Sunday, October 08, 2006 |

My housemates are Christians, and they're friendly. But sometimes, I just think there's some unspeakable gap between us...(Sigh) We have very different mind sets.
Like, last Sat, my two Christian friends and I had tea with one of our students (Chinese school student, a lovely 12-year-old girl from Macau)...
The little girl is very curious by nature. She asked bunches of questions that 'grilled' the religion inside out...
She asked questions like: Where's Jesus from?
And the Christian friend said, "From God."
I said, "Madonna."
Then the little girl said, "Isn't Jesus God?"
"If so, are you saying that God himself was made by God!?" She asked my friends.
And the Christian friend started explaining the trinity thing...
You know, 3 = 1...
The girl answered them very honestly after listening to her patiently, "That's very confusing."
Who says the child's mind is naive?
And she went on to ask the difference between Catholicism and Christianity.
And as I predicted, my Christian friends 'attacked' religions other than their own.
And when the little girl asked, "How do you know all that? We need a Catholic here, too."
My Christian friend was annoyed. She told the little girl to read the Holy Book, and there she will find all the answers!!!
Isn't that what Mr. Lee Tin Ming called the 'cyclical proof'?
And then both my Christian friends said that the little girl asked too much!!!
And they sort of advised her not to ask that much, coz that's abnormal for a 12-year-old girl to ask too many!?
And then they started to persuade her to go to 主日學, and there, they said, the girl will find the answers about God!!!
The little girl said she's been there before. And nobody can answer her questions!
I really loved that clever girl. When my friends grew more and more impatient, I encouraged the girl to think and ask more. I sincerely encouraged her not to stop asking.
I told that actually adults don't have the correct answer for everything.
The questions that she asked have been asked by famous thinkers and theologians at all times.
And my Christian friend looked at me and said, "Ms Anna, you must be a very patient person!"
I didn't say anything then. I knew my friends were quite angry.
And Christians are supposed to be spreading their Gospels always...gee, they can't even answer the girl's questions.
Terrible. I've learnt not to comment or speak when it comes to their religion.
I just think that what I wanna say or ask have already been said or asked. If they can't give me the appropriate answers, I'll just stop the conversation. I hate to say but Derrida is right.
There IS differance.
Anything communicated via language is a text.
No matter how hard we try, we are confounded by the ineliminable gap between the signified and the signifier.
And not many people can use language as immaculately perfect as Mr Lee Tin Ming, unfortunately.
There's too much trash, contradiction and blurred, clumsy clusters in people's utterance.
The problem is like a tumour in language. And it cannot be cured.
When you try to fix it, people get angry and they think you're offensive.
and because there's too mnay horrible beings around, when we see really brilliant brains, we feel so refreshing, grateful and excited.

13:05 Posted in bliss | Permalink | Comments (0)