Like a theif in the night...

I came from a Christian background. Lived it, done it, ever since I could remember. And although I remain sympathetic and admittedly still appreciative of the life that I grew up with, my convictions today are not what they used to be. Practically speaking, my personal faith, if such a term would still be in order, is no longer acquiescent with pop Christianity. When I was a kid though, nothing fascinated me more than Eschatology, or more plainly speaking... the study of last things or those concerning the final prophetic events mentioned in the Bible.

Now I haven’t been to church in a long time. And if it weren’t for my Dad and Mom visiting lately, I probably wouldn’t have been inside one again. Consequently enough, the Pastor's sermon was about Evangelism, specially focusing on the imminence of the end times.

I don’t know how many times I have heard this before. Nothing signifies pop Christianity more than "evangelizing the world". In fact, when I was a kid, they used to play a lot of Christian films specifically showing the end times and what it would be like to get left here on Earth when every other righteous man and woman has been taken away into Heaven. And it was scary... in fact it was downright fucking traumatic! I remember having nightmares about it for years and waking up almost crying. Of course now when I hear people still showing these movies, I get outraged. I can't believe that they still resort to scaring the shit out of people just so they convert. Sheesh!

I should point out however, that within the Christian community, there are several different schools of thought and approaches or perspectives (thank God) on interpreting the Bible, Theology, and everything else. And it does not follow that everybody has the same take on a given issue. Consequently, I know a lot of people (dear friends from the theological academe) who belong to those that appreciate and practice progressive thinking and will readily challenge traditionally accepted pop Theology if sufficiently justified. Sometimes, they are downright labeled as heretics. And though I am not sure I could still call myself a Christian by popular definition, I would like to believe that I still belong to this group.

Going back... the sermon was basically the recycled message on doing your part to evangelize the world. Expectantly playing on the guilt factor, the Reverend was giving statistics of death tolls, abortions, etc. and some other crap about how evil society has become now and why these are signs of the end times that the Bible was talking about. And this is what I want to talk about here...

In Mark 9:1, Jesus is quoted as saying "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power."

This to me is a very disturbing verse in the Gospels. Specially when you try with all your might to mesh this with the looming end times theology and the imminent return of the Son of Man that has been so widely preached all over the world. The truth of the matter is, the early Christians no doubt had the idea, or literally believed that Jesus would return and fulfill his promise during their generation. This is literally what gave them courage to go out and preach. The idea that help was on the way, the master would be returning soon... the kingdom of God is at the doorstep... I can almost see the light peering through the cracks.

This is further evidenced by the letters from Paul where he had to console churches later on, that it was ok even if they were growing old and weak and that the old people who were contemporary to Jesus' time who were promised from Mark 9:1 were actually dying one by one. They were selling their stuff, no longer actively living, and just waiting for the promised event. One can imagine that it was possible that they were probably just camping inside their churches.

So what happened to the promise? To address this In 1 Thessalonians 4:16, Paul makes a startling announcement. He claims that "The dead in Christ shall rise again." And even more so apologetically in 1 Corinthians Chapter 15 where he later exclaims "O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?"

This is what he left to console the people. Because of course it would have been the end of the Faith if they simply abandoned the promise. If Jesus' wouldn't really return and bring the glory of the kingdom of God with him, then what good is all of this? So by introducing this theology of the dead rising (which was never preached by Jesus himself nor any of the other Apostles), Paul effectively numbs the pain and suffering of the early churches and pumps the much-needed lifeblood to the promise. Suddenly, there is now new reason to keep steadfast. And so continuos the long and arduous waiting process. It doesn’t matter if it takes a decade, a score, or a century's wait. In fact, they are given honor as he stated in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 "For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep."

It was extremely effective, and it worked as planned. So much so that 2000 years after, Christians the world over would still buy this explanation.

