Choices

As humans we all consciously and unconsciously go through the task of making choices everyday and in fact every moment of our lives. Most of the choices we make are naturally inbuilt in us, and it is required for us to make that choice, i.e. drinking water or sleeping, and these choices help us to live our daily loves without disturbance or discomfort and by choosing not to take these choices we will be exerting a level of discomfort to our selves, therefore it is necessary to make these choices.

But sometimes, we come across situations in our lives that demand from us to make a conscious, weighted choice that has a huge impact on our present and possibly future lives. These are the choices that requires one to think through carefully and then make a decision. The thinking process doesn’t necessarily have to be a long one, instead it can be just a few seconds long where you weigh the pros and cons and go ahead with what seems the best option.

These choices, the ones that require you to think are the ones that will shape and change you as a person. These are the choices that will determine what conflicts and what challenges you will face in your life, and these are the choices that will reflect on you when you meet new people.

There may come times when you feel like you don’t really have a choice and there seems to be only one path ahead. During these times, remember that you ALWAYS have a choice. Adam had the choice to eat the fruit or refuse, Cain had the choice to not get jealous and avoid killing his brother, Steve Jobs had the choice to enroll and spend four years at university or drop out and do something he liked. All these people made choices, even though they might’ve felt like they didn’t have a choice, they always did. Choices don’t necessarily have to be either this or that, instead you have the choices of ‘option A’ or ‘the choice of coming up with another choice’. Even choosing to come up with another choice is a choice itself.

Now what happens after you make the choice? Maybe the decision you made turned out to be wrong or bad for you. Do you sit and whine and complain? Do you beat-up yourself over it or do you keep your head high, learn from experience and move on? Doesn’t the second one sound way better and way more productive?

There is literally no point on dwelling over bad decisions unless it is to learn a lesson from it. After which you extract the lesson and put that choice in a treasure box and lock it, because even though you have put it away, it is still going to affect the rest of your choices as well, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of your choices will also be wrong or bad for you. The bad choice happened because it was better for you to experience and learn from it now rather than making the same bad decision much later in your life when it can’t be fixed.

Finally, at the end of the day, just remember that all the choices are already written down for it is also written what choices you will make, so just believe that God has a better plan for you even if the choice you made wasn’t the best. He is just testing to see whether you’re strong enough, whether you have enough faith and whether you rely and trust Him or not. So after making the choice, if it turns out to be a wrong decision, thank God because He opened your eyes before it was too late and if it was a good decision, still thank Him. In the end just remember that only He has the power to give you the power to make the choices you make.

Source: Google images

“It is the duty and obligation of Muslims to establish the truths and proofs of Islam and then allow others the freedom of choice to accept or reject the proofs”

-Yusuf Estes

Analysis of Dulce est Decorum est

The title ‘Dulce est Decorum est’ means, ‘How sweet and fitting it is to die’, so merely by just looking at the title it tells is that this is a poem about death. The title is written in Latin which makes the poem sound very old but powerful at the same time as Latin is a powerful language till today.

The poem is very powerful and it conveys the same message throughout, ‘War is devastating’, and this gives the readers the exact feeling that the poet wanted us to have. The poet uses powerful devices like similes, metaphors and most of all very strong imagery to convey the sense of hopelessness and loss. The 1st line grabs and pulls the reader in the poem. The poet uses simile in the first line ‘like old beggars under sack’ which shows that the soldiers had been fighting so much that they had become like beggars who hadn’t slept for days. The strong use of figurative language shows a clear image of the poet’s emotions. In line two, when he says, ‘Coughing like hags…’ it shows us that poet was very angry, frustrated but at the same time sad and depressed because his heart went out to the soldiers. The word ‘trudge’ in line four shows us how tired and hungry the soldiers were as they weren’t running but trudging as though they were using up all the time they had and walking really slowly because they knew that once they entered the war, there would be no turning back. ‘Men marched asleep…’ these three words create a very powerful image in our mind and gives rise to very intense emotions. The line, ‘Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots’, tells us that the soldiers had been fighting for so long that they were so tired and had no idea what was going on, They were fighting just for the sake of it. They also had heard so much noise that they were so used to it they couldn’t even hear the hoots.

The poet describes the droppings of gas-shells as ‘softly’ which tells us that here was no way of surviving from them as you wouldn’t even hear them coming. In line 7, he says ‘deaf even to the hoots’ but in line 8 he says ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys!’ and then he says there was an ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ which tells us how disturbingly the soldiers had got up from their sleep and were fumbling to put on their masks, in order to save themselves from the gas. The phrase ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ is also an oxymoron as it shows us the intense fumbling that the soldiers were doing as if they were still very young and in ecstasy, but here it portrayed the opposite. The author uses ‘floundering like a man in fire…’ which shows how much the soldiers were confused and just dragging themselves in hopes that the war would get over soon. The poet shows us that they didn’t have time when he says ‘the wagon we flung him in’ which tells us that there wasn’t a single moment to lose as they didn’t even have time to put their fellow soldier’s body properly and had to just fling it in.

