Missionaries in Thailand

โดยปกติแล้วคนไทยที่นับถือศาสนาพุทธนับถือพระเยซูเป็นที่เคารพบูชา ดังนั้น จึงทำให้เขาใช้คำว่า “พระ” ก่อน “พุทธเจ้า” เพราะว่าโดยปกติแล้วคนที่นับถือศาสนาพุทธจะไม่ทำตัวเป็นศัตรูกับศาสนาอื่น ๆ

นั้นนับว่าเป็นสิ่งที่ดี แต่คนไทยควรจะรับรู้ว่า บางศาสนามองพุทธศาสนาว่าเป็น คู่แข่ง โดยส่วนมากแต่ก็ไม่ทั้งหมด คนคริสเตียนเชื่อว่าคนที่นับถือศาสนาพุทธหรือคนที่ไม่นับถือคริสเตียนจะไปสู่นรกเมื่อตายไปแล้ว

แล้วอีกอย่างคือ คนคริสเตียนส่วนใหญ่เชื่อว่านั้นเป็นหน้าที่ที่จะชักชวนคนพุทธให้กลายมาเป็นคริสเตียน บางครั้งอาจจะเป็นเพราะว่าในคัมภีร์ไบเบิลพระเจ้าท่านได้สั่สอนผู้ติดตามของเขาให้เป็น “ผู้ตกคน” ความเชื่อเหล่านี้ได้เผยแพร่ไปทั่วโลกเพื่อที่จะพยายามชักนำคนที่ไม่เชื่อให้กลายเป็นคริสเตียน คุณสามารถพบเห็นบุคคลเหล่านี้ได้ทั่ว ๆ ไป ในกรุงเทพ และที่ ๆ คนจะได้รับการศึกษาและอาหารโดยปราศจากค่าใช้จ่ายเมื่อเปลี่ยนศาสนาเป็นคริสเตียน เช่น ภาคอีสาน บางครั้งคณะผู้สอนศาสนาจะเชื่อเชิญคุณให้ร่วมงานเลี้ยงด้วย (โดยปราศจากแอลกอฮอล์) เพื่อที่จะชักชวนคุณให้กลายมาเป็นคริสเตียน

ผมไม่ได้เขียนบทความนี้ขึ้นมาเพื่อที่จะต่อต้านคนคริสเตียนและศาสนาอื่น ๆ แต่บ่อยครั้งที่คนไทยมักจะหลงเชื่อความจุดประสงค์ของผู้สอนศาสนา คนไทยจึงควรตระหนักถึงอันตรายที่จะเกิดขึ้นต่อศาสนาและวัฒนธรรมไทย จากคนที่คลั่งไล้ศาสนาเหล่านี้

ถ้าคุณไม่ได้อยู่ในประเทศไทย คุณจะรู้ว่าบางคนดูหมิ่นพุทธศาสนามาก แต่ถ้าคุณอยู่ในประเทศไทยจะคุณไม่สามารถรับรู้ เพราะ บางครั้งคุณไม่สามารถซื้อหนังสือ หรือรับข่าวสารที่ดูถูกดูหม่นพุทธศาสนาได้นี้คือเวปไซต์ตัวอย่างที่ที่ดูหมิ่นพระพุทธศาสนาเป็นอย่างมาก ผมจะให้ลิงค์กับคุณเพื่อที่จะพิสูจน์ประเด็นนี้ของผม

*******************

Thai Buddhists usually accept Jesus into their pantheon of holy figures. That’s why they put the word “pra” before “Jesus”. That’s because Buddhists don’t usually see themselves as being in conflict with other religions.

That’s very nice, but Thais need to know that some religions definitely do see Buddhism as a competitor. Many, though not all, Christians, believe that Buddhists and other non-Christians go to hell when they die.

