idols, saints, where should God be placed in between?

In Quiapo, Manila, and around the world, may have died, and the toll will surely rise still, in stampedes that result after the processions of religious images of Christ, Virgin Mary, and Saints.  In a race to kiss, hold, or just even touch the images, people get injured, and others, unfortunately, die.  This is true every year, and everywhere else.

 

People congregate during the feast of saints, and Christ who takes varied forms as Sto. Nino ( child Jesus), Jesus in the manger, or a Black Nazarene.  The reasons too are as varied as the images.  Having purchased a lottery ticket, the instant devotee pleads before the images and prays that the number combination will win. The dying, even against the advice of doctors, joins the procession to wipe off the moisture from the image and use it as the healing potion; this cure, even the cancer can be healed, so the belief goes.  Or, a spinster in her 50’s, prays long and hard before the images, that Cupid will pierce the heart of her shining knight to be, and bind in one arrow, the two hearts bleeding and craving for each other’s love or lust.

 

Whoever said that the worship of God is unselfish, a pure form  of devotion for the divine?  Often, if not almost all,  people worship not necessarily to thank God for everything that has been bestowed on them – the air, the sea, the wind, and yes, making human existence possible – but to ask for blessings, and more blessings, in an almost unending list of wants and desires which only death could end.  Many join the processions of images, showing the piety and sheer devotion externally, but the innards of these men crave for the fruition of the earthly, selfish desires.

 

Moses, after his forty days of fasting, came back to his flock only to find that they worshipped wine, sex, food, and the graven images.  So enraged was he that he destroyed the images, and castigated his people whom he redeemed from slavery from the hands of the pharaohs.  Human race started paganism, by birthright.  To shake the habits of men, of worshipping the sun, the sea, the moon, and stars, is like deleting from the memory man’s story that even predated Moses, and other prophets and patriarchs of  Christianity.

 

Paganism, or at least, its hidden manifestations, will always be part of human history.  Constantine the Great unified his army by rallying under the banner of the cross, and he tried to obliterate any form of idol worship.  But as pointed out by Dan Brown in his controversial fiction wrapped in seeming historical narratives, DA VINCI CODE, paganism did not end with Constantine the Great:  it only invaded Christianity from the inside.  Look at the sun rays of Virgin Mary, the hierarchy of the saints, are  not the rays emanate from the sun god Ra, or the saints, the different gods for different intentions?

 

The New Testament has reduced the Ten Commandments into two: Love your neighbour as you love yourself, but love God most of all.  That God, if we follow the Christian teachings, commands that he should have the primacy  of our total love is clear:  Love God above all.  Yet, when the Christians join the processions, sustain injuries, and even die, in the pursuit of the devotion to an image ( or even granting, it is a devotion to the persona the image represents), where does lie the primacy of God?

 

Allowing images in the Christian worship is a concession to human nature.  Our senses must be sated somehow.  The images we see should conjure in us the true persona the image represents.  But when we see devotees push each other during processions, and therefore, hurt each other, the belief system may have been turned upside down: the persona is now reduced to  a mere image, sheer, raw paganism.  If these devotees truly worship the persona the image represents, then they must have imbibed the essence of Christianity, that is, to subordinate one’s selfish ends for the others. Yet, as we look at them pushing, kicking, shoving each other, and literally killing each other,  in a race to hold, to kiss, and even to touch the image,  what happens now to the core values the persona behind the image represents?

 

Paradoxically, religious procession is stripped of it’s basic substance: religiosity.   First, the God persona is reduced to an image, and the worship of the latter violates the first commandment.  Second, these processions run in opposite directions from the second commandment.  Instead of giving way and loving the others in a procession, there we witness, the primal selfishness of man, of subordinating all others just so he attains the intentions why he joins the procession in the first place.  How many bodies have we seen lie lifeless upon which other devotees laid their feet on?  And why die in a procession if true devotion and love of God is shown when we, like the Good Samaritan, defer the form of religion and prefer the substance, by not going to the synagogue on a Sabbath day to help the injured and the dying in the street?

Images, saints, where should God be placed in between?

the other worlds

It starts with a basic premise. Everything that we perceive is based on the limitations of our senses, and the extent by which our minds process these perceptions. In this sense , man is truly unique; it is not our color, height, or weight that make as an individual, it is our peculiar perception of the reality that confronts us, which is basically determined by our senses and mental capacity, and the memories that we have stored in your psyche.

