Author: Andy Uyboco

Just a couple of days ago, my high school batch hosted our grand alumni homecoming. That means it has been 25 years since I donned my white polo and khaki pants, put on my backpack and trekked the streets of Juna on the way to school. I still had pimples and a head full of hair back then.

We were the last of the 80’s and the first of the 90’s. We grew up with BMX bikes and breakdancing, Madonna and Michael Jackson, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Hardy Boys and Sweet Valley High, the A-Team and Knight Rider.

I was a computer geek even as a kid and my father indulged my hobby by subscribing to U.S. magazines like Personal Computing and PC Magazine. I saw the debut of the first Macintosh, the IBM PC (XT and AT), and the slow demise of the Apple II, where I had so much fun with pixelated games on a screen that showed no other color but green.

16 kilobytes (kb) was standard memory. You were a power-user if you had 64kb, and if you had 128kb, you were at the top of the food chain. For today’s users who are so used to Gigabytes (GB) of memory, a kilobyte is what you get when you divide a gigabyte by one million.

But enough of the geekiness. We were witnesses to Ninoy’s assassination and the original EDSA revolution. Marcos vs. Cory was a hotly debated topic in English classes. Unfortunately that’s about all I remember of politics in that era as I was more interested in computers. Seems like I can’t escape from the geekiness.

I have my elementary math teacher, Mrs. Salinas, to thank for introducing me to the world of computers when I was just in Grade 4. The school had just acquired a number of low-end Zenith computers and she offered to teach programming in BASIC for those who were interested. So that’s how I spent a number of Saturdays learning about variables and loops, on a machine that only had 1 kilobyte of memory (yep, that’s not a typo) and didn’t save any of my work. I had to retype any programs that I had made before if I wanted to run them again.

Speaking of teachers, I met a few at the reunion. There was my Montessori (pre-school) teacher, Ms. Vikki Ravarra, who had to put up with my constant fear of not seeing my mother at the back of the classroom. Ms. Nelia Sanchez, the ever patient and kind grade 1 teacher, who made the transition from kinder to elementary less scary experience. Ms. Edna Royo, my grade 5 teacher who tied my rubber shoes to the teacher’s table for defying the school rules of wearing black leather shoes (which I detested) once too often. She was strict and firm, but always fair in class. She taught me to love softball, actively coaching our team to be the softball champions for that year.

There was, of course, fellow columnist and toastmaster, Mr. Rene Lizada — who was my inspiration for becoming a teacher, speaker, writer, and heckler. I even saw my college physics professor and department head, Fr. Dan Mcnamara, who has transferred here from the Ateneo de Manila. He had a deep booming voice and his lectures on the third floor could be heard on the ground. I frequently hung out in his office trying to figure out the quantum physics chart that hung on a wall, and I ran to him for advice when I considered shifting out of physics and into computer science.

It’s hard to believe all those happened more than 2 decades ago. Some of them seem just like yesterday.

And just like that, it’s 2016.

Happy New Year!

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

The latest tit-for-tat between Digong and Mar has left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m not particularly happy that the conversation has shifted from issues to personal attacks, mudslinging and juvenile one-upsmanship.

Pambabae yang sampalan, suntukan nalang!

Ah pambabae ha. O barilan nalang!

It reminds me of my elementary and high school days when we would settle arguments with “backfield na lang!” (“backfield” being a euphemism for a fistfight at the soccer fields at the back of the school where authorities were less likely to see you.)

Then there are whole essays devoted to educating us on what “Wharton graduate” means, the difference between graduate and undergraduate, and even the difference in toga colors for each. This prompted one of my former classmates to ask, “Should I now start saying that I undergraduated with BS Physics and BS Computer Engineering degrees from the Ateneo?”

Wharton, Shmarton, Kickout, Dropout — who cares? The real question for me is what have these people actually done? What are their accomplishments? What is their track record in public service?

