What to Believe?

What to Believe?
My first Mumbai layover. After a completely uneventful flight from Singapore we get vectors nearly halfway across the Indian subcontinent and back to the airport where, once again, I get to experience a runway so rough it feels like landing on a field of sand dunes. All swoops and dips and bulges. There are the standard loitering people and three-legged dogs on the taxiways. We park next to a beautiful, brand-new 777.
The "handlers" are all VERY polite and attentive and I feel like I'm going to get saluted at any moment. Our driver informs us that a big Hindu holiday is this week so traffic is light and everyone is getting ready. He says it is "just like your Christmas" but somehow I'm don't think it is "just like" it.

The rooms are nice here and the gym and pool. But it got me to thinking, What Makes People Believe What They Believe? That's a pretty big subject. If you took an orphan and raised him in a completely a-religious envronment. Where you never let him read a book, listen to the radio, watch a TV program, surf the Internet if there were ANYTHING religious involved. (as if that is even possible.) What would he believe about causation? What about "what happens when we die"? What makes any one book or philosophy any more appealing than the next? Would the child's choice depend on his intelligence or education?
Or let's say you are a missionary to Jakarta and you are trying to convince some tribal bone-in-the-nose people that they should worship GOD (yours, not Allah and certainly not theirs). Would you use the fear of Hell or the reward of heaven? How would you convince them not to, say, have sex with any of the girls of the tribe (if that was a tribal custom)? Or that it isn't right to steal if the tribe had been doing that for centuries?

The hotel is right across the street from the airport. So is the slum. We don't leave the hotel grounds. I look at the slum and wonder...

Elegantly Wasted

Think of the song "Elegantly Wasted" by INXS. Nice song, the lyrics don't really apply here but the title is spot on. This is me at the bar on Clarke Quay in Singapore. Just letting the time pass drinking margaritas and talking to BC and the barkeep. Man did that guy pour. You can just barely see his sainted hand on the right of the picture holding a water glass. That must be the indication that the night is neither young nor of any purpose anymore. Time. Time to go on back home to the hotel. This picture was probably taken at around 1130pm.

Big fight on the IPA server about my comments linking the Vatican and the Pedophile. My comments meant to add levity to a horrid situation. Interpreted by some as an attack on their religion. Big spool up. Flurry of messages. Gritting of teeth and pulling hair. Me telling Laurie, in my stupor, that she should be a strong woman with guns and grit and, as Malcolm X would say, "kill them if they come!". Slinking off to bed. Weird dreams that I can't remember.

Singapore is this huge city of Malls. Shopping. Shopping. Always shopping. Everywhere you look is another entrance to a skybridge to a mall. Food courts stretching for miles. Shoe stores and high tech and fashion. Happy, smiling Singaporeans doing what they do best...