The dog perceives you starkly definitely from the way you see yourself in the mirror. The range vision of the dog is different from yours. The dog has powerful sense of smell. We, concededly, cannot sniff a bomb. The world we see is not the same kind of world the dog experiences. Imagine if you had night vision: the nights would never be the same again.

At a time when I was engrossed in my study of philosophy, I was enamored with the idea of parallel universes, and the implications they have on human existence. Philippine Studies, my other major way back in the undergraduate, exposed me to the world of faith healing, shamanism, witchcraft, magic, the frontiers of the mind – the other worlds. If we perceive reality differently, ergo, we cannot shut the door to the possibility that parallel to the reality that we now live, there are other possible universes that co-exist with us but which, owing to the limitations of human faculties, we cannot perceive and understand, as of yet.

Parapsychology explains these other worldly phenomena based on the capacity of the mind, and the yet its uncharted potential. Yuri Geller is able to bend metals by merely concentrating on it, and telekinetic powers take over. John of God, the Brazilian doctor turned faith healer, is able to operate without use of anesthesia. Nostradamus had clairvoyant powers, the gift to see the future. If your beloved is in distress, thousand of miles away, you too will feel the distress. Charge it to your extra sensory perception. All these are but illustration of the powers of the mind.

Yet, there are similar phenomena which do not fold quite fully well in the mold the parapsychologist explains as the power of the mind.

Take my grandmother, who incidentally, at the age of 94 can still recognize her grandchildren. At a tender, I witnessed many people who were suffering from the worst form of skin diseases. She did not finish elementary nor medical course. But she has this potion which is heated, and then she would rub this to the affected area, and murmured incantations the language of which I do not understand. Amazingly, living micro-organisms were collected in this hot potion, so hot that I wondered why these organisms were still crawling. The process was repeated depending on the severity of the disease. In days, the skin diseases were cured.

I developed recurring sinusitis way back in high school. Every summer vacation, I would return to our very rural hometown where my grandma lived then. One time, I had this sinusitis, with the debilitating fever and headache. There was this faith healer named Inday Moran (may her soul rest in peace). My grandma accompanied me to her clinic. To my surprise, the same medicines which my doctor gave me were prescribed by this faith healer. She also operated other patients the same way a doctor would. But she would also refuse to administer serious cases like operating on a kidney due to lack of facilities. When I was examined by her, I realized that she was a linguist. She spoke English, Tagalog, and other languages fluently. Yet, she only reached Grade III in the elementary level.

She cured so many people that she was elected mayor of our town, and was undefeated until she died. And my sinusitis? She cured it.

Ever since, I have opened to the possibility of parallel universes. I have to unless I had super human senses and perceptions. If one recognizes his limitations, there is no other logical way but to be open to the possibility that the other universes may indeed exist.

I am prompted to blog about this because of my recent experience. Two years ago, my wife went to Ireland for two months. When she came back, she could barely walk and had been suffering excruciating pain for almost a month already. She was taking pain relievers but the pain persisted. After three doctors and many tests, she was diagnosed to have slip disc, an incurable disease in which one of the disc in the lower spinal column collapsed, and the major nerve compressed. Without surgical intervention, she could suffer paralysis in the lower part of her body. But I asked and researched about the success rate of slip disc operation. The result: it is a 60-40 proposition, with the possibility of major accident during surgery.

I have a German tennis buddy who has slip disc also. There are only two recognized experts in this field, two German doctors in Germany who can operate for a fee of P5 million or $100,000.00. Where on earth can I get the money?

Then, we went to this faith healer. Miraculously, the day after the healing, the pain was gone and my wife can walk again.

Was it our faith that healed? But to be candid, when we went to this faith healer, I was the typically doubting Thomas. The faith healer must have some powers which science, as of yet, cannot explain. The key is openness.

My friend Millie was kind enough to let me read about the Einstein Theory of Relativity. Small objects travel space that is warped by the larger objects, This warping can only be seen in at least 3 dimension-reality. But accordingly, there are 7 dimensions of the hyperspace which are not yet determined with particularity. Will somebody pursue Einstein and explain to us the possibility of parallel universes, the other worlds?

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Sunday August 19, 2007 – 07:40am (CST) Edit | Delete

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of holy wars

Imagine the two human species that preceded the homo sapiens: homo habilis and homo erectus who lived 1.5 million or so years ago. Without any plausible scientific bases, but with the capacity for rational thinking, they were confronted with the elements of nature: fire, wind, air, and water. During the day, they looked – up at the sky, and saw the searing sun, and in the stillness of the night, the moon illumined the earth. Put yourself in their shoes, and you realize the awe and wonder our ancestors must have felt. As one writer puts it, they experienced what we call tremendum et facinans. Extreme fear and fascination.