What’s more, many Christians believe that it is their duty to convert Buddhists. Perhaps this is because, in the Bible, Jesus instructs his followers to be “fishers of men”. These believers travel around the world trying to convert non-believers. You can see some of these people in Bangkok, but there are more of them in places like Isan, where people can get free education and food if they change religion. Sometimes, these missionaries will simply invite people to a “party” (no beer!) in order to convert you.

I’m not writing this to bash Christians and other evangelicals. But Thais are often very naïve about the intentions of missionaries. Thais should be aware of the threat to Thai culture from these religious fanatics.If you have lived outside of Thailand, you may know that some people are very insulting to Buddhism. If you live inside Thailand, you probably don’t know this, because you can’t buy books that insult Buddhism. Here’s an example of a website that insults Buddhism and Thai culture. I give you this link to prove my point.

***********************

No, I didn't translate myself!

The sentiment is earnest. Most Thais don't seem to have a clue about the evangelical, viral nature of some belief systems.

In a weird sense, though, the tolerance of most Buddhists toward other religions may actually provide some immunity to these viruses. When evangelicals begin their Jesus spiel, the Thai Buddhist reaction may be, "bring him on...give me a pic and I'll add it to my shrine".

In the future, I hope to add some photos to this page. I've been told of several fanatical Thais in Bangkok, wearing placards, sporting mini speaker systems, and warning of Armageddon. If you have any such photos, please send them my way!

***************

Dec 26, 2008: Oooh, Santa has granted my wish! With permission from the photographer, below are a couple shots of an aforementioned loonie. You see "Jesus is the Redeemer" in the first pic, and "The Result of Evil is Death" in the second.

Jan 28, 2009: More!

Bolt Versus Phelps

As much as China's attitude towards Tibet digusts, there's no denying the successful, spectacular nature of the 2008 Olympics.

Imagine some new sprinting events. One would be a "chicken sprint", where the athlete is required to insert his hands into his armpits for the duration of the run. In another event, the hands must be held over the head with elbows locked. A locked-knee sprint could be included. How about one in which the athlete is required to raise his knees to the level of his sternum on each step? All of the above would have 100, 200, and 400 meter categories, as well as relays and medleys.

Perhaps a "silly sprinting" event would be overboard.



In any case, if such events were ever to be seen, would anyone be surprised to see a character like Usain Bolt walk away with, say, eight gold medals around his neck?

As absurd as the chicken sprint seems, isn't that what we have in the swimming events? There's the breaststroke, the butterfly, and the backstroke, with medleys and relays. Judges eyeball the contestants, prepared to disqualify any of them for breaking form. There's also the freestyle event. In the end, though, there's nothing freestyle about freestyle...the fastest stroke is clearly the American crawl, so that's what all freestylers inevitably use.

I don't doubt that hardcore swimming afficionados would be indignant about my take on the butterfly stroke. It's a uniquely challenging form with a long history (?), they'd say. But c'mon...when an Olympic athlete comes home with a hoarde of medals, he/she is most certainly a swimmer. Phelps broke Spitz's record for medal haul, which Ian Thorpe had threatened in Sydney. Isn't it obvious that there isn't any great separation of skillsets between swimming events?

As much as I like to see Phelps padding the American gold medal count, I'll cast my vote for Usain Bolt as the superhero of the 2008 Olympics. In the event that displays the rawest, most touted, most sought-after athletic skill (speed!), he easily annihilated the competition and the world record. Given his relatively poor explosion from the blocks, it's fair to speculate that somewhere around the 60 meter mark, he was propelling himself faster than any of the roughly 100,000,000,000 humans in history.

******************

Gymnastics is another sport where multiple medals are frequently seen. Here, the above complaint (of large overlap between skillsets in different events) applies, but perhaps less strongly. The problem with Olympic gymnastics is the fact that the athletes can only receive medals in particular events if they've already displayed competence in all four gymnastic events. To take this logic to an extreme, imagine that you can't enter the shot put competition unless you've already demonstrated that you're an elite decathlete. The talent pool of potential shot-putters is then slashed dramatically, and it would then be no surprise to see an individual medaling in both the shot put and the decathlon.

