Attachment

attachment (noun)
(virology) the event/process of the viral infection cycle where the virus particles adheres to the host cell. This process is mediated by the anti-receptor that binds to the corresponding receptor on the host cell.

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Hey Clay! Sorry I haven't posted for a while; exams are coming up and last week I came down with a sore throat (possibly caused by streptococcus?) so I didn't have the time or energy to do so.

I enjoyed listening to the music you posted; it gave me an insight to the kind of music you like to listen to, and none of it was sibilant. The songs were nice; I didn't dislike any of them, but I didn't love any of them either. I guess ils ne sont pas de mon gout (I think I totally phrased that incorrectly >_> that doesn't bode well for my French exam next wednesday), which is (theoretically) the French way of saying that they don't suit my tastes. In Hokkien, we would say that I don't know how to listen to that kind of music. The only one that I could easily get used to is the Lakes of Canada one; that was quite nice.

So as you can see by today's Vonerdword, I'm currently really, really into Virology right now. It's really interesting and relevant and its just a really fun thing to study. My virology prof is WAYYYYY better than my Bacteriology prof, and the material is much more coherent, so I really like it. Also: I've sort of developed a bit of a liking for Agusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron, commonly referred to as Ada Lovelace, who is credited by popular science as the first computer programmer (this accreditation is widely contested among the academic historians, mathematicians, and computer scientists because 1. her program was designed for a machine, not an electronic device, 2. the machine that the algorithm was written for was never completely built in her lifetime and thus never actually performed in her lifetime and 3. there are ambiguities pertaining to how much of the algorithm she herself wrote; some people believe that she was aided by mathematician Charles Babbage, some believe that she amended and improved upon an algorithm originally written by Babbage, and some believe it is entirely of her own doing).

Countess Lovelace was the daughter of the renowned poet Lord Byron, and the story of her life is quite fascinating. She is not the feature of this blog post, so I'll try my best to summarize it very briefly: Her mother separated from Lord Byron one month after her birth. She hated Lord Byron because of his poetry and resolved to raise Ada to oppose him and everything that he stood for. This meant that Ada was educated from an early age in the Sciences, Mathematics, Logic, and Music, and it turns out that she was quite the mathematic prodigy. Some believe this comes from her mother, who is rumoured to have been good at science as well. However, as gifted as Ada was in the sciences, she also inherited her father's flair for words; her good friend the mathematician Charles Babbage called her in one of his letters the "Enchantress of Numbers" for both her brilliance in the mathematical arts as well as the mastery of language that enabled her to articulate her ideas and the ideas of others in ways that others could not. Her most notable work was the translation of the lecture memoirs written by the Italian Louis Menebrea on one of Babbage's lectures on the Analytical Machine from French into English, which includes a set of notes written by Ada herself, upon Babbage's request. I find it quite humorous that Ada's notes on the lecture are longer than the translation of the lecture itself.

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In today's post, I want to talk about something that's been on my mind since Saturday night. By the by, it was absolutely phenomenally fantastic seeing and hanging out with everyone on Saturday! It was a much needed breather from UBC life and it was so much fun!

Anyways, on Saturday, you had mentioned that there was a bit of turmoil in your church at the moment pertaining to the pastoral staff, and I had also briefly mentioned that my church has also experienced something of the sort.

I kind of wanted to elaborate on that here, because it's something that I've been sort of coming back to every once in a blue moon since it happened several years ago.

My family attended a chinese church; it is the same church at which my parents first met when they were in university, and they were very active as young adults in the church, so practically everyone there that is about older than 40 knows my family (also because three of my dad's sisters were also very active in the church, so my sister and I are known as being related to four prominent church figures in their day). Being a predominantly assimilated chinese congregation in Canada, our church offers two services every Sunday: an English service and a Mandarin service, and although there is much overlap between the two services, there two different pastoral staffs: one for each service. I'm not completely sure of the political details governing the administration at our church, so I'm likely to be wrong on several points, but the main parts of the story I know are correct, having heard them from several different times from several of my relatives who are (relatively) high ranking members of the church.

Back when we still attended church, I was in elementary school (we sort of stopped attending when I entered high school, the reasons for which are a completely different story for another time) and at that time, there were two members of the English pastoral staff that were exceptionally good. For privacy's sake, I will not be using their names.

Pastor P and Pastor G were my two favourite speakers. Their sermons were very powerful and very well written. I remember as a kid being in awe of their sermons. I still remember the clarity and finesse of Pastor G's sermons; his sermon on anger still resonates with me to this day, almost ten years after. I really, really enjoyed his sermons because, looking back on them now, I realize that they were structured like essays: he's open his sermon on the topic, and then he'd read parts of the Scriptures with us, examine their context and meaning, outline his interpretation of the excerpt, and then explain what God was saying about the topic at hand, and then at the end summarize his interpretation and give suggestions for how to apply them to our own lives. He did it in such a clear, concise manor and his logic, I now realize, is very similar to the logic that I now use to work through my own faith.

