june afternoon

It has been a tough week last week. However it was also a cherish one, because my paper was accepted :)))). Even though it was not the first, since it summarized more than one year of fully dedicated work, I have a huge sentimental feeling of it.

It was the brightest afternoon of the year in Europe, but I felt that I was somewhere in southern hemisphere, suffering of winter solstice, experienced the darkest evening of the year.

One thing I do learn, among other stuffs, is realizing that love is always beautiful, and I must nurture it to make it even more beautiful.

Is Hawking right?

Following his latest book, Stephen Hawking faces many protests and event condemnation from religious groups. Basically he stated that the universe is created from nothing, not by any trancendental power as religious believe.

In my opinion these religious people are just too reactive. Sometimes it even worst, they challenge Hawking's knowledge with their ignorance and conspiracious statement. This kind of action will only makes people laugh due to its baseless supports and then raises doubtful feeling about religion, particularly among young thinker. This is definitely dangerous!

Therefore I suggest a proporsional and less reactive counter to Hawking's knowledge. A preacher who doesn't even know Newton law in physics, should not give any 'scientific' counter argument. Just revisit the foundation of faith, that there is some trancendental matter that cannot be reasoned.

But, is actually Hawking statement based on solid theory? I don't know, the reporter might be spun, or misinterpreted his intention.

Furthermore does the solid theory violates religious values? I don't think so, though it clearly againsts certain interpretation. For example in the holy Quran, God only said (yes, I'm a devout religious) that human was created from soil or universe were created by Him. There's no further explicit explanation on how it was done. Therefore any theory can emerge in between, including Hawking's one.

How about Hawking's theory? According to other theory there are still loopholes in his theory. Moreover even if it's correct, it won't negate the existence of God.

We should not think of being so important, so God created human in a way such as a child creates a clay statue. Instead it would like process where an engineer creates a CNC machine to shape the raw clay, but God must be better than that. Instead, He created an advanced mechanism to create human by creating the source of the caused of these entire creations. For example, for creating human, God merely creating this universe with its complete rules of interaction among its elements, where at certain point this interaction will create living element and so on and so forth so finally human is created. But the probability is so small! Don't be so naive, do you think just because we think the system is very complex so God cannot ensure a 100 percent accuracy?

What about the universe? I think similarly. Clearly, it is ridiculous to think that that the planets and sun are created in the way we make meat ball or dumpling. Since clearly I'm not smarter than Hawking, instead of proposing my own speculation, I think it is better to use his. The way God created the universe (or multiverse) might coincide with Hawking's theory. But instead of it started from the big-bang, God provided a sufficient condition to make it happened. Definitely He even created an earlier phase of all these thing, e.g. the cause of cause of the caused ... of the cause of the cause of big bang. With His 100 percent accuracy, voila here we are.

Socialism and religion

20th century was the bloodiest witness of the emerge of socialism, and also its conflicts against other ideology. As a new ideology, socialism values often conflict with old values, particularly corrupted religious values. We have to emphasize the word corrupted because many opinions say that pure religious values should not violate pure socialism values, so does my opinion.

Socialism values will change society class structure. The ones who are on the top clearly will not let this change happen. They use people religious sentiment to provoke hatred about socialism in society. The most lethal provocation is the accusacion that socialists are atheist and anti-religion. Unfortunately this provocation was taken by communists under Commintern organization, though in its 192x congress Tan Malaka gave opposite statement. Commintern's stance to bring religion as enemy put socialism in religious part of the world in danger. Indonesia is an imminent example of atrocity against socialism, particularly communism. Guevara's war in bolivia was also got obstacles from accusation that communism in Cuba annihilated church and catholics institution. A Bolivian soldier, who was apparently a devout religious, ask him about the existence of religion in Cuba when Che platoon captured by Bolivian army. It showed how useful this religious propaganda for tackling socialism.

However in many places, socialism in its political form, communism, promoted bloody movements against religion as well. These actions were lethal suicide for socialism itself. Even a small incident got an enormous amplification due to religious sentimentalism, that turned out to be used to accuse any socialist. Many pure socialist movements became victims of this generalisation of accusation. Even sometimes a non-socialist movement which is merely related to socialist one might get the accusation as well. The fall of Spain second republic maybe a good example of this case. How Franco's fascist power with the assistance of Hitler's Nazi exterminated the Republicans was directly or indirectly fueled by the same sentiment. Some communist promoted atrocities in many ways, from executing jesuit priest, burning churches and even trying to destroy Gaudi's sagrada familia in Barcelona. The impact was horrible. Any communist or accused as communist was shot dead across Spain, regardless their religious view, some fled abroad. Unfortunately those people were knowledgeable persons. This might be a good explanation for Spain retardation for the next several dozen of years. Yes if we turn to far east we'll find the similar case in Indonesia. Unfortunately there's no such kind of european union to accelerate the development of Indonesia just the way it happened in Spain for this last 15 years.

It is such a contradictory that a country which has "keadilan SOSIAL bagi seluruh rakyat Indonesia" in its nation philosophy became so anti-socialist.

For the first time, I emerged the kernel of this opinion in room 9009 around 2003-2004.

inflation

More than 10 years ago GusDur raised public employees salary 100 percent. Apparently with 10 percent inflation each year, after more than 10 years the actual value of public employee salary is lower than 10 years ago before the salary was increased.

Let's see this illustration,
since the inflasion is 10 percent per year, so each year the actual value of the salary is merely 90 percent of the previous year. So in 10 years the actual become
a is amount of salary before Gusdur
b is salary after Gusdur raise it
c is current value of salary.
b = 2 x a
salary value of one year after raised
s1 = 0.9 x b
salary value of two years after raised
s1 = 0.9 x 0.9 x b
salary value of n years after raised
s1 = 0.9 x ... x 0.9 x b = 0.9 ^n x b
so after 10 years
c = 0.9 ^10 x b = 0.35 x b
since a = 0.5 x b thus c is less than a,
thus it is lower than actual value before GusDur raised the salary. To conclude it is not better if it not worse than the value in new order era.

It was pretty unproductive last month! There were three potential entries that in very slow progress. Or is it a sign that I was doing something more productive? :D