At a certain age, your degree or lack of it doesn’t really matter anymore. Look at Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

On the one hand, Duterte-apologists are explaining all these as masterful moves:

1. To show the public that Mar can easily be rattled and can’t handle stress.
2. To keep himself in the headlines without spending a centavo. As the old marketing adage goes, “bad publicity is still publicity,” and there are a few more months to go for him to correct whatever bad image he projects now to get himself in the limelight.

It’s not a bad strategy at all.

Consider Carlos Celdran, who last week incurred the wrath of Dabawenyos by issuing blanket statements cursing “Dutertards.” Then, with a heartfelt apology and an offer of peaceful level-headed discussions, he won back many people, including me. One thing is sure though, a lot more people are now aware of who Carlos Celdran is, regardless if they bought his apology or not — and sometimes that awareness, that name-recall, is all that matters come election day.

Consider that Karen Davila interview of Alma Moreno, where she practically embarrassed herself by showing how little she knows about issues she is supposedly advocating for. Her preferred birth control method is keeping the lights on and she doesn’t seem to have a clue on what the RH Law is all about.

This week, Pulse Asia reported that she is now in the list of Top 20 senatorial bets.

Someone slap me, please.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2

Click here for Part 3

In the closing moments of Ravi’s talk, he mentions that without God, there is no recovery (or as I understood it, no redemption or salvation). He then follows with the famous Pascal’s Wager: “If you rejected him, and you turned out to be wrong, that was a huge gamble you took in life.”

He then mimics Pascal talking to an audience of atheists: “Look, boys, if I’ve been wrong, what is your test for meaning? Happiness. But I’ve been happy. So if I die, I die.  But if you boys are wrong in rejecting him, you’ve got a king-sized headache coming at the end of it, for having rejected the one who made you and framed you.”

I have already debunked Pascal’s wager in one of my earlier articles, False Dichotomies, but the gist of it is that Pascal assumed that one only had to choose between Christianity or nothing. The reality is much more complicated — one can choose to be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Sikh, a universalist, a Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, “spiritual but not religious,” and so on and so forth. What if one of those others are right instead of Christianity? Some researchers have estimated that there are around 4,000 religions all over the world today. So it’s not a 50-50 chance as Pascal would like you to believe, but only around 0.025 percent. Even if you only consider the 5 major world religions, that still just a 20% chance that you’re correct. The odds are still against you and you have also taken a huge gamble, my friend.

This talk of “rejection” is also inaccurate and misleading. A study by Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago finds that 67% of people stay with the religion they were born with (in a paper entitled Counting Flocks and Lost Sheep: Trends in Religious Preference Since World War II). So for most people, it is not even a question of rejection but simply of staying faithful to what one was raised to believe — a sensible reaction given the harsh cultural and social ramifications of turning one’s back on one’s religion in many societies. In many middle-eastern countries, for example, the punishment for rejecting Islam is death.

Even some “Christian” groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses have a practice called “shunning” to those members who reject their faith. A friend of mine, Gamahiel Tutor, a former JW elder, related to me his personal experience of this when he questioned the church officials too much. When he finally couldn’t take it anymore and turned away, he was “shunned” which meant that his former friends and relatives regarded him as dead to them. They wouldn’t talk to him nor have any sort of relationship with him.

Can one really be accused of “rejecting” God when it just so happened that one was born into the “wrong” religion and the price of conversion was too high, or one never got a chance to hear about Jesus, or one heard about it from an unconvincing source?

Besides, I find it absurd and unjust that a decision you make in this life affects your afterlife for all eternity. And that decision is made in circumstances that can hardly be called fair. One is supposed to trust secondhand sources (not God himself) for this monumental decision — and sometimes these sources are not credible enough. One is called to “have faith” instead of being presented with convincing evidence. If my single encounter with Christianity is with a bumbling Christian who cannot answer my skeptical and probing questions with nothing other than, “Just believe and pray. God will answer you in the stillness of your heart,” or some other useless advice like that, can I be faulted for rejecting the message due to the poor delivery of the messenger or his refusal to engage in a more critical discussion?