Going back to today, we also see how pointless it is to keep mentioning "evils" in society to try to convince ourselves that the world is coming to an end. Exactly what is it really, that we have today that was not 10 times more worse than what it used to be? Murder? Rape? Genocide? Don’t tell me abortion.. don’t you remember they sacrificed babies back then? Christian persecution? Don’t you think being fed to the lions would be the extreme case here? The truth is, the signs that the Bible talked about has been happening since their time. It was happening then and has continued to happen through out history.

Besides, what is so goddamn special about our generation? Christians have been preaching that it can happen any day now... for 2000 years we have been waiting for that "any day now". Don’t you even think for a moment that like everybody else who waited and died through out history... that it might not also happen in your lifetime?

I am alive. I am living my life. I am enjoying my life. I interact with people, and I contribute to society. Don't you think this no longer applies to me today? I am not even gonna argue about whether I believe in all this, but the very least that pop Christianity can do is acknowledge that these are supposed to be things of the future and so being in any form dogmatic about interpreting what the prophecy means is being completely stupid as stupid gets.

The End of the Prequels

I have always wanted to add movie reviews to the stuff that I post here. From time to time, I will try to do so. Of course this is granting the fact that a new movie I saw is worth the effort. I like movies but I'm not the type who watches everything. My humble DVD collection however should be enough backlog for me to work on once I muster the will power to do so. I have to admit though that sometimes, I watch something just to get over the curiosity and have been even compelled to see movies simply because they are too "pop culture" to miss like this one... not every damn movie though, at least those that I can actually sit through for the next 2 hours and not revolt in apathy and disgust. I think it is relevant enough to watch pop movies even just to be able to converse about it with friends. Lastly, I am not a professional critic and I do not profess to be one so just bite me if you disagree with anything.

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After much hype and media galore, it has finally come to an end. After seeing Episode 2, I wasn’t really expecting much from Episode 3. It felt almost like a new Microsoft Windows version... there's just too much hype around it that you know it will never be good enough.

Arguably though, this to me is the best of the prequels. Finally, we see some action from all the characters that we expect to. I got pretty pissed off from the very short light saber fight scene that yoda did in Episode 2, didn’t you? Here, we get to see a lot of the light sabers being waved around.

I think the most enjoyable thing about the movie itself is the way you expect it to finally tie all the details together. How the republic finally becomes the Empire, how the Jedis get exiled, the fall of Ani Skywalker, and the birth of Luke and Lea, they even bothered to show Chewbacca just for the heck of it I guess. George Lucas obviously had only 1 more movie left and as far as I'm concerned, he did ok. What I can at least appreciate is the fact that it was at least logical (although, who didn’t know from the very beginning that Palpatine would actually turn out to be the Sith Lord?)

The acting on the other hand was nothing worthy of praise. Hayden Christensen (Ani Skywalker) could really use some acting lessons, and even Natalie Portman (Padme Amidala) lost her previous allure and magnetism. The scenes and dialogues between them lacked the depth that would have made the film's drama more realizable. Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan) was the only one that was convincing here. He deserves credit for this. The only problem I have with Ewan is whenever I see him on screen, I always remember his role on Trainspotting and it just ruins it for me seeing him be a mentor.. much like I always remember Bill Paxton on True Lies... ha! This one is my problem of course.

There were some details that I thought (among others) weren’t very consistent. Did Ani Skywalker really get that powerful and be able to finish Count Duku in less than 5 minutes? Count Duku was supposed to have been a direct apprentice of Yoda himself and was also the mentor of General Grievous and Quai Gon-Jin. For pete's sake, he sliced off Skywalker's hand the last time they waved their sabers at each other, even Yoda didn’t get to kill him in 5 minutes in Episode 2 and yet it didn’t seem like young Skywalker even broke a sweat.

