I read this article today that was at the top of my news feed from CNN.  It reeked from the very beginning of setting up Christians:

Survey: Churchgoers more likely to back torture

The actual analysis comes from a survey of 742 people done by some think tank called Pew Research Center.  Of this incredibly large sample size, the only religious people that this well funded think tank could find were of one ethnic group.  Since all church goers are white, this is clearly a well represented cross section of Christians in America.

If you can't tell through my sarcasm, this is horrible sample size.  And the reason I mention that everyone in the survey is white, isn't to hate on white people, but to emphasize the lack of diversity in this sample.  It almost seems like some college kid did a survey of all of his friends and then wrote it for a report he owed his professor.  That small sample size lacks professionalism.  But it wasn't a college kid.  It was a "think tank", and CNN finds it worthy of their front page.

For what reason do you come up with a survey like this?  For what reason do you publish an article with such a sensationalistic title?  Any people group appended to the beginning of that title is instantly villanized.  Scores of people at CNN probably knew this before it was posted.  What good are you doing by publishing this survey?  What are you trying to accomplish?  Christians have a lot to answer for already.  Is that not enough?

Of course this article made it to digg, and it's a huge hit because it's so full of church haters.  I don't know why I do it because it usually makes me sad, but sometimes I look through the comments.  I was hoping to see someone point out the sample size, to acknowledge truth and be a voice of reason, but nothing.  Just hate.

Oh you work for Wycliffe Taiwan… so do you translate stuff?

The answer is a big fat NO.  There would be some serious consequences if someone of my language skill tried to translate something as important as the Bible.  I’m strictly a computer person.  There are two projects I am responsible for while I’m working here in Taiwan: building the Wycliffe Taiwan website and building a personnel database system.  When I got here, I actually had fears that I’d be wasting my time here.  Our director, who was responsible for bringing me over, didn’t seem to have a particular vision for using my skills.

“We’re currently using Wycliffe HK for our website, but we’d like to have our own website.”
“Okay, what do you want on your website?”
“Well, let’s see what the HK site has.”

And from there he proceeded to write down all the headers of the HK website.  If the HK website fulfilled everything he wanted, then why would he need your own?  And if this is all I was brought over for, how can I possibly justify the support I raised?  Thankfully there were other coworkers here with much more vision and purpose for what they’d like the office to have, and from that emerged the two projects I am working on today.

Website

I’ve been building a simple Content Management System so that even when I leave, this office would be able to update their website without having to call me.  Anyone capable of using Word and an okay knowledge of the web would be able to contribute.  This is actually a lot more ambitious than I thought it would be.  I could have used a pre-existing CMS but the ones I looked over didn’t fit my goals.  Although they had support for other languages, they didn’t support using multiple languages.  Our website supports both traditional and simplified Chinese and English.  Currently, although the website is up and running, it is a work in progress and something that my pride is not yet prepared to advertize to the world (even though this office already is).  Because I’m designing a CMS and not just building a website, the majority of my focus has been on the back end and not the front.  As soon as the presentation is at an acceptable level, I’ll proudly post the link up here.

Personnel Database

This project was conceived to help organize the office’s records.  They have records of their members, missionaries and donors in various locations, and they would like to consolidate the most important information to one place.  On top of simply taking care of personnel records, it would also take keep track of donations and do some simple accounting.  Although from a bird’s eye view of the project, it seems quite simple, but I’m finding it quite daunting.  This is the first project in my professional career which was not a web based application, and there are elements of this project that are simply out of my scope of experience.

One of the things I find difficult in working here is that, for the most part, I’m alone.  Yes I have coworkers, but in these projects I’m the only one who can complete them.  It’s not that I’m not used to working by myself, but in the past, people would tell me what the design direction is.  At the very least, I’d at least have someone to bounce ideas off of.  But here, the entire weight of the project is on my shoulders, and it’s difficult to bear, especially when there are so many things that are unfamiliar to me.  For a perfectionist like myself, it can sometimes be paralyzing, because I won’t want even want to start unless I know what I’m doing is the best method.

Another topic:  Let me go back to a thought that I threw out before: does my work here justify the support I raised?  Sometimes I find myself thinking this because I have deeply frugal tendencies and always look to see if I’m being a good steward of my resources.  At this point I think I might, but just barely.  I’m not altogether sure of how much stuff costs if it were outsourced, but if all of the money I raised was simply given to a company to do the same tasks, they’d probably do a better job for a cheaper price.  But I’m thinking not by that much.  However, if I included the income I could have been making if I hadn’t quit my job, there’s no way this comes out even money wise.  Of course, the work isn’t the only factor, as the support raised and the money I left behind pays the way for my personal development, but still I find myself contemplating this stuff.

I have less than four months remaining.  I’m targeting the second or third week of July to return.  Nothing is set in stone yet, but that gives me less than seventeen weeks to finish everything, and that’s not a lot of time.  But hopefully it’s enough.

I saw this article on digg a while ago.  It's a movie about Jesus from the perspective of Islam.  This Jesus is well respected, but he is not the son of God, and did not die on the cross (it is actually Judas that took his place!).  This movie is being made into a TV series and being shown on Iranian TV.  Growing up in a conservative Christian setting, my knee jerk judgment was that this film was just "Muslim Propaganda".  The director chose to base his story on the Gospel of Barnabas, whose origins are suspect and conveniently Islamic in doctrine.

But the article was quite interesting, and makes me curious enough to want to watch the movie and maybe even explore the Apocrypha.  The director, Nader Talebzadeh, is fascinating.  He claims that the reason he made the film was to create dialog between Christians and Muslims.  And in a country like Iran, where the media is controlled, this may be the only way for such a dialog to begin.  The initiative has to start from the Muslims, because initiatives from Christians aren't accepted.  And even if responses aren't accepted and dialog never happens, it still has a chance of planting seeds.  In response to the anticipation of people claiming "blasphemy", he sites his sources and simply says that this is the Age of Information, and people can "go check it out".  While he said this with the belief it would validate his work, one can just as easily read the doubts about the Gospel of Barnabas and read about the other perspectives as well (assuming the Iranian internet isn't fully censored).  But I guess that's what a dialog should be, and he should definitely be commended for his initiative.