Look at it this way. If I were to send a message to my son through a friend saying, “Please buy 5 apples and 2 oranges,” but my friend wrongly relays the message and my son shows up with 2 apples and 5 oranges, do I put the blame on my son or on my friend? In fact, the blame might even be on me because I might not have double-checked to make sure my friend got the message right in the first place. I would never punish my son for getting it wrong because of the messenger’s faulty delivery.

That being said, I find the entire idea of there being no more chance at redemption after death absurd if God were indeed loving and just (and if the soul does indeed exist). Why would he make it so if he were loving and just? Apologists, of course, have crafted several replies to this but so far none of them have satisfied me and I remain unconvinced. If that is enough to warrant me an eternity in hell, then so be it. I probably couldn’t stand to be in such a “heaven” with a megalomaniacal deity and his minions anyway.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Send me your thoughts at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I outlined the three main arguments in Ravi’s talk, “Why I Am Not An Atheist.” Today  I will deal with the second point — that without God, there is no ultimate meaning, therefore no hope.

The Christian apologist William Lane Craig, in a discussion with atheist philosopher Shelly Kagan, made the same argument. Since the naturalist does not believe in an afterlife and since the universe is predicted to end sometime in the far future and everything will die anyway, then there is no ultimate meaning and our lives do not really matter anyway. In other words, the Nazis were neither right nor wrong as they tortured the Jews because everyone’s existence ends anyway.

Kagan was quick to point out the flaw in this sort of reasoning. How do you go from saying “since life has no ultimate meaning” to there is therefore “no meaning AT ALL?” The torture surely mattered to the Jews  who were undergoing it. It mattered even to some Nazis who realized the horror of what they have done afterwards and scarred them for life. To use a more recent example, it is wrong to say that since there is no ultimate meaning, then it doesn’t matter that people were killed or hurt during the recent attacks in Paris or that innocents were also killed or hurt as France retaliated at Syria.

Just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold meaning. You give a box of chocolates or a bouquet of roses to your loved one knowing full well those things won’t last more than a few days. You spend time with them, talking, playing games, or watching a movie. Do those things last? No. Are they meaningless? I doubt if you would agree. (I explore these issues in an older essay, Death and the Meaning of Life)

Do our lives become meaningful only because someday after we die, we can sit around sipping heavenly coffee with Jesus, swapping stories about the good old times on earth?

On the contrary, I can use Christianity to argue that life on earth is meaningless (except for around 5 minutes of it). The central teaching of Christianity is that Jesus died for man’s sin and his death acts as a substitute for our own. And so, even if one has done evil most of his life but makes a deathbed confession (like the “good” thief crucified alongside Jesus), he is deemed worthy to enter the pearly gates. So those 5 minutes you spend confessing your sin, feeling sorry for what you have done, and asking Jesus into your life as your Lord and Savior, becomes the sum total of your life. Everything else you have done is meaningless. Every little bad or good that you did is rendered moot and pointless.

Now, preachers make that sound like such a grand thing. That God himself gave you that precious chance to “repent and be saved.” But let’s put this back in the context of the examples we used above. It means that the Nazi who tortured and killed Jews, but survived and later on made a deathbed conversion to Christianity, is now in heaven — while the Jews he murdered are now in hell (since Jews don’t believe that Jesus is the messiah). It also means that the terrorist suicide bomber in Paris is roasting in hell alongside the atheist Parisians he bombed (I’m not saying that all Parisians are atheists but I’m assuming some of them were). I hope you see the absurdity of this picture.

Think about that now. How meaningful are the lives of these “souls” now suffering in hell? All their little victories, their art, music, laughter, joy and love were all for nothing because they didn’t accept Jesus’ “offer” of salvation. Zacharias criticizes the meaninglessness of atheistic philosophy yet is blind to the senselessness of his own doctrine. The Buddhist doctrine of karma, reincarnation, and continual striving for enlightenment makes more sense than this.

