The God Problem

Let us assume God is real. For some, this assumption is hard to make without a sufficient amount of evidence. However, my goal is not to prove his existence, but rather to examine the mysterious ways in which He works if He were to exist. I won’t ask you to abandon your beliefs or convert to any specific religion. I only ask that you join me in exploring the possibilities behind this assumption, first.

The one thing we should be able to agree on, despite what your religion may be, is that, if God does exist, he should be capable of doing anything (omnipotence). Of course, this principle usually stems from the belief that God was responsible for the creation of the universe and also the basic design that allowed for the creation of life on Earth. In conversations concerning God, we always seem to assume that God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good entity.

If this were true, however, it becomes difficult for us to maintain our belief in Him when bad things happen to inherently good people. His very existence may be questionable, but the presence of evil in our world is all too real for us to deny that bad things do happen on a daily basis. If we are to stick to our original assumption, we can only then conclude that God is either not perfectly good or that everything happens for a reason. The latter means that some greater good may eventually present itself from the occasional presence of evil and misfortune on others. This belief is what we have come to define as theodicy. By drawing this conclusion, however, we seem to have indirectly destroyed the belief of free will by trying to attach reason to the unexplainable. When we say, “there’s a reason for everything,” we make the assumption that God is aware of the future effects evil will have on us and therefore permits it to occur. This, in turn, suggests that the future has already been written and God is the best-selling author. So could it be that the presence of evil is proof in itself that we are in control of our own destiny?

If there is a lesson to be learned behind every evil action, God must be designing the very nature of this evil so that it can affect the right people correctly. The issue here is conceptualizing the idea of who the right people are. If all humans are mortal beings, hurtling towards death, then why do we continue to believe His actions will always serve to benefit a particular set of people? In other words, from the point of view of an immortal being, why do we think He cares about the temporary effects evil may have on us (no matter how good they may be) when people are constantly dying and born every second? For there to be some benefit from the presence of evil, the action must be of a particular nature so that its effects on us are either lasting or great enough to effect a considerable amount of people. The problems with this are when evil affects the innocent and no one seems to have learned anything, when the guilty are allowed to run free, and, more importantly, when the innocent are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.

The movie, The Tree of Life, examines this very issue. If God were perfectly good, then why would he feel the need to take the life of an innocent, pacifistic, young boy? Though the answer is not stated outright in the film, it becomes clear that the effects of his death have a direct influence on the dynamics of his immediate family. The juxtaposition of Brad Pitt’s strict fatherly character and the idea that God has taken his son from him forces us to assume that God is trying to teach him to cherish the life of his sons rather than taking it for granted. The same goes for the oldest son, who blames his father for the unhappiness that surrounds the household whenever he is around. We see him as a grown adult, calling his father, and sharing a moment with him over the death of his brother. Had the boy lived a full life, it’s hard for us to believe Sean Penn’s character would’ve had any inclination to call his father with the fear that he may one day lose him too without fully expressing his love for him. By the end of the movie, we see the entire family, including the late middle child, embracing one another in what appears to be a representation of heaven. Here is where I drew the conclusion that God may have chosen to end this boy’s life because of his inherent integrity. In other words, out of all of the members of the family, the middle child managed to prove to God that he was worthy enough to skip the experience of life and enter heaven at a young age. This, I suppose, is where the line, “only the good die young,” came from. Only those that have proven themselves to be perfectly good are allowed the privilege of dying at a young age. Along with this, God may have felt that the boy’s untimely death would benefit the rest of the family by pulling them closer together. The mother may appear to be the most gracious of them all at first; however, she chooses to do nothing about her husband’s aggressive behavior when her son takes a stand against him at the dinner table. Also, if the mother’s life were to be taken, the father would be forced to raise the boys in the absence of the mother’s grace and their lives would’ve been shaped incorrectly.

