About Christianity

'It is true I cannot understand you. But it is because I cannot understand the pain, that I can give you support. It is because I don’t know the suffering, that I can encourage you. If I truly know and truly understand, then, maybe I could not even utter a single word.'

i like this phrase a lot. as usual, for the n-th time, it came from a story. how i wish i can come up with such beautiful lines. well, these lines were said by a man to a woman he loved, to the woman whose pain he could not understand.

have you ever have the feeling of asking people to shut up? sometimes do you get the urge to slam at people and shout at them and say, 'Don't talk about things you cannot even begin to understand.' all people have problems in their lives, big or small. what is small to you may be big to others, what is big to you may be small to others. there are different kinds of big problems as well. one person may grow up in a very poor family. the other may grow up in an abusive home (well i don't really call that a home anymore). the third may grow up alone, without family.

because of our characters, which i believe are given by God, which is also moulded by the environment we are in, we make different choices in the same situation. there arises different opinions. makes sense?

and of course, people make decisions that benefits them. nobody in their right mind will make decisions to harm themselves unless for a very special reason. even people who take drugs, i guess (since i never try before) they want to escape from reality or just for curiosity sake. to them, their benefits are escape from pain or satisfying their curiosity. that, is the benefit they derived from it.

because humans are logical beings, we make decisions that we deemed as the best for us. however, what we think is best for us may not be that way as others see it. back to the example, person A takes drugs because he wants to escape from reality and the pain, but person B might not see it that way. he might see going for counselling to be a better option.

this is a small example. bigger, more common examples would be abortion, euthanasia...etc. i am not going to talk about that now in this post. this is not the point of it anyway.

sometimes we see people doing things as wrong, whether it is very obvious or not, and sometimes we slammed the people straight in their faces. scold them, criticize them, whatever. or maybe we didn't do this ourselves. but people do this to us. i am excluding your parents and your teachers punishing you because you are naughty, ok? lol.

and when that happens, sometimes we tend to or actually shout back, or get shouted back, 'what do you know?' or 'don't talk about things you cannot even begin to understand!' when people threw this words at us, or when we throw it out at others, what is the emotion we are feeling? i can say, almost 100%, it is anger.

for simplicity sake, we assume we are the one shouting at others. so, we feel angry. why? because there is this joker, who didn't even understand our pain, didn't even understand our situation, didn't even understand a single thing, came and condemned us. this person, who did not even go through the pain himself, actually scolded us. he who did not know anything has no right to say anything. that is what i always thought. really.

but why? that is in contradiction with the very first paragraph of this post right? the reason i said that is because the first thing people do is to condemn. maybe people are like that. maybe we ourselves are like that. how many of us, before we say something, even bother to understand the person right in front of us?

the fact that a person is smiling happily doesn't mean he has no troubles. people don't usually wear their feelings on their faces. there is no need to tell the world you are in trouble. people are not interested. we wear a mask we called 'smiles'. naturally, as if we are born with that talent, we can switch to that mask whenever we are with people. we are so gifted at that we don't really consciously tell ourselves to keep the mask on. it is as easy as breathing, as walking, as eating.

so, when we see the person standing in front of us, do we understand him/her? how much do we know about him? when we condemn, or scold, or criticize, why do we do that? yes we know he might be wrong, from our perspective. so? why do we condemn? is it because we care for the person in front and want him to turn from his ways? or is it because of that self-righteousness inside of us that we allow ourselves to be the judge over him?

if it is the latter, i guess it would be better for us to shut up. because we accomplish nothing. nothing at all. so what if we declare judgement on the others, when we are not even supposed to do that in the first place? does it help? no.

if it is the former, that we want to help, then maybe, or we should, get the situation right first. yes, he may be wrong. but how do you feel if someone who don't know a thing come and tell you what to do? you wouldn't like it, and you would reject it. i know i would. but if you show you care, you show that you want to help, and instead of condemning him, you gently tell him what is wrong, or by practical efforts show that you really want to help, then, wouldn't it be a much better choice to make? wouldn't the result have a higher chance of turning out to be more positive?

different people have different capacity of stress and pain, sorrow and despair. maybe the person who suffered, he had already suffered more than you can ever bear. maybe he suffered a pain greater than you imagined, such that if it were you who were the one going through it, you might already have long been gone, or made a much worse choice.