I myself do not know whether or not there is an ultimate meaning after all, but that does not prevent me from finding meaning NOW, from finding joy and sharing it with my loved ones NOW. Your life matters, not because someone else says it matters, but because you yourself recognize that it does.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Send me your thoughts at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Click here for Part 1

Without God, there is no moral framework.

This seems to be Ravi Zacharias’s key point in his talk, Why I Am Not An Atheist. To illustrate this, he relates an incident from the early days in his career. He was giving a talk at the University of Nottingham when a student stood up and declared, “There cannot be a god because there’s too much evil in this world.”

So Ravi replies. “Wait a minute, when you say there’s evil, aren’t you assuming there’s such a thing as good?”

The student says “Yes.”

Ravi then says, “When you say there’s such a thing as good, there’s such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which you can differentiate good and evil?”

The student hesitates at this, but is later forced to acquiesce and acknowledge a moral law.

Ravi then continues with, “But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver, but that’s whom you’re trying to disprove and not prove. But if there’s no moral lawgiver, there’s no moral law. If there’s no moral law, there’s no good. If there’s no good, there’s no evil. What is your question?”

This shuts the student up and delights the audience to whom Ravi is relating the story as they acknowledge his clever reply with cheers and applause.

This is what is called the Moral Argument (or at least one version of it) and it is often used by Christian apologists as some sort of trump card to point out that atheists/agnostics (who are mostly naturalists), have no business talking about morality, or good and evil — because these are not supposed to exist for them, or do so only in a relative fashion. Since there is no objective moral law giver, good and evil become merely opinions and one is just as good as the other. We are like animals, “following the dance of our DNA,” as they like to quote famous atheist and biologist, Richard Dawkins.

My main contention with this sort of argument is that while it is indeed possible to argue philosophically that there MUST be an objective moral law-giver, this law-giver has not seen fit to definitively reveal to humans what these objective laws are. We are still left to fend for ourselves and discover and argue about what these supposed objective laws are — thus rendering them virtually relative.

Note that the moral argument is generic and may be used by almost any sort of theist as long he believes in a god that is basically good and just. So a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, and so on may use the same argument and still come out at odds with each other — as is the case in reality.

My friend Gelo used an argument from a game of chess. Both theist and atheist sees a chessboard with the pieces intact. They have no idea what the rules are so they make it up along the way. The difference is that the theist believes that there is a definitive rule-book somewhere for playing the game while the atheist believes that they can just make things up as they go along. But my point is that that neither rule-book nor rule-maker can be found in a way that is objectively verifiable. And until we are able to do so, then we are then bound by the rules we make up by ourselves and neither of us know any better.

Still the theist may contend that there is nothing stopping the atheist from breaking or changing the rules because he doesn’t believe there are objective rules anyway. E.g. “I’m tired of moving the knight in an L-shape so I’ll make it move in an S-shape now.” Yet I would argue that the theist can do the same thing with this sort of reasoning, “After praying and fasting about it, I believe the Lord has revealed to me that knights should not move in an L-shape but in an S-shape. I obey God rather than men, so I’m moving my knight in an S-shape whether you agree or not.” And we’re left with the same sticky situation.

So while I may grant the theist a philosophical victory in this case, it is of no practical use in reality because morality is still VIRTUALLY relative. Just look at the different ways different nations handle issues like divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and so on. If there were an objective right or wrong to these issues we don’t know it, and we can’t test it nor verify it as objectively true (at least, not in the same way that we can verify that the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 9.8 meters per second squared).

Of course, Christians would contend that the Bible IS the objective rule-book I’m looking for, but the only people who would agree with that would probably be Christians, so that doesn’t sound very objective to me. I have issues with the Bible which I outlined in two past articles called Illusions of Biblical Inerrancy and A Second Look At Biblical Inerrancy so you can Google those if you’re interested. (See also Cherry-Picked Abominations) For now, let it suffice to say that I find it highly suspect that the supposed objective guide for morality would deem it fit to lay down rules against eating crabs and shrimp (Leviticus 11), yet say nothing in objection to human slavery.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Send me your thoughts at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.