Toastmasters speech #4: Man - God's Software

This was my 4th Toastmasters speech. I'll probably post a separate writeup on my Toastmasters experience itself, but that's for another day... And now due to insistent public demand (what public???), tan-tara-ran!

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I fell in love with computers way back when I was in high school. I and my dorm mates would stay up late into the night taking apart and putting back together 286 and 386s. None of them could run anything higher than DOS, and hard disks were a rarity. We booted up from floppy, or for those ancient IBM machines, we had BASICA loaded from ROM. Running the simplest program would give me the greatest pleasure. I'd spend hours poring over BASIC game "recipes" from the library and write up programs of my own after class. Those were my favorite times of the day.

I love software, I have ever since then. It is an extension of my will, bearing my stamp. The excellence (or crappyness) of my code reflects on my own abilities. And as time passed, my creations got more and more complex. I would divide it into modules, which were independent, but worked together as a whole. Now I see an analogy in nature. I see the same principles at work when it comes to God and His probably most cherished creation: man. All creation, while individually independent in motivation, works together to produce a stable ecology on our world.

Problems happen whenever we violate that stability. Wars, global warming, food shortages, all these have been attributed to man's abuse of power. Ultimately, it can all be traced to inconsideration. Large problems are caused powerful men not considering the rights of the unfortunate, or a large group failing to decide what's best for itself. Even smaller, everyday problems are caused by miscommunication between individuals. The moment we lose contact with others is the moment we make decisions selfishly and often cause harm to others. Aren't there people who are so easy to get along with? With whom we feel as if we were connected by some intangible wifi network of the mind? Everything we do with these people is so easy! They are dynamic and fun to be with and work with. And for each one of these people there are ten who are so difficult to relate to. Sometimes you get tempted to take that Ethernet cord and stick it so far up their behinds just to connect!

Whatever our religion or creed, I'm sure we universally agree about the importance of our fellow man. And key to this is communication. This is how we learn about others and how we can best serve them while getting what we want. Isn't all software about information, the processing, transmission, and storage of it; all for the betterment of man? If we really want our world to be bug-free, it is up to us to actively take part in building our world. We must communicate, debate, etc. Yes, even conflict is essential, for it weeds out what is undesirable. That is, as long as it is tempered with consideration for others, until we are all one in purpose.

Now I don't pretend to understand the source code drives us. It doesn't matter what language we speak, what protocol we follow. Belief, race, and religion don't matter in the face of these challenges! Some might say Muhammad showed us the way. Others might say Jesus came down to this earth to debug us. Still others might say it was Buddha who did it, and now you can learn how to do it yourself in 21 days! But I know we are meant to live together and for each other. No matter what race, belief, or nationality, we must come together to make this work.

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I think this is one of my better speeches yet... Alright, so it's the best I've got so far. Expectedly, the earlier ones were pathetic, stuttering attempts at meaning and humor, hehe. This verson is as close as I could make it to what I actually said (Minus a ton of "uhms", "aaaands", "soooos", and more than a few run-ins.) With a few additional connectors to make the ideas fit better into each other, if that were even possible, hahaha! I should be the poster boy for scatterbrainedness... Oh well, as they say practice makes perfect. Well it better, for your sakes and mine...