My belief is that God does not control the actions of his children. He simply provided us with the capacity for evil so that he may judge us on the choices that we make. However, at the same time, He may not even care about the nature of our actions at all. From the eyes of an immortal being, our purpose on this Earth may only be to serve as His entertainment and nothing more. The amount of time that we spend on this Earth is only a fraction of a second compared to the eternity he has spent watching over us. So wouldn’t it only make sense that we, as a growing number of unique individuals, are not as important as we may lead ourselves to believe? After all, who are we to assume that every single person on this planet exists to serve a particular purpose in life? Are we really that narcissistic to believesomething is going to happen to us after we’ve passed away? Do we really need to continue theorizing about life after death in order to function correctly in our society? Can’t we just consider ourselves to be a collection of living organisms that are lucky enough to be sharing the experience of life with one another?

Nevertheless, our decisions to act vindictively or graciously are what allow us to continue believing in our own free will. God may hope that we model ourselves to be perfectly good citizens, but abolishing the presence of evil in the world would simply be impractical, as evil will almost always serve for the benefit of a greater good. 

An Economic Analysis

I had an epiphany the other day after I was laid off from my job. I knew this was going to happen eventually because they hired me under the pretense that I would only be there for "seasonal help."After the holidays, there was a noticeable difference between the amount of customers that were coming into the store. Now, my job usually consisted of standing in one room and making sure every article of clothing remained in its perfect spot at all times. That's usually something you tend to overlook when you walk into Hollister. However, this always gave me a lot of time to think. Hollister was going to fire me because their store couldn't afford to keep all of their employees on staff. They couldn't afford it because people weren't spending enough money in their store. Less people were coming in, so Hollister decided to mark up its prices to account for this. Their revenue might've remained at a reasonable rate, however, they were starting to lose customer loyalty. Regardless of how 'cool' their brand might've become in our society, no one in their right mind is going to spend fifty dollars on a fucking t-shirt.

But I wondered why the number of customers in the store was decreasing. I remembered one of my favorite South Park episodes, Margaritaville, where they try to encourage people to spend more money (rather than save it) to stimulate the economy. Now this made perfect sense to me. Spend money at our store so Hollister can afford to pay me so I can spend money in other stores. That's basically how this whole thing works. Their idea behind the episode was that people were getting scared by terms like "the recession"in the media and over-reacting by getting frugal with how they spent their money. And even that made perfect sense, as well. If you save your money, you'll have more money to spend in the future. "A penny saved is a penny earned." However, I started to think that it wasn't because people were getting scared by the big words in the media. They weren't that stupid. It was because people were beginning to have more priorities in their expenses and those priorities weren't getting any cheaper. 


Your purchasing power (or basically the excess money you can use to help stimulate the economy) is measured by your income minus the cost of living. Now when the cost of living first begins to increase, logically you will have less money to spend on the things you don't necessarily need. This began to occur from an exponential inflation for a number of things: tuition, rent, necessities like food and clothing, gas, oil, health care, entertainment, phone bills, etc. When this happened to everyone, businesses started to lose money and could not afford to pay all of their employees. Your income either gets cut significantly or you lose your job. 


People are always saying that the solution is to increase the number of jobs for people so more people have money to spend. But that's not exactly true. The cost of living needs to become cheaper first before we can spend the money we have left. Without that, businesses will have no money to provide you with the money you need to live; no matter how hard you work for them. And you wonder why kids today grow up with dreams of becoming movie gods and rock stars. Getting ridiculously rich, fast, just seems safer than working up from the bottom of a cubicle, only to get laid off by the CEO's who need more money to pay for their kids to go to college. In the 1970's, it used to cost my parents around $2,000 or less to go to college every year. Today, it costs some people around $55,000 (or more) to go to school per semester. The people who's cost of living greatly outweighed their income, but still desired to pay for their children's education (so that they could get a high income job when they get older), took out ridiculous loans from banks they couldn't possibly hope to pay back in a reasonable amount of time. The annual interest rates probably wouldn't help either.


Anyway, my point is that our necessities are starting to outweigh the amount of money that we're able to bring in. For our economy to see the light of black again, the things that we need to have, need to become cheaper, first. If only the room full of rich, white men in Washington could understand the problems of their people.

