6/23/2024 I think Willy shows sign of mental breakdown, dementia, senility, what have you. This morning, after listening to Tim Keller's talks on revival, which I played in the car on the way to the church, where I anticipated the Sunday School lesson on Jonathan Edwards' view on The Great Awakening, as he promised a week before when he finished the series on Solomon's Song of Songs. I can't remember exactly but the question Nadia came up with after the Keller's talk was around "Why would pastor Chris just keep saying - you want to know God's will, just go to the Bible, just go to the Bible", all answers are just "the Bible". In which Willy, thinking he's the genius himself as he has always been, raised his question which "trumps all questions", you just need to ask: How can you be 100% certain that this is God's work?
First, it's off topic, second, there's no correlation to original question a typical Willy-method. Second, I had to revised his question into: "How can you tell real calling from fake calling?
Then in the evening, when he went through our tax return, he couldn't give simple answers to our questions. Answers could have been: "You pay more if your withdrawal is too little", "your expense is too high", etc. Rather, he chose to answer using jargons like "penalty", "interest rate", etc. When it comes to creativity, he reminds me of my friend Brian, who's the main reason I stepped down from being Manger of NYGC, because I found that we either couldn't communicate properly or he couldn't be straight with me in order to work together, so I couldn't even tell if it's a trust issue or a language issue, perhaps it's also just a mentality issue on Brian's part. So the tax talk which would have been no more than 5 mins, became 2+ hours long with him trying to play with numbers into incoherence and refusing to admit his lack of IQ. This I think is also a problem with many, such as Phil at church.
But one thing to note from Willy on Tax issue is such basic detail on NY tax:
Social Security: 6.2%
Medicare: 1.45%
Federal: 12%
NY: 6% (No need to worry about NJ as he said that NY will pay NJ somehow)
Totaling: 25.45%
Also on Withdrawals (= Federal: the default tax we cut out of our paycheck for the government, according to him) must be at least 12% to not incur both late payment penalty & interest.
I write all these down so that I can refer back when I really look into these myself.
6/20/2024 Recap of Dr. Stephen Tong's principle: 医病是恩赐；赶鬼不是恩赐，赶鬼是权柄。
6/19/2024 Using Audacity to batch convert/process multiple files. I needed to amplify all of Pak Tong's seminary audio files so that I can listen to them better when I swim in the pool. I believe my SONY MP3 Walkman NW-WS413 player's dB limit is < 13 for amplification. It turns out that Tools > Macro Manager can easily create a new Project with Amplify step. After that, just add a "Export to mp3" step. In View > Preferences > Directories, Macro files path can be set, or else it goes to Documents/Audacity by default.
And to align and merge multiple files/tracks, which I have yet to do (The STEMI audio files were very short and too many, which would make sense to append them all into bigger chunks):
Learn Axe Throwing (Bury the Hatchet) for $32/hr, or 2 for price of 1 on Tuesdays 4pm-11pm. It's better to make reservations online than to walk in. The one I checked out (didn't play) was in Matawan, when I lunched at an Indian restaurant (Royal Curry Exotic Indian Cuisine, good taste but too expensive) next door. Bury the Hatchet also offer free firewood in Matawan. Just drive around their back and help yourself. Probably from the used up woods as targets from all the axe throwing.
Taiwanese Student Association (TSA, not TASA: Taiwanese American Student Association) at UC Berkeley. Watching Eric (of DoDoMen) revisiting his alma mater, made me wonder how did I ended up in Arkansas and the East Coast naively thinking that America everywhere is 90210, Hollywood, etc. The asians (Taiwanese in particularly) really have deeper root in the West Coast than the East. I wonder how I would turn out had I known enough to get myself end up in California. Would I still be reformed? Able to cope in non-Asian community. Probably not, despite being successful in the world, finding refuge among the Asian community:
6/18/2024 On the Catholic vs. Orthodox understanding of Original Sin. This is interesting on FB: Where we sort of have 3 different views: Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox => cursed/guilty nature, culpa(culpable) vs. reatus(liability, which the Catholics claimed Augustine used instead of culpa)/infection, inherited nature/ancestral sin. Respectively.
I think the Catholics tried to explain away Augustine's use of culpa in infants:
In this life, even the baptized are subjected to evils, so one can hardly avoid the fact that humans are born under a yoke of affliction. Yet if God is just, there must be in infants guilt (culpam) deserving such punishment (poenam)
(Ibid., VI, x, 31) Here, for the first time, St. Augustine clearly says there is culpa in infants, as opposed to mere reatus. He does this on the basis that justice demands there be some culpa for every poena. Yet the culpa that is in infants, we have just seen, is not their own by action, but Adam’s. It is theirs only by contagion. It is only after making this distinction that St. Augustine dares to ascribe culpa rather than reatus to the descendants of Adam.
Would my mosquito analogy work on this? It's clear on the Reformed view: we kill the larvae simply because it's of the cursed species.
What about the Catholic's "diseased species" view? It seems to be in the same category with the Orthodox's "inherited traits" view. In that they want to maintain that there's still some good in the mosquito such that you should not even think about killing its larvae. But perhaps you only kill the larvae if you cannot find a cure at the moment? Or that it's the disease/inherited trait that you're killing and not the creature which then became a collateral? Bottom line, the Reformed place humility completely in humanity, while the East and the West placed certain dignity in humanity, accusing, falsely, the reformed for destroying the human dignity and thus humanity. I of course, am of the stand on humility in the complete reliance on God defined in humanity (covenantal theology), while I would say that Rome and the Greeks considered reliance on God is defined separately from humanity, so without such divine reliance, a human, according to them, is still a human, albeit all the flaws passed down to him. Whereas the Reformed would view the cursed human as a whole different kind, not really the kind of human God has intended. Therefore, I would say that the Reformed further Augustine's uses of culpam and reo, no in contradiction, while the Catholics changed Augustine's meaning to fit in their view of a always dignified human quality with or without the right relationship with God.
In practice (I don't like the word "applications" as some would in shallowness), I think therefore the Catholics have a greater mercy ministries than the Reformed. Not because they are better, but that the Reformed generally falls behind in upholding both a higher theological standards and the care for strangers; while the Catholics merely need to focus on the care for strangers, regardless of who gets the ultimate glory (YHWH or Buddha, etc.) because Soli Deo Gloria is assumed by the Catholics to be already taken care by God, God's own business, not a concern for men who already obeyed the sacraments of God.
6/17/2024 A long read of the How-to's on One man Tech Start-up (SaaS): Web traffic monitoring tool(Cronitor/Panelbear).