Great Speeches

I've got this army friend who is very into self-improvement books. Over these months I have seen him read on books giving instructions like 'How to make people like you' and those kind of topics. And recently he brought along this book on 'Great Speeches.' It was quite an interesting book, and is actually quite beneficial and the least of all his books which reeks of self-improvement ideas, if it were not for his purpose of trying to speak well with this book. I am thus convinced that any book can become rubbish if you had a purpose which is rubbish. Inside it were (surprise!) sermons alongside political speeches and so on. The sermons are by Jesus of Nazereth (Sermon of the Mount), by John Calvin, John Wesley, Billy Graham, Karl Barth, Jonathan Edwards etc.

The one by Jonathan Edwards made me heavy-hearted. I believe it was a small adapatation from 'Sinners in the hands of an angry God'. And it taught about God's wrath. And Edwards was telling his congregation that there are some who are listening to his very sermon and feeling so 'at ease with himself' and even telling himself that he wasn't the one Edwards was describing, but they are hanging 'like a spider' on a thread. Then he compared New England to the biblical city of Sodom, whom we all know was destroyed by God. I felt it was a timeless truth. Even as OCH taught on Sunday that we are to live each day of our lives knowing that the wrath of God can come anytime, I know there could be some in our midst who did not take this seriously. Edwards said that it would be very miserable to find our brother sitting next to us suffer that fate.

And then there was this section called 'Trials' where people come up with great speeches when being tried unjustly, and not suprisingly, Martin Luther was there at the Diet of Worms. 'I shall not recant... unless proven otherwise by Scripture or reason. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.'

But then I was quite shocked to see that Job was in there too, and he was in a trial against God. Particularly when the book is trying to glorify those who are being tried unjustly. In this case, it is Job, which is so wrong and taken out of context, because the Book of Job is trying to tell us Job is self-righteous in his trial against God, exactly the opposite this book is telling us. If we had read the bible we would know that Job's self-righteousness did not stand well against the righteousness of God. But alas, this is not a Christian book. Haha.

And then there was kind of a small debate among us about Bioethics. There was this person called Leon Kass who argued against the 'Brave New World' of human cloning. I agree a lot with this man. He argued that intrinsically humanity knows it is wrong for human cloning. That is his 'moral' argument, apart from his 'rational' arguments. He also said that there can be no sufficient reason to explain 'the horrors of father-daughter incest (even with consent), rape, murder, cannibalism etc). Which is so true, isn't it? What is stopping us from rape? What is stopping us from murder? Everyone says it is 'innate'. And everyone wants to give a naturalistic and rational answer to that which is innate and ultimately, moral. You cannot! You wish to say that our DNA had written these moral codes of law? Maybe. But who wrote it? And why do only homosapiens have this code written? How does one explain by reason? I doubt anyone can answer this.