The Clock that Stopped

I was looking through my desk the other day and I found this old watch that stopped working a while ago. It just stopped doing what it supposed to do one day. And life just went on. No one in the world knew the watch stopped. No one even cared. Not even me. All I know is it stopped at 10:57 one miraculous day. It didn't need a doctor to declare its exact time of death because it was a watch.


Now I wouldn't necessarily go as far as saying it quit. It was just tired of doing what other people expected it to do. Maybe it cracked under the pressure. Or maybe it just refused the dreams that was handed to it by others and decided to do something else with its life. It managed to crawl under all the expectations laid out by society and, one day, built up the courage to just stop. It was the day time stood still long enough to look back and wonder if it was all worth it.
Ironically the watch told me not to give up. It told me instead of quitting, find a new point of view or something else to follow. Find yourself and your passion before you commit your time. Because if you lose yourself in the illusion of time and work and money and stress...one day your watch is gona stop just like mine did.

Or maybe it just needed new batteries ;)

Art Advice From Long Ago

I remember sitting in my 9th grade art class trying to draw this kid in the front of the room.
Mr. Hockenberry would walk up and down the rows while he watched our progress.
I remember him telling us “Don’t think of what you are drawing as a whole. Instead, focus on the lines that happen to make up Mr. Seagraves over here. They're just lines that unite together to make a picture.”
It was what turned my world around. That may sound ridiculous, at first, but bear with me here.
Instead of drawing a tree with a trunk and a puffy cloud thing for leaves I focused on what really made a tree. The lines and shades that came together to compose the image as a whole. An actual tree in real life.
And somehow that also changed me.
I managed to translate that to my real life.
Instead of judging someone, at first glance, based on how they look and what people say about them, I focused on who that person was and how they came to be.
There are lines in people’s lives that make them into a whole picture.
Experiences they have throughout life that shape their personality for better or for worse.
By not seeing just a tree and drawing what we manipulate that tree to be in our heads, we can finally open our eyes and become real people.
Just make sure those lines are in the right spots ;)

Mind Thoughts

I often have thoughts during the day that i like to progress further and further regardless of how much they make sense. i havent posted anything lately because ive been pretty busy writing scripts but i hope you like this :)


1. Modeling is robotics. When the robot's mind evolves to the point where it can give the illusion of a personality, that is acting. When the actor supersedes his or her peers and wins the popularity contest, that is stardom. Stardom, contrary to popular belief, is often above the law. For example: Brad Pitt, Steve-O, and Quentin Tarentino.

2. Facebook is one of the main reasons why teenagers stay up so damn late. lack of sleep makes us tired, irritable, unattractive, fat, and forgetful. so if you want ur profile pic to look good get the hell off Facebook.

3. Reality tv shows on MTV like parental control, NEXT, room raiders, and even cribs are so painfully fake and scripted that its the very reason why people cant take MTV seriously sometimes. Andy Warhol once said "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Honestly, it's a great effort on MTV's part, but I think we'd rather have our reality shows about real people with absolutely no acting experience in real life situations. I actually had the privilege of meeting a girl who was on the TV show, Made, once. She wanted to be made into a beauty queen. She told me that reality TV was probably the furthest thing from reality and almost the entire thing was scripted for her. However, she did say that the experience helped her come out of her shell and mature her to the level that she wanted to be at in the minds of her peers. I met her at a business camp a while ago and she was actually elected CEO of her company above 8 other strangers. Bottom line MTV: you help several teenagers transition their lives into adulthood. However, if you feel you must fill your time slots because you don't actually have good materiel, then at least find some better actors and writers for your retarded dating shows. And stop assuming we think these are real people. Please.

4. My life has become so integrated into technology that i actually care more when my cell phone gets lost than when my wallet with my license, credit card, library card, personal items, two free movie passes and twenty bucks gets lost. Btw twenty dollar reward to anyone who finds my wallet :P

On a similar note, I've realized how much my life revolves around technology to the point where I actually depend on it. It has become a necessity. an addiction. It wakes me up in the morning. It entertains me. It cleans me. It allows me to see around my house. It even tells me what to do sometimes. I found that i actually listen to what my mother says more when she says it via text message than when she says it to my face. I even remember it better. For some reason "go to bed. NOW!" is more intimidating to me when she is texting it from her bed at 12am.

