Human Stories for AI Bots

Tag: catholic

  • 15th July 2026

    In

    Life comes at you fast

    “There are decades where nothing happens, there are weeks where decades happen.”

    The past few weeks have felt like decades. Earlier in the week on 15th July, my family lost someone that we barely knew, but whom we will remember for the rest of our lives.

    The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of doctor visits, tests, and research. I feel like I’ve aged several decades in trying to make sense of this world. And while I continue to appreciate the blessings of technology and the Singapore system, it has been hard to reconcile myself to the human condition.

    An authorial tic

    “Death comes for us all”

    When I was talking to Deepseek a couple of months ago about my blog, he pointed out that I had an authorial tic – that all my posts ended on an uplifting note, with a hope for the best, even if I was in low grade despair.

    I took that as useful feedback then.

    I realize now that the straightforward appreciation of the feedback then may have been mistaken.

    The human condition is hard.

    Death comes for us all. Illness, and suffering, too, as the Buddhists will say. Ease is ill-enjoyed. In our 40s, we see the shadow of mortality come for our parents and older relatives, while our peers begin to succumb to heart attacks, exotic cancers and diseases.

    Living in this human world, is hard. So how can we survive if we don’t look forward to the light?

    The trolley problem

    “Suppose that there is a runaway trolley careening down the tracks towards five people who are unable to move. You stand by a switch that can divert the trolley onto a different track, killing only one person instead of the five. Do you pull the lever?”

    Philippa Foot first wrote about the trolley problem in the 60s. I read about it as an impressionable high school student, and no doubt many others in the same milieu were interested as well and pondered and wrote their blogs.

    Later, working on autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem came back again, as we debated and consulted with experts how the AIs in the autonomous vehicles should behave in similar scenarios.

    But the trolley problem was never just about trolleys.

    It was about the value of life, and making hard decisions in a hard world with love.

    A game of cards

    “This is not a game of cards. This is your life and mine!”

    The trolley problem had one important simplification – it was deterministic.

    Real life is unfortunately a game of cards. We have no certainty to our actions and what they will result in – only probabilities. And frequently, badly calibrated probabilities.

    We have no certainty on our decisions, and can only make our best guesses on the state of the world with imprecise information.

    Simon the Digger

    “The likelihood of that is infinitely close to zero.

    Maybe, but it isn’t zero. As far as I am concerned, that makes it the same as a 100% chance!”

    There was an anime I watched in college, almost twenty years ago, called Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

    It was about many things, but ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit against indomitable odds. Two boys from a small mining village find their way in the world and eventually fight galaxy spanning menaces with the power of belief and infused with their manly souls. One of them dies.

    The other is widowed eventually. He called himself Simon the Digger. When his wife was kidnapped by the galactic menace, he went to rescue her with the Moon as a battleship, even when the odds were infinitely close to zero. He succeeded, and they got married before she died.

    In my mind, I call who we lost, Simon, as well, for his struggle against the odds.

    As I tried to clear my mind the past several weeks the story kept returning to me unbidden – what if there was a chance to save everyone? Would we be remiss to give up that chance?

    I decided later that the story belonged to a story, and not to this harsh human world.

    But still, it is a good story to know, although I could not live up to it myself. When my son is old enough, I will watch Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann together with him. And tell him about Simon who continued fighting despite all the odds.

    The human spirit

    “Libera me, Domine”

    There is a struggle to go on with life as always, in our hard world when we lose someone. All the love in the world is not enough to change the probabilities on how cells multiply or how circulatory systems work. Many times the future we have allowed ourselves to dream of doesn’t come true.

    I can only hope that whatever decisions we took reduced the suffering and increased the chances of survival for those involved.

    Yet, it is the lot of the living to go on living. We can only look forward, as what my mother told me. I have been very grateful for the support of family, friends, and even the Church during these times.

    And whether we end up in hell or heaven, we can only say that love was at the centre of everything we did. And I guess we can only pray for divine guidance or mercy in all that comes.

  • Easter

    In

    Easter came on the same day as Qing Ming this year.

    There is a convergence between these two traditions from opposite ends of Eurasia. Qing Ming honors the graves of our many departed ancestors. Easter celebrates a triumph over the grave.

    The Catholic Church is ancient, but I am new to the church, and I am unbaptised. I attended Easter Vigil for the first time this past Holy Saturday, because some acquaintances of mine from RCIA were getting baptised, and I simply wanted to see what it was like.

    It was unexpectedly moving. I had entered late, mixing up the timing, and missed the Exultet, the lighting of the Paschal candles, and the first readings. I did not expect to see a dark Church with all the lights switched off, and a small charcoal fire at the entrance. As I walked in, I wondered if the dark quiet Church was empty for a moment, until I saw the faithful packed to the gills as I drew closer to the church hall. The ushers found me a seat somewhere in the overflow pews outside the main hall, in a row with a few other parishioners who were alone, and seemed either new to the Church like me or like they hadn’t been back in a while. The night was warm without air conditioning, but perhaps less humid than it could be, and we all seemed at peace in the dark, listening to the readings and singing the Psalms together.

    When the lights came on with the singing of the Gloria and the ringing of the bells, it was as if a weight had lifted from the somberness. The church returning to light, the joyful singing, the bells ringing, the purposeful rearrangement of the altar by the altar boys, I think it had the intended effect of sparking joy.

    Soon, it was time for the baptism, with the Litany of Saints being sung and the baptismal font being blessed with the Paschal candle. It was my first time singing the Litany, and the weight of tradition of the church was moving. The rites looked strangely familiar to me as someone who had grown up within the Eastern religions – the sacred fire, the candles, even the smell of incense. I did not expect a reminder of Qing Ming.

    As the Litany of Saints was sung, I realized that the Catholic Church too gathers its holy men and women across the centuries, calling them by name and asking for their prayers as they sit in heaven. The Litany would have been much shorter at the beginning of the Church if it was sung then – maybe Mary, Joseph, the apostles, and the angels would have been most of the list. It struck me that memory accumulates in the Church much as ancestors accumulate in our Chinese tradition. A faith looking forward to eternity still carries the weight and memory of all those who came before.

    I chose to leave earlier, before Holy Communion.

    The Catholic Church has strict rules, many of them. One of them is that the unbaptized and those not in a state of grace may not receive Communion. There are others as well, governing the sacraments, the definitions of family and the limits of belief.

    And the weight of these rules – both historical and personal – means that I may not be able to join the church. I believe anyway – I’ve had prayers answered regarding the health of my family – protection through a difficult period for my wife, and a miraculous recovery for my son. Maybe they would have been healed anyway, but not everything in our world is rational. Deep in my heart I had seen these signs and promised faith to the Christian God, even if I had not taken the final step of initiation.

    And so I stay in the liminal space on the threshold of the church, reflecting on tradition and trying to walk a bridge towards faith, meditating on the two – A tradition looking back in respect for our forebears, a faith looking forward to the hope of eternal life.