Gambling..Is it rampant here? With Singapore Pools earning millions and millions of dollars on end each year, is it right to say that Singaporean have, in some way or another, an addiction?
4-D, TOTO, BIG SWEEP, and STRIKE!
The four corners of betting. And with the World Cup at everyone's door (and coffeeshop), what's the harm of placing a couple of wagers on your favourite team?
Recently, a friend of mine made $2200 on a single game! His starting placement? A modest $100...
That's as high as a white-collar worker's starting pay!
The dilemma I face is this, I am in everyway tempted to make a simple wager of my own in the hopes of gaining decent returns. I mean it sounds simple, doesn't it??
1)You place an amount on the team to win
2)You stipulate when the goals will be scored and what the eventual outcome will be
3)If you're good at predicting, you walk away a happy man!
But talking about it with Alts kinda made me think twice. Now, I've got my own personal reasons for not betting. I trust in God to help me make my own honest and happy living and I believe that that is what counts the most.
Moving on, as I browsed through the non-fiction section in Borders, I came across a book written by one of America's most controversial and radical intellectuals as well as writer - Ann Coulter.
Entitled, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism", Coulter challenges the modern face of the United States which has fallen to corruption and ridicule.
It sparks pretty interesting thoughts and here is the synopsis from the book itself.
"If a martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law.
Many Americans are outraged by liberal hostility to traditional religion. But as Ann Coulter reveals in this, her most explosive book yet, to focus solely on the Left's attacks on our Judeo-Christian tradition is to miss a larger point: liberalism is a religion—a godless one.
And it is now entrenched as the state religion of this county.Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion. In Godless, Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us its sacraments (abortion), its holy writ (Roe v. Wade), its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), its clergy (public school teachers), its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free), its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland), and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident).
Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly reverses the pretense that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science.
Writing with a keen appreciation for genuine science, Coulter reveals that the so-called gaps in the theory of evolution are all there is—Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution's proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the "evolving" peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes.
Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism.
And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classroom?
Liberals' absolute devotion to Darwinism, Coulter shows, has nothing to do with evolution's scientific validity and everything to do with its refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force. They will brook no challenges to the official religion."
So in the Land of the Free, is what we're seeing a refusal to admit that there IS a God? One who is true and omnipotent?
I choose to read and to digest these opening words from Coulter's book and at first glance, one is able to tell that this is not just any other woman's opinion that you can tamper with. Not that I condone some of her views (particularly those on arabs and racial profiling), but the conclusion that I can certainly draw from that one book cover is that America and its ideals is not one I'd choose to emulate.
Sure, they gave us democracy, they introduced capitalism which paved the way for business as we know it now, but it also opened up a thousand doors for a nation of stupid people to give themself an excuse to commit crimes, have promiscuous sex while defining it as a part of their culture.
Over here in Singapore, having a set of shared ideals and practices that mirror 'Western Living' only makes the flaws of Singaporeans glare like the sun on Yul Brynner's bald head.
I'd like you to take a look at THIS blog have a rough idea of what I'm talking about. In case you don't who that person is, maybe her former persona (Sarong Party Girl) will ring a bell.
I'm not making her a target of abuse but it really shows that many, MANY people out there are still lost.
It's always the same reaction anyway but if we don't try, we'll live to regret it when the day comes. That reaction manifesting itself in many forms:
1) How do you even know your GOD exists?
2) Why should I believe in some MAN who died on a tree?
3) I'll do what and want and live how I live. I like it..why should I stop?
4)If I go to Hell, I'll go to Hell. I don't need YOU to tell ME.
To live a full life, only to look back and realise how stupid one has been and regret it is one of the hardest lessons people like these have to learn.
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Thursday, June 15, 2006
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