The Selfish Gene

Listen carefully the next time you overheard an argument in office or at home. For you may just stumble upon a powerful clue for God’s existence!

In his bestseller Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis observed that when we quarrel, we would often appeal to some higher Moral Law to which the other party is accountable. For example, it is common to hear people argue like this: “That’s my seat, I was here first”, “Give me a piece of your orange, I gave you some of mine” or “How do you like it if someone did the same to you?” Such arguments do not merely express our displeasure at someone’s behavior. They are actually appealing to a standard of right and wrong which we expect others to know about and ought to follow. Otherwise it would be as futile as claiming that a footballer had committed a foul without some agreement about the rules. This transcendent and universal Moral Law is a signpost pointing to God who is the Lawgiver.

But not everyone would agree. Popular writers such as Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright have tried to show that rudimentary forms of moral cognition can be found in animals as well. Here is a discussion on whether natural selection can account for morality as we know it available in the latest edition of Kairos Magazine.


The Selfish Gene: Monkeying With Morality

Shocked!

It's always a challenge to comment on complex social issues in an accessible, fair and yet personal/compassionate manner... For me, this ecommentary is a classic of combining these elements and the 'kungfu' level I hope to attain.

Shocked
by Soo-Inn Tan, 16 Jan 2006
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I remember my mum hinting that my beloved Teochew nanny may have lost her daughter in very tragic circumstances. Sons were prized in China. Daughters were not. Apparently, when her daughter was born, they tore her from her mother's arms and threw the new born child into the river. That was a long time ago. Things have gotten much worse since. Here is part of an article from the January 9th 2006 issue of the Guardian Online.

The births of up to 10 million girls in India may have been prevented by selective abortion in the past 20 years, researchers say today. Half a million babies are aborted every year because they are girls, even though termination on the grounds of gender was outlawed in India in 1994, according to a study published online by the Lancet medical journal."

"If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would not be unreasonable."

READ ON FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

Message Of Reconciliation

Tony Lim's message was delivered at the end of 2006, but never more current than now. Here are some excerpts:

Richard Lischer had this to say about Martin Luther King’s collected sermons:

“In these sermons King tells the truth about the sins of racism, idolatry, militarism and violence. As Desmond Tutu puts it, he is not afraid to look the beast in the eye. Yet he does so in a way that is remarkably generous towards his enemies. Where it is possible to ‘explain’ racism as a symptom of fear of some other psychological or cultural disorder, he does so. He often takes time to understand and articulate the White Southerner’s anxiety in the face of change. He makes his judgements on racism and war against the backdrop of God’s profound love for the world, a theological awareness which lends to his sermons a brooding sense of pathos. In re-reading them one is reminded that the emotions most characteristic of a the prophet is not anger but sorrow. He tells the truth but rarely in bitterness of spirit and never with contempt for the Other. His truth-telling is pervaded by a sense of tragedy…although embroiled in many local conflicts, King never took his eye of cosmos and the universal fact of reconciliation. The victory he promises will be big enough to include victims and victimisers, the segregated and the segregators, in the beloved community. King fought as hard as anyone in America for new laws, but his sermons palpably yearn for the new thing that rises just beyond the law’s guarantees. And for King that new thing was the peculiarly American expression of God’s reconciliation of the world through Jesus Christ. ( p 160, f)


"What tangible, concrete, realistic signs and gestures of reconciliation can we as a Christian community give to our country, our community, our church, our family?

1) Be realistic – look the beast in the eye. This is Malaysia – neither paradise nor is it hell.
2) Tell the truth about ourselves, about the Other
3) Confess our sins
4) Offer signs and meaningful gestures of reconciliation
5) Best we could do may lie in us just wanting to reach out toward reconciliation. Which in the end must mark all that we say, and do as a person, as a church, as a community."