The use of words such as ‘guttering’, ‘choking’, ‘drowning’ arise such ghastly images in our mind that it is painful to even think about it. The description of the face of the man is very vivid, ‘white eyes withering in his face’ and ‘his face like a devil’s sick of sin’ which shows how bad the war was and dying was not at all sweet and fitting. The phrase ‘of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues’ tells us how the wounds made by the war, mentally not physically were so ugly that they were incurable and these innocent people did not need to see all of this.

In the third last line he addresses the reader himself almost as if saying very sadly and giving us advice that the ‘Old lie – How sweet and fitting it is to die for our country’ is nothing but an old lie which only brings more and more deaths to the country. The whole poem also emphasizes the stark contrast of the poem with the title, as it is not at all sweet to die in such a way.
All in all this poem gives us a very realistic idea of what war is and describes it very clearly stating that war brings devastation, frustration and sadness for many years to come, and that this bruise can never be cured no matter what you do.

Vintage Vibe

Thoery of Evolution: Factual or just a theory?

So recently I have been having a lot of discussions with my friends about religion and belief or lack of belief, and so I thought it would was time I did a post on why I feel religion makes more sense than atheism.

Atheists/Darwinists claim that there is no Creator, and everything evolved out of nothing, or inanimate matter.

Just by reading this claim, a logical human being would deduce that it is not possible for living things to evolve from non-living matter, simply because of the fact that inanimate matter doesn’t possess the complex features and details that are present in living cells.

In order to prove this claim, American chemist Stanley Miller carried out an experiment in 1953 using gases that he claimed existed in the primitive atmosphere of the earth. He combined these gases and added energy to the mixture to create several amino acids present in the structure of proteins.

Although this did prove slightly the theory of evolution, only a few years later this experiment proved to be invalid, because the gases used by Miller were stated to have been completely different from the real conditions of the earth. After the revelation of this fact, Miller too confessed that the atmosphere he used was unrealistic.

Another reason why the theory of evolution is hooey is because even science today hasn’t been able to create even the simplest of cells by bringing together inanimate matter. The conditions that a cell requires to form are too great to be coincidences. The probability of an average protein made of 500 amino acids being formed coincidentally is 1 in 10950 and in math, a probability smaller than 1 over 1050 is deemed impossible. Also, the DNA molecule that stores genetic information has data which is written down would fill a giant library consisting of 900 volumes of encyclopaedia of 500 pages each.

Another interesting fact is that DNA can only multiply with the presence of proteins, however for information to be present in the protein; DNA too has to be present. So this is kind of like the situation of whether the egg came first or the hen. It is highly impossible that both of these complex cells arose coincidentally at the same time in the same place, and it is also impossible for one to exist without the other, which concludes the fact that life couldn’t have originated by chemical means, and therefore had to be created by a higher Creator.

Additionally, another claim by Neo-Darwinists is that living organisms present at this time underwent mutations of sorts from their ancestors’ therefore leading them to create a new species. Yet, scientific facts themselves state that mutations do not cause living beings to develop, on the contrary, they always cause harm to them. This proves that a ‘destructive mechanism’ cannot by any chance be an ‘evolutionary mechanism’ therefore; a process called evolution could not have taken place.

An added evidence is that if a species went under some changes, then there should’ve been billions of fossils of creatures who were in the stages of transformation; i.e. some a half reptile half/half bird creature? But archaeological finding have never come across such fossils which proves that all these different creatures suddenly emerged fully formed without any changes in between, which again proves that they would have HAD to have been created.

It is also claimed that human beings evolved from apes. This is one of the funniest claims I’ve come across, because I refuse to believe that my ancestors were monkeys.

Evolutionists have created a chain which goes as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens implying that each one is the ancestor of the other. However, paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus all lived at the same time in different parts of the world, which indicates the baselessness of their claim since there could’ve been no evolution process if all of them were present at the same time. Moreover, it has been found that Homo erectus have lived up until very recent times and no evolution has taken place among them.

These are only a few of the claims that I will refute in this post, but there are many such baseless claims which I hope to write about in future posts.

Sources:

The evolution misconception by Harun Yahya

http://people.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiology/miller.html

http://www.accordingtothescriptures.org/creation/fossilrecord1.html