Problems Are God’s Way Of Tapping You On the Shoulder...

By Adam Khoo

I just completed one of my final Introductory Seminars for my Patterns of Excellence Program and am happy to report that my next Intake 5-8 April is Almost Full. However, I want to relate to you an interesting experience I has with one of the participants who
signed up last night.

He told me that the reason he chose to sign up eventually (he heard about my program 3 years ago, but never took action) was because his problems has become so severe that he could not take it anymore. His wife decided to leave him, he lost his job and suffered a mild heart attack just a few days ago. All this pain finally drove him to do something to change his life.

He told me that he wanted to come to the program to learn how to make all his problems go away. he said he wanted to be a successful and happy person like me who seemed to have no problems. He will only be happy if his life was free of problems and he believed that I could help him achieve this.

That's when I stopped him and said, 'You have got the WHOLE WRONG IDEA!' 'I cannot make your problems go away!' In fact, I believe that the more successful you are, the more problems you will have. Everyone has problems at any given point of time in their lives. In fact, I would bet that Bill Gates (the world's richest man) has his own set of problems and I can tell you that his problems are a lot bigger than yours and mine.

The only people without problems are those lying in the graveyard. So, if you want to have no problems, then GO AND DIE (of course I did not say this...he would have slapped me and not signed up).

But the question people always ask is why must life be full of problems? Why can't everything go the way we want? Why must things be so difficult? Why do some people get hit with such big problems in life sometimes? (e.g. kids run away, wife leaves them, diagnosed with cancer, business failure).

Well, I believe that whenever a 'problem' arises in our life, it is God's way of tapping us on the shoulder and telling us that we need to learn something or change our thoughts or actions.

If we keeping falling ill, it's a tap on the shoulder that we are not eating right, not exercising enough or thinking of negative thoughts (emotional stress is the number of cause of physical illness). If our kids don't want to listen to us, it's a tap on a shoulder that we are not listening or spending enough time with them.

If you receive complaints about your work, it is a tap on the shoulder that you are not putting enough effort or you are doing things the wrong way. If you keep getting into arguments with your partner, it is a tap on the shoulder that you doing what is required to sustain a good relationship.

When we acknowldege God's taps, learn the lesson and take positive action, we will move closer towards our goals and dreams in life. The trouble with most people is that they IGNORE the taps by justifying, avoiding, denying, giving excuses or blaming someone
else for the problems arising. They say things like 'The stupid boss is just finding fault!', 'the clients are just unreasonable', 'my kids are so ungrateful and defiant', 'these chest pains will go away', 'I wish my wife will quit nagging...just ignore her'.

So, what does God do when you don't learn and do something to his taps? He starts tapping EVEN HARDER! This is when your problems start getting worst! Your business starts losing clients, the chest pains get worst, your kids start arguing and shouting back, quarrels with your partner gets more and more frequent.

And if you continue to IGNORE these taps, God will do whatever it takes until he gets his message across to you that you need to change your thoughts and actions. He will HIT YOU ON THE HEAD WITH A BRICK. This is when those major problems whack you in life... Your partner leaves you, your kids run away from home, you suffer a heart attack or you go bankrupt.

Some people will finally get the message and start changing their life for the better. Unfortunately, some people will always continue blaming, get depressed and give up completely. How are YOU dealing with God's shoulder taps now?

Makan places in Penang

BREAKFAST: Pulau Tikus

• Pulau Tikus Market Daytime Food Centre (right next to the pork butchers), Jalan Pasar: Char kway kak, 7 to 11am
• Van with registration plate PDX6343 parked outside Marble Arch mall, right next to Pulau Tikus Market: Halal putu mayam, 7 to 11am
• Outside Sin Hup Aun Coffeeshop, 10m in front of the putu mayam van: Halal nasi lemak and curry puffs, 8.30am to 11pm
• Kwai Lock Coffeeshop, 295B Jalan Burma, 5.30am to 2pm daily except on the first day of Chinese New Year, tel: (02)016-404-1434: Apom balik, 7 to 10am daily; Hutton Lane soup kway teow, 7am to 12pm daily
• Stall outside the Sin Hwa Coffeeshop, right opposite Pulau Tikus Police Station in Jalan Burma: Char kway teow, 10.30am to 5pm daily

BRUNCH: Tanjung Bungah

Assorted fruit and vegetable fritters and gooey battered tee kueh, 12pm to 5pm daily except on the eve and first day of Chinese New Year.

LUNCH: Penang Road and Burma Road

• Kek Seng Coffeeshop, 382-384 Jalan Penang, 8am to 5pm daily except on the first day of Chinese New Year, tel: (02)016-402-3069: Lor bak, asam laksa and durian ice cream
• Stall with the sign Teochew Chendol in Lebuh Keng Kwee, outside Joo Hooi Cafe, 475 Jalan Penang: Chendol, 10am to 7.30pm daily, except when it rains heavily

TEA: Padang Brown and Swatow Lane

• Jalan Johor-Dato Keramat food junction: Popiah, 2 to 7pm daily, except on Thursdays. Pasembur, 2 to 6pm daily
• New World Park foodcourt, Swatow Lane: Ice kacang, noon to 8pm daily, except on Wednesdays

DINNER: Little India

• Restoran A Dawood, 61 Queen Street: Nasi kandar and teh tarik, 10.30am to 10pm daily

SUPPER: Lorong Baru

• Perimeter of Wisma Central, at the junction of New Lane and Jalan Macalister: Chee cheong fun, 7 to 11pm daily, except during the first day of Chinese New Year

10 myths, truths about atheism

By Sam Harris

1. Atheists believe that life is meaningless

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can be redeemed only by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave.

Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness - well, meaningless.

2. Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions.

Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the Gulag and the Killing Fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok.

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3. Atheism is dogmatic

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity.

An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs.

As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts once said: 'I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.'

4. Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the 'beginning' or 'creation' of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, The God Delusion, this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory.

Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase 'natural selection' by analogy to the 'artificial selection' performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5. Atheism has no connection to science

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God - as some scientists seem to manage it - there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith.

Taking the US population as an example: Most polls show that about 90 per cent of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93 per cent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6. Atheists are arrogant

When scientists don't know something - like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed - they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the lifeblood of faith-based religion.

One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7. Atheists are closed to spiritual experience

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences.

There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest Jesus is the sole saviour of humanity? Not even remotely - because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8. Atheists believe there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding

ATHEISTS are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Quran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If so, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own.

Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Quran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists. From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialise the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9. Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society

Those who emphasise the good effects of religion never seem to realise that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as 'wishful thinking' and 'self-deception'. There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth. Still, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed.

In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself which is more moral: Helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10. Atheism provides no basis for morality

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Quran - as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Quran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery - and yet every civilised human being now recognises that slavery is an abomination.

Whatever is good in scripture - like the golden rule - can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.