Christians against the world

Why do Christians have this feeling that they are the minority, and that the world has trouble accepting what they believe?  Why do Christians have a victim mentality?

Ed Stetzer reckons that the church is not dying in the USA, just changing.  He lumps Christians into three groups:

• Cultural Christians - people who call themselves Christians because their world tells them they are.  They do not practice a vibrant faith, even though most of them come from a Christian heritage.  These guys make up about a third of the 75% who call themselves Christians in USA.
  
• Congregational Christians - people who attend church, but deep down, they are just like the cultural Christians.  These guys make up the second third of the 75% who call themselves Christians.
  
• Convictional Christians - these guys have come to a point in their lives where their faith in Christ has been sealed.  Jesus changed their lives, and their lives become oriented around their faith in Him.  These guys make up the final third of that 75% who call themselves Christians.

In Stetzer's opinion, the number of convicted Christians has not declined.  But as culture has changed, those who call themselves "Christian" without the real and deep conviction are changing the appearance of the statistics.

Would you agree with him?

I think his description is similar to Jesus' Parable of the Sower.  It makes sense to me.

On a world-wide basis, though, we see a lot of opposition towards the Christian faith.  Robert Morgan wrote stories from Northern Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, Egypt, Turkey, North Korea, India, Burma, Afghanistan and many other places, where the church is being persecuted.  But Christians expect persecution, as Jesus told them they would, so such is really not a surprise.

Why is the world against Christianity?  Is it bad?  Is it a threat?  What do you think?

Value of human life

Reflecting on recent news events, Waleed Aly wrote a comment about the value of human life.

It seems that we, humans, object to the fact that that lives can be terminated unexpectedly, as what happened in the recent MH17 saga.  We seem to expect that life would go on without end ... or, at least, we be warned and be able to gradually say goodbye before the end arrives.  We seem to think that it is a violation of our rights to die unexpectedly.

Then, it doesn't matter as much when some people die, as compared to others.  If Palestinians or Gazans or South Sudanese that we do not know die, it does not matter - they are not from the rich Western world, and we are not related to them.  We care more for the people we know, or those who have aligned themselves to us in some way.

Do you think that this is true?  Are values about life like what Aly said?  Should it be?

How does God feel when somebody dies?  Does He care?

What do you believe?

Facebook unethical?

Facebook has hit the news again.

Anna Lemind wrote about the hidden psychological experiments they conduct.  Without informing their users, they have been gathering statistics about the positive and negative emotions expressed by the users through keywords and emoticons.

Violet Blue said that Facebook "tampered with the emotional well-being of 689,003 users" as its experiments sought to find ways of spreading, or avoiding the spread of, emotions en masse.

Peter Aziz reckons that Facebook's mobile app gives the company too much information about us.  The app tells Facebook where we are, who our contacts are, what their contact details are, what we photograph and text to each other.

What do you think?

Are these guys unnecessarily cautious?  Is Facebook unethical in the way it handles the information it carries on its servers?  Are they not allowed to perform data mining on the information that sits on their hardware?

Or are they fine to do what they want with data that we have given them?  We did, after all, agree to give them that data when we signed up to use their app and their platform, didn't we?

Has the company overstepped its boundaries, or are they fine?

How to handle asylum seekers?

I recently learned that it is illegal to send asylum seekers back to their home countries.

It is also very cruel.  These people have been victimised in their homeland.  They are fleeing some kind of terror that they have faced over there.  To turn them back to the horror that they are trying to escape from ... imagine yourself in their shoes and you would understand how unkind it is to do that.

However, some asylum seekers are not really running away from anything.  They are just looking for better economic prospects.  They are illegal immigrants.  Some may also be terrorists seeking a way into the host countries that they will later terrorise.

And some potential host nations also lack the resources to take in these people.  Nobody has the right to demand that any host country take them in.  Asylum seekers should wait for host countries to accept them - not demanding or expecting to be welcomed any more than the people who apply for migration.

So what can we do with asylum seekers?  Send them to detention centers and process them?  That seems to be the way most are handled.  But this method should also be temporary - nobody should have to stay in detention centers and be in the processing stages for the rest of their lives.  Otherwise, detention centers are just a guise for lifetime imprisonment.

How should we handle asylum seekers?  How can we give them refuge and care?  Who are genuine and who are not?  What do you think the world should handle this problem?

What do you think?

Illegal to be poor

In Malaysia recently, Federal Territories Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Mansor tried to clean up the city of Kuala Lumpur by banning soup kitchens.  He also forbade people to give alms to city's beggars.  His rationale seems to be that the presence of the poor and homeless makes the city look bad.

However, his words have been receiving a lot of negative backlash.  Doesn't Islam encourage giving alms to the poor?  Shouldn't the city be looking after these unfortunate ones, instead of making their lives more miserable?  What is the government doing to aid such people?

Isn't the cost of bureaucracy and corruption higher than the cost of feeding the poor?  Why can't rich bureaucrats open their homes to the poor to get them off the streets?  Is it a crime to be poor?

What do you think the solution of the problem is?

It seems to me that this is not just a Malaysian problem, but quite a universal one.  Countries like to look good by hiding away the fact that there are people among us who are less well off.  Social welfare schemes try to skimp on providing for these as they manage their budgets, as they try to entice the richer with tax cuts.  However, the poor will always be among us, and they need assistance.

In what way can we assist?  We say that "if we give a man a fish, we feed him for a day, but if we teach him to fish, we can feed him for a lifetime".  Is it possible to educate the poor and send them on the way to self-sufficiency?  Would that work for everybody?

How can we care for these people who need help?  Is it fair to give them money for not doing anything, at the expense of those who work hard for what they have?

What can nations do, as they struggle with their national budgets?

What would Jesus do?