5. Dear cell phone innovators,
We have enough cell phones to make us all unique individuals who all conform under your tyranny. Our need to be constantly be connected to our friends and family has awarded you the opportunity to rape our wallets and social life. And by installing cameras that send pictures...what the hell were you thinking? there are kids as young as 12 years old who are now locking themselves in their bathrooms to take naked pictures of themselves to send to guys who honestly only just want to send it to every single guy they know. You have cleverly managed to build your own underground child pornography service that has at the same time passed conveniently under your own noses as well as the law enforcement's watchful eyes.
just stop making us smaller, cooler, more colorful cell phones. we dont need fun little one dollar applications to occupy our attention when we have five minutes of down time on the bus or in the subway. people need to pull their souls out of their cell phones in those five minutes and observe the world. observe people. or just observe the depths of their own minds.
we have enough cell phones. you have made such an abundance of new cell phones that it seems like you are coming out with one every week. cell phones should not be like a new style of clothing that defines us as an individual. they are machines. they are gadgets that run on batteries. batteries that often pile up in landfills destroying our eco systems. stop making us new cell phones and start making us things we actually need. like jetpacks or more efficient eco friendly engines. or jetpacks haha :)

6. The man that loves thinks clearer than the man who lies. however the man who loves AND lies is incapable of being loved. the woman who loves the man who lies is only lying to herself.

7. Why is divorce becoming a disease? Dare i say a plague? Getting married should be something that needs to be taken seriously. Someone i care about leaving with half my shit does not sound appealing to me. Be absolutely sure that the one you marry is someone you cannot imagine in your life without.
Love is a noun. it is something that we all search for. There is proof that it exists everywhere in all aspects of life. However seeing is believing and believing makes it tangible. It makes love real.

Thats all for now :)

Hi, my names Chris Connolly.
I'm Vietnamese and Irish and i was born in Anchorage, Alaska. If that's not enough to convince you that im not like your everyday asian, then be my guest and keep reading.

In high school, instead of getting a job like every other kid in my town, I decided to get an airbrush and paint some t-shirts in my spare time. Eventually, this turned into a legitimate operation once my friends started to buy them from me. But it didnt last very long after the airbrush started to malfunction from overuse. However, this led me to experiment with actual things rather than just articles of clothing.
For some reason, I never thought of myself as someone who had a gift for painting, though. Every time I finished working on something, I always told myself, 'Why the fuck did I do this in the first place? Like there's obviously thousands of other people in the world who are better at this than you are, so why the fuck are you wasting your time on this shit?' But eventually I found the answer. It was about not having someone over your shoulder constantly throwing a set of guidelines in your face as to what art was supposed to be. I didn't want to feel pressured into creating a masterpiece every day because then I would lose the essence of the very hobby I came to love. I wanted to maintain my own personal escape from reality rather than have it become an obligation or an occupation. I felt comforted by the fact, that in light of the question, 'What should I paint today?' the answer was always simple, 'Oh, right, whatever the hell I want.'

Being a realist, I knew that painting was not gona provide me with a healthy lifestyle, so I decided to pursue a career in music business at NYU in 2010 (I only did this cuz my mom forced me to play the violin every day of my life since I was 3. And i also thought i was good at math).
After my first year there, however, i was kicked out because they failed to tell me that i needed at least a 2.8 gpa for the major that i was in. And cuz they dont like asian kids who cant do calculus.

Now Im going to school in PA studying film with the hopes of returning to the city someday and attending film school. So far, I've completed one short film and a few other scripts that all seem to have a similar type of reaction from the friends who are willing enough to read through them. Im currently working on a project with my friend up in NY, trying to get our first full length film into the stages of actual production.
In the meantime, ill be working on countless more scripts and building my resume so that NYU has no other choice but to take me back. Ever since I was little, I've always heard that we're capable of doing anything in life, as long as we put our minds to it. So that's what I'm going to do. Hope that I break my leg in the process.