunited by chance 35 years later are also suing the state-run Canary Island hospital for millions in damages. The error occurred back in 1973. The lawyer for one of the twin sisters said his client was seeking £2.4m from the government. The case has been working its way through the courts since 2004 and the lawyer said a verdict on possible damages was due soon

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