because we have not gone through it, we have no way to understand the person in front of us. but also, like the man said, it is because we have not gone through it, that we can see things objectively, that we can encourage, that we can help. because we still have that hope, because we still have that energy to move. because we can, and able to pull the person up to a place where there is light. of course, a person who went through the same pain and came out of it would be a much better person to help.

the above 2 paragraphs seems like a contradiction right? i guess i will explain it later.

all that i said just now, they were of course somehow extreme. we don't usually meet people who despair. but we do meet people who are in pain most of the time, whether we are aware or not. but it comes down to the mentality of us when we face others.

i will now explain the contradiction. if we don't have a mentality of wanting to help, then we should shut up. like i say, we might not take the pain if it were us. so instead of condemning, it would be better for us to walk away.

if we want to sincerely help, then, we would have to make use of the hope and strength we have to pull the person up to where there is light. of course, give the person the right hope, not the wrong kind of hope. i made a post about that on the blog post 'hope is cruel'. go see that if you want to.

we understand nothing. and from there, depending on your mentality, for the same situation, we could greatly affect people in 2 very different ways. if one day, i am asked, 'what do you know?', i hope i can come up with a reply as beautiful as the one made by that man who has the love for the woman.

chinese teacher left behind students and ran away on his own during the sichuan earthquake. what do you think of this statement which was in the news? what is the first impression you have?

let me see..... he don't deserve to live. he is heartless. he is a coward. he ought to die. he is not fit to live. a rotten man. are these the thoughts that came into your mind? if it is, see, you made another mistake. because, who are you to condemn him?

let me say first, i read the headlines, and not the article. but what i am saying is not related to that. that is not important, because, i am going to address the issue of humans judging one another too quickly. no, i am not defending him. i am not judging him.

so he ran, leaving behind his students and leaving them to die. he got slammed, he got flamed and he got condemned. maybe you think he deserved it, because if he just stayed, he might have saved some lives. some of you more noble people may have sacrificed your lives to save that few kids, or as many as you can. afterall, they are children with a bright future. fair? it seemed so.

how about we look from another perspective? his perspective.

what if his parents had not yet died? what if he has a family to support? here, i am assuming his parents are still around and he has a family to take care of. please note, in china, the women do not work, or seldom work after they got married. traditional thinking. the man brings in the bread. in china, you only have a kid. his parents most likely only have him as the only child.

now... the situation in front of you. an earthquake. someone got to die. you either save the kids and risk dying, or you leave them to die and get a higher chance of survival. obviously, he chose the second one. are you condemning him again? think about it again. if he die, who is going to take care of his parents? if he die, who is going to take care of his family? would you save a few kids and let your family suffer, or risk getting condemned and slammed and insulted and flamed but able to live on for the sake of your family? so what if your name got written down in the newspaper as a crisis hero who died but your living family suffered? if you die, that's the end of you.

no, i am not saying the reason why he ran is because of that. he might have other reasons. or he might just like you say, a coward who care for nothing else but for his survival. what i want to say, people do things for different reasons. who are we to judge him? if i have a family, i would rather get condemn and live, than to die a crisis hero. planning to slam me? you better not do it on my website.

same for other things. sometimes people do things that are 'evil' or 'bad'. we are quick to judge. we hear one side of the story and we jump to conclusions. always being full of ourselves, always think other people are no good. but what if, we are in the same situation as them, what would we do? 'i would definately save the children.' is that what you think? no. unless you go through the whole thing yourself, you are not fit to comment on anything. yes. not fit. because no one can talk about what they do not understand. it makes us an even worse hypocrites than we are right now. we may think we will save the kids, but when the real thing came, what would you do? what would you do?

i am not saying you are also another coward who will run away. who knows? you might be a hero. you might be a coward. you might stay. you might run. whatever you do, who are others to judge? everyone has different purposes in life. who are we to judge others?

so, the next time something like that happens, big or small, in war or peace, in any kind of situation, do not judge. of course, i am saying this as a person who has not undergo any tragedies in life. maybe, if something bad happen to me, like someone come and kill off my loved ones, i would condemn him too. because we always talk about things we don't understand. always.

but there is this statement (from memory) from a character in a game (True Tears) i played, which is translated as :

it is true i cannot understand you. but it is because i cannot understand the pain, that i can give you support. it is because i don't know the suffering, that i can encourage you. if i truely know and truely understand, then, maybe i could not even utter a single word.

what i want to say is, encourage people, and not judge them. i am saying this from the point of a person who never experienced a single tragedy in life, which is why i am able to say it. this post is kind of contradicting, eh?