It also bothered me how they just inserted the droid commander General Grievous into the movie without providing much of a background. It is good I guess that I "accidentally" was able to watch several chapters of the Clone Wars Animation on Cable TV so I knew who he was. What was surprising to me was in the animation chapters, Grievous was portrayed as a very powerful foe of the Jedi's. In fact so powerful that Jedi knights would run and hide to avoid facing him if it was possible. There were also several fight scenes in the animation that showed him taking on multiple Jedi knights all at once and killing them (hence his trophies of light sabers). We see in the movie that he suddenly has this weird cough, and doesn’t seem to be able to walk straight. Did I miss a few more chapters in the Clone Wars? Maybe I did. But I guess I didn’t care enough to find out before I saw the movie.

It was also to disappointing to see Yoda fail the way it was portrayed in the movie. He was supposed to end the rule of the Sith when he fought with Palpatine. Samuel Jackson (Master Windu) fought Palpatine and won, in fact he was about to kill him if it weren’t for Ani's betrayal of the Jedi Code, so what gives with Yoda having a hard time with him and needing to escape?

It also doesn’t sound consistent to Jedi wisdom that Ani would so easily fall prey from Palpatine's traps of being able to possess power over death. But then again, what do I know about Jedis. I just I hope that finally this is the last I hear of the jar jar jokes.

Email Signatures

I have always wondered why people bother to put their email addresses in the email signature that's attached to every outgoing email they send. I mean, isn't it enough that whoever you sent it to already knows your email address from the "FROM" detail?

Another thing that annoys me is the disclaimer that they always attach on corporate emails. Don't they know nobody fucking cares about that let alone read it seriously? The unnecessary text just makes the file get bigger and bigger through each reply... your friggin eatin up my valuable email space

Daydreaming of dreaming...

I am fucking groggy at 10 in the morning. I just finished the conference call and am now sipping a cafe mocha. I only got a couple of hours of sleep these past days.

I can't believe I was at the frigging server room till 10:30 PM when we transferred to Prod. I sent my wife an SMS that I'll be on my way home in 10 minutes 3X that day. When I finally got home at around 11:15PM, I had to punch into the night shift and start replying to my backlog of emails... there were around 16, and this was only since 3PM that day. Worse part of all is I had to be at work before 7:30 AM the next morning so we could monitor the Prod and quickly spring into action in case shit happens.

Do you know that feeling when your eyes start to get itchy? And it feels so darn good to close it tight even just for a couple of seconds? And you have this small feeling of numbness in the palm of your hands... and you cant really make a tight fist? That's me for the last few days.

The good news today is we haven’t had any reports of problems from the transfer we did and it's already been 2 days. Fuck yeah! We finally nailed the son of a bitch! The biggest transfer to Prod and no glitches. This calls for a celebration! Right after I get some quality sleep of course...

Transfer to Prod

We are in a few minutes... about to transfer the biggest fix (2 web server patches, 3 .EXE files, 1 DLL, several INI files and script updates) with regards to functionality to the Production system. Everyone is edgy, and I am about to piss in my pants as I review the transfer documents that I have submitted to the client.

The users are downstairs just waiting for us to screw up. I just hope I disappoint them this time. I keep going through the procedures and technical issues and think about any detail that I may have forgotten. Did I miss any INI file? Only 1 way to find out of course...

So here I sit.. as I await the go signal from Data Center to shutdown the production services and apply the fixes. I am usually escorted into the server room by a guy from Data Center and another representative from SysDev whenever we do this... another one of the global standards for security. Did I mention that their server room is fucking freezing? Well, it is! Not to mention the fact that our rack was placed right beside the huge A/C vent. Fuck! I hate going inside that room. My jacket is always never enough!

Erpat

Dad finally went under the knife yesterday. Saw him last night and he didnt look very good. I think I underestimated it when the Doctor said it would no longer be a minor surgery. He was still a bit groggy when I entered the room... took him a minute to recognize me.

He still had a bloodied gauze patch on his nose and his upper lip and they attached a small tube running from his nose down to a rubber glove to drain the excess blood. Mom just told me today that he can eat soft food and banana on his own now and will probably be removing the patch on his face later. What a relief! At least, I guess he is going to be better than what he looked like last night....