Using his sermon on anger as an example, Pastor G wanted to discuss anger and how we as Christians should go about dealing with this emotion. Some people believe that anger is a sin; if I'm not mistaken, is considered one of the so called Seven Deadly Sins under that name of Wrath. Pastor G began by talking about why some people might think this, and then proceeded to look at several parts of the Scriptures that give examples of the Lord's actions. He used several different instances to illustrate that the Lord reprimands people for getting angry, and other instances where the Lord himself gets angry in the Bible; the greatest of them being the time when Jesus visits the temple in one of the major cities (Jerusalem? I think? It's been a while since I looked at that section... >_>) and he finds there are merchants in the courtyard selling animals for sacrifice, and Jesus gets very angry and very upset, to the point where he upturns their tables and basically rages and makes a mess. Using these examples, Pastor G argued that if the Lord, being a perfect being, can get angry, then getting angry is not necessarily a sin. Pastor G then goes on to say that if anger is not inherently a bad thing, then when is it okay to be angry and when is it not okay to be angry, as Christians, and then proceeds to cite several more parts of Scripture (the temple incident being one of the most prominent ones), and then concludes that we should follow God's example, and his interpretation was that it is okay to be angry if something or someone has broken one of God's rules and they have sinned; if you are angry and this is not the reason, they your anger is not justified (in the case of the temple, Jesus' anger was justified because the merchants had defiled the sanctity of the church; they were greedy and had taken advantage of the people there to make money off of their suffering by selling them sacrificial animals in the church's own courtyard).

Pastor P was an elderly pastor; not an old man, but not a young one either; I'd say he was about in his last 50's or early 60's back then, and he MIGHT have also been a part of the Mandarin pastoral staff; I'm not quite sure. Regardless, he was a very conservative, old fashioned asian, with ver conservative, old fashion asian-style views and hopes for the congregation. Pastor G, on the other hand, is my parents age, and he is more modern in his views, more in line with our sort of perspective on Christianity. It is not unreasonable, then, for us to learn that behind the scenes, at the administrative meetings, Pastor P and Pastor G often disagreed on points pertaining to the congregation, the hiring of our Youth Pastors, allocation of funding, etcetera. Many people in the congregation were unaware of this.

Then, after what I believe to be years and years of going head to head, Pastor G decided that it would be better for the congregation if its pastoral staff was not always fighting amongst themselves, so he decided to resign from the administration; he would go back to school, to complete some certificates for a higher degree in real estate, and work in business instead. When this was announced, the entire congregation was, naturally, deeply saddened. Pastor G was very, very popular, and very well loved. In his "official statement" to the congregation, Pastor G cited the need to spend more time with his family as the reason for his leaving his post, but many people began to speculate that the real reason for his departure was due to the internal conflict with Pastor P. It caused so much upset that the church elders decided to hold a public forum with the congregation so that people could talk to Pastor G and the other pastors and get answers, to resolve their issues.

From what I've heard (seeing as this occurred after we had stopped attending church regularly), the public forum began quite well; everyone was civil and considerate. But then, part way through the evening (some say it was near the middle, some say it was near the end), someone yelled out and blamed Pastor P for Pastor G's resignation, and that was the trigger that basically turned the forum into a bloodbath (or so I've heard). There was apparently lots of finger pointing and name calling. By the end of the night, the congregated lashed out emotionally by not only blaming Pastor P for Pastor G's departure, but by demanding Pastor P's own resignation in an attempt to get Pastor G to stay. People were saying things like "Why should Pastor G resign when Pastor P is the one causing all the conflict?"

In the end, due to all of the ruckus, Pastor P gave in to the congregation's pressure resigned. Pastor G, having already announced his resignation, never had any plans to un-resign (it would have also been extremely disrespectful and a very big insult to Pastor P if Pastor G had un-resigned). So, in this way, our church lost two of its best speakers. In the aftermath, one of our older pastors that had been in retirement for almost a decade had to come out of retirement to fill the gaping void while the administration scrambled to find replacements, as the pastoral staff was now two short.

And this, right here, is one of the problems I have with organized religion (I have several, of which this is one). Church is supposed to be a place where Christians gather to rejoice in the glory of God, where we share and learn about God together, as a community, and, as a community, become better people. Usually, the complaint with organized religion like this is criticized for its leadership (for example, the retarded Pastor in Florida who decided to video himself burning a copy of the Qu'ran and put it on the internet, which has sparked huge anti-american riots in the Middle East resulting the death of at least two americans within the first day). But in this case, its not the leadership of the church that is at fault, it was the congregation itself. One would expect that a group of adult Christians would know better than to act like five year olds who've had their favourite toys taken away from them. If this is how we, as a community, act, then I argue that perhaps this whole thing isn't as effective as it should be. Shouldn't we, as adult Christians, be able to handle situations like this with more maturity? Or have these people actually learned nothing from their own religion? Perhaps some people value the church more for its social aspect than its spiritual aspects. I don't know, because I'm only one person; I can't read minds, and I don't know how other people think.

I'm not trying to downplay the benefits of church; I believe that being part of a congregation is an amazing experience and it is a very powerful (and essential) way to become close to God, both personally and as a part of a group. But when things like this happen, it makes me wonder, how many people out there sit in church and actually actively LISTEN and then THINK about what they're being told.

As Ghandi once said, "I do not like your Christians; they are so unlike your Christ."

Anyways, that's my story and some of my thoughts on the issue; I'd love to hear what you think about it.

Chat soon,
~Tim~