About Christianity

'you are cruel. you gave her a hope that she could never reach. she would have been fine the way she was. but you came and gave her hope. if she never saw hope, she would have never known what is despair either.'

the above conversation, does it sound familiar to all of you visual novels fans (i am referring to fans who read VNs for their story and not for hentai only. for more details about VNs, go to my main site, games section)? if you do play VNs you would most likely come across this line.

i came across that few lines of conversation roughly 2 years ago when i was playing the game, and i could not get it out of my head even after so long. of course, i did not replicate word for word that conversation, since i depended on my memory from 2 years ago. regardless, the most important thing is that the main idea is still the same.

ok. so. what happened? this girl was suffering from many things since she was a kid, all the way till she grew up. a boy, without knowing fully her situation, gave her a hope that she could be free from her suffering. the girl had not held on to any hope, until that boy came and gave it to her. like the above said, it was a hope that she could never reach.

moral of the story? am i moving on to the moral of the story too fast? lolx. ok maybe i should say something more.

hope is cruel. this is the topic of my post. everyone knows, that we need hope to survive. he who has no hope has no purpose. he who has no hope cannot live life fully. we see people down and we give them hope. we see people struggle and we give them hope. correct? most of us do. but before we give them hope, maybe we ought to think a little bit more.

many people give others hope, even though they knew or maybe they knew not for certain that the hope can never come true, no matter how much he try, no matter how much he hope. for example, you tell a cancer patient that he would get better and recover. you tell a person whose beloved will wake up from a coma. maybe something near to us, you tell a person everything will be all right when you know it is not. familiar? very. i am sure most of you do that.

to give people hope knowing full well they cannot get it is not only cruel, it is downright irresponsible. you may think you do a good deed by giving people hope. you may think you helped him or her by giving her hope. but if you give a person an anticipation of something that will take more than a miracle to come true, then you are just deceiving yourself and the unlucky person. in the end, the one who suffer more would be the person you had encouraged.

or maybe, you give a person a hope that may be achieved through a lot of effort. but the thing is, you give him or her hope, and then you leave her alone. you did not help. all you did is to talk nice. if you give a person hope and leave him or her to struggle for her own, what is the use? you would be making him suffer more. the process may even backfire.

what does that makes us? hypocrites. again. i seemed to always use this word in my posts. i guess it must have become my favorite word. yes. talk and no action. talk without sparing a thought for others. talk and forget. we don't think of the consequences. he is down. we must encourage him. she is in despair. we must give her hope. so? what is the point if they had a hope they can never achieve? we cannot just talk, we must also pull them up. give them a reasonable hope. you don't tell a 4th stage cancer patient he will live on for a few more years. you don't tell the wife of a man who became a vegetable that he will wake up.

of course, i admit hope is neccessary for life. without hope there is no life. but what i want to say is, if you want to give people hope, give them the right kind of hope. a hope which can be attained. a hope which could drive them to move on, not to drive them into further despair. extreme example: you convinced the wife of a man in a coma that he will surely wake up. she believes you. the next day, he died. tell me, what would the wife feel? sad before you gave her hope. sadder after you gave it to her.

moral of the story? i think i got the moral and the main story mixed together in one lump. regardless, there is one hope we can always trust. that is Jesus Christ our Lord. because to Him, impossible is nothing (my favorite addidas phrase!). He will not give you the wrong kind of hope, and what He said, will happen, because He don't lie. Because He is not a hypocrite.

remember, hope is cruel, and the person who give the hope is a cruel and downright irresponsible hypocrite if he do not give the right kind of hope and drive people further down into despair. giving hope is not neccessary doing a good deed, giving the right kind of hope is. also, when you give people hope, it is for their sake, not for your own sake of 'oh i did a good deed today!' mentality.

my company had a tree-planting day recently, just last week. to me tree-planting campaign, tree-planting day etc, is just a waste of my time. utterly pointless. utterly unconstructive. and finally, very fake, so fake it makes the people almost like a hypocrite.

why?

humans cut down so much trees everyday for resources. paper, wood, construction...etc alot of things need wood. and so we cut down trees. and then we plant trees. we see tree-planting day, the people just plant a few trees, and they say it is giving back to the earth. i mean, you take down one whole forest of trees, plant maybe 10 trees, and say it is giving back to the earth? who are you kidding?

maybe i shall say it in a smaller scale. everyone who works in an office knows how much paper we waste everyday. i admit i waste paper too. one email sent to 10 people will result in the printing of 10 exact copies of the same email for filing purposes. 1 printing error in a document will result in the whole stack of documents already printed out to be shredded.

so my company has this tree-planting day. i was very amused, and yet felt they were acting like hypocrites. my company wasted a lot of paper, as all companies do. meaning, indirectly we contributed to the cutting down of many trees. our tree-planting day, i did not go down to the little 'garden' or 'field' to plant a tree. as i said, don't waste my time. i saw a few people carry pots of trees. small trees in a pot. that is our tree-planting day. so, for cutting down who-knows-how-many-trees, my company, in a valiant effort to save the earth for the sake of the future society, decided to plant a few trees in a pot and put them in the office.

you get what i am trying to say?

moral of the story? in life, we always do things like that. just like the people, we all are hypocrites. we do bad things, or nasty things, or sinful things. and then, sometimes, or most of the times, we do little things to 'make up' for it. let me give you an example that many of us are guilty of.

for 364 days a year, we don't care about our mother. we don't bother what she thinks or what she does. sometimes we scold her and shout at her, sometimes we ignore her. sometimes we find her irritating. sometimes we find her naggy. sometimes we feel she don't understand at all what life is all about. sometimes we think she should just keep quiet and do her own stuffs. the list goes on. need i say more? and then on Mother's Day, we buy something, celebrate it, and say thanks to our mother for raising us up to be a good child. the very next day, everything return to normal.

now you tell me... how many of you are guilty of this? is this not like a tree-planting campaign? cut down so much trees and plant a few pots of trees. treat people so badly and on that one day we 'make up' for it. is this not what a hypocrite do? there are many other examples other than this Mother Day's example. if you want, i can give you more.

how about only saying sorry after we take an innocent person to vent our anger at when we are frustrated? or maybe we buy a very very little something to someone whom we had caused a ton of trouble? or maybe in a relationship, you took from the other party a lot of things, and you yourself give 'a lot (very little)' of things back?

what i want to say is, the 'make up' is too pale in comparison to what we took. no, i am not saying the make up have to match or be more than what we took. that is not the point. the point is, we are always not sincere about giving back. we take a lot, and think we give back a lot, when we give back only a little. like the tree-planting, is it really useful? no (to plant that few pots of trees, i guess the paperwork to organize it must have cut down even more trees). in the end, we are only deceiving ourselves. in the end, we are only wallowing in a pool where hypocrites are and think we are righteous, that we are good. do you get my point?

sincerity. that is what i found out. everything we do is insincere. you saw a friend outside and you say hi. you say to meet up for dinner one day. do you mean it? do you really mean it? you say sorry to a friend. do you mean it? or do you want to just want him to stop bothering you? say thanks. but is that what you truely feel? or is it just a formality?

do everything with sincerity. it is important. of course, i am also one of the hypocrites. everybody is. it is just a matter of who is worse. everybody is a hypocrite. there are no exceptions. if you are going to slam me for this statement, don't bother. i will just delete away your comment. don't talk to me about free speech in my blog and website. because like you, i am also in that puddle of insincerity.