Gymnastics is spectacular, but can there be any doubt that it would be even more so if gymnasts were allowed to specialize in one event? In other words, an athlete could specialize entirely on the floor routine, foregoing the training required for the vault, balance beam, and parallel bars. In addition to an increase in the mind-bogglingedness of the performances, we might see a decline in some of the alleged abuses of young female gymnasts, who must maintain an insane training regimen to prepare for four events.

Frontloading, Freeloading

Today's organisms are phylogenetically descended from others which were vastly simpler than they are, so much simpler, in fact, that it's inconceivable how any kind of description of the later, complex organisms could have existed in the earlier one. John Von Neumann

There are numerous grades of creationist arguments, from those that willfully ignore the convergent evidence from multiple branches of science, to those that make every effort to conform to available evidence without dispensing of that added element, the cosmic designer. The notion of "frontloading" falls into the latter. The idea seems to be that:

*Evolution did indeed proceed from a primordial common ancestor.

*Further tinkering may not have been necessary, but the potential for all sorts of otherwise impossible complexity was built into the DNA from the very beginning. Over geological time, organisms unfold into more complex, higher forms. Evolution, in other words, was directed from the very beginning.

Typically, a frontloader gets excited if/when some journal reports on a gene that serves no immediately obvious function in a creature that resides in a low position on the evolutionary tree, but is important for higher organisms. An example would be precursors for nerve tissue found in some sponges. Unlike the folks who do the research and write the articles, these frontloaders are quick to speculate that the gene in question was somehow embedded for future generations and is worthless for the sponge.

Despite the attempts to move the ID goalposts right out of the stadium, there are big problems with frontloading:

1) Exactly how many genes needed to be loaded into the primordial organism to encompass all of life's diversity over the last 4 billion years? Presumably, any genes that IDers typically label "irreducibly complex" (e.g. those for the blood clotting cascade) must be included here.

Michael Behe takes a particularly, uh, nuanced view on the subject. Some of his remarks seem to suggest he's not averse to a frontloading scenario. And he claims to endorse "common descent". On the other hand, he also argues that the majority of the 10,000 or so protein/protein interactions in a typical mammalian cell exhibit irreducible complexity. That's just one species! For a Behe-frontloading scenario to work, tens of thousands of different protein coding sequences would have to be packed into the primordial organism.

2) How were these useless genes preserved over 3 billion years or more? Useless genes, of course, have a habit of getting excised from the genome, so we should see evidence of some sort of mutation-checking system that is so powerful that a wide variety of genes can be passed through trillions of generations without so much as a single base pair substitution. We don't see that, and it's not for lack of trying...biochemists would love to get their hands on enzymes that copy with such fantastic fidelity. It's funny to see the same folks who have offered up so much blather on the topic of "genetic entropy" reverse course and speculate that certain useless genes have been passed through lineages unscathed for eons.

Then again, there seems to be another breed of frontloader who argues that none of these ancient genes were actually useless. They simply served functions other than what we see today. That's great...it's the same argument that biochemists have offered the IDiots to dispute "irreducible complexity" for the last 20 years (e.g. on its own, the spring mechanism of a mouse trap won't catch mice, but it will serve nicely as a tie clip).

3) Where are all these buried genes now?

I can see some "outs" for the above questions. As for the buried genes, IDers can wiggle out of that dilemma by fantasizing that we've reached the evolutionary juncture where all such genes have been jettisoned and are thus, conveniently, not available for study. With the advent of humanity, you might say, all biological innovation pooped out. Awfully sci-fi.

It's possible to imagine some sort of DNA or RNA software package that compresses a huge diversity of genetic outcomes into relatively few base pairs. I'd call this program "evolution", but the frontloaders must also explain how their pet examples of "irreducible complexity" get compressed and maintained in the primordial .zip file. If you respect the authority of Von Neumann, that's one hell of a hurdle.

Should I try to make that bacterium sweat, or grunt with effort?