Mountain View Christians

Only One Kind of Sound Matters Most

mountainviewcoc — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:16:39 +0000

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 and desire 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?

“The Song of Bernadette”

mountainviewcoc — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:50:46 +0000

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?

My Father

mountainviewcoc — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:57:09 +0000

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.

Worries!

mountainviewcoc — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:01:53 +0000

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.

Of Mice and Men

mountainviewcoc — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:28:51 +0000

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.

The Diamond of Great Price

mountainviewcoc — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:58:05 +0000

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.

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

Beatitudes According to the Unspiritual

mountainviewcoc — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:47:47 +0000

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.

Lessons from Twins

mountainviewcoc — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:13:27 +0000

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.

Answers to Questions

mountainviewcoc — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:16:44 +0000

Questions from lpable@excite.com. Click here for that article where the questions have been posted.

(1) “How do I know what authorized matter is mandatory and what authorized matter is optional? Do I need to trust some ‘authoritative’ teacher of the text, or is there a fool-proof way to know?”

Learning from Past Mistakes

mountainviewcoc — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:08:36 +0000

How did you learn your great lessons on this business called life?

Mine came out of the mistakes I had made. Many mistakes, and not just small ones but big, mistakes that made me back out into a corner and made me think how I got it all wrong when everything seemed to be so right.