Owing to man’s rational capacity, there must be order to an otherwise chaotic environment. Bereft without any scientific explanations, the first men that walked on earth had woven tales about the sun, moon, fire, water, air, and earth. Owing to the reasoning power, man has to explain the reason why these elements exist, and if they cannot fathom , they have to embrace these elements as supra-natural; and thus, superstitions about these elements evolved into paganism – sun, moon, earth, fire, wind, worship. Yes, religious rituals evolved around a stone, a river, a mountain, and even animals.

The earliest religious stirring is paganism – a raw, almost reflex reaction to the mysterious earth the early men faced. The mind cannot have without explanation. Chaos is intolerable. There must be order and harmony of human existence, from the material to the spiritual. Beliefs were held, and myths were told, delineating the powers of the gods and how the mortal should relate to them.

Religions however went beyond nature-worship. In the western world, the three main branches – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – have posited a Supreme Being who is the alpha and the omega of the human race. In the east, Hinduism and Buddhism from which many groupings evolved, posited that human being has his supra-natural aspect that is imprisoned in the flesh. To reveal man’s divine nature, he has to unhinge from the karmic principle, to escape from the wheel of re-incarnation to attain nirvana, a state of total bliss.

Of the religions, it is the western groups that have defined the bloody history of the human race. While the pre-historic men embraced religious worship to give order to an otherwise mysterious nature, the modern western religions have created chaos and disorder, by the never-ending forays into another religion. Religions as we now experience, have evolved from a tool of explaining the mystery to a tool of subjugation and annihilation.

Tell me of major wars, and you will see that the cause celebre of the same is rooted in religion. Judaism is the ancient of the three western religions. Yet we recorded its clash with the early pagan Egypt. Christianity saw the expansion of territories by the sign of the cross and the sword. Islam later on, avenged and even exceeded the adventures of the Crusaders. The war on terror right now , it is too, rooted on religion.

Why should man kill in the name of Jesus, or Allah, or Yahweh? Is it because we can now explain nature and de-mystified the pagan idols that we now project the superiority of our respective God by killing one another? Yet the irony is that the God of the west is professed as compassionate, the source of the ultimate love for humanity; and redemption can only be had by following the God.

There goes the clincher – there is only one road to human salvation. The compassionate God has admonished His flock to evangelize, to convert the gentiles and pagans and the infidels. The road to salvation must be shared. But must we kill a person who does not want to take the road we have taken?

But why the brouhaha? A man has yet to rise from the dead and tell the living that he has seen the road to salvation. The road we the living are talking about are mere glimpses of our faith. In a sense, the modern religious are still pagans. Enveloped in the modern mind is still the mystery of whether man has an afterlife. And in order to explain this, we embrace the concept of human salvation through a religion. But how sure are you that your road is the real one? Or are you even sure you have an afterlife?

Granting that your religion is the road to salvation, then your path necessarily excludes other religions. The rest of humanity then would be damned in hell. If your God is truly compassionate, then what kind of love that abandons the rest of humanity to damnation? Even if you combine the Christians , Jews, and Muslims, the number is still insignificant compared to the billions of Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and non-believers. Does it mean they will not find salvation? To reason that you have a compassionate God that leads you to the only road to salvation necessarily contradicts the true nature of your God. The whole argument collapses and so do the reason why you have to subjugate and kill to convert people into your fold.

Now tell me, why do you have to kill in the name of your God that you profess to be compassionate?

Our pre-historic ancestors worshipped in order to give them relief to the mysteries they have encountered with nature. They projected supra-beings to help them understand, in the absence of scientific explanations of things they saw and experienced. The spirit world was a tool for their meaningful existence of earth. But the modern man has made the spirit-world the end all and be all of human existence. Religion has ceased to be a tool; human existence instead has become a tool of religious practices that see the wastage of human lives. We have forfeited our present existence in favor of the afterlife which we have but only glimpses of our faith.

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read the current news (courtesy of my friend Millie)

Threats Force Egyptian Convert to Hide
Saturday, August 11, 2007 2:58 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By MAGGIE MICHAEL Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — An Egyptian Muslim who converted to Christianity and then took the unprecedented step of seeking official recognition for the change said he has gone into hiding following death threats.

Mohammed Hegazy, who sparked controversy when pictures of him posing with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in newspapers, was shunned by his family and threatened by an Islamist cleric vowing to seek his execution as an apostate.

“I know there are fatwas (religious edicts) to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country,” the 25-year-old Hegazy told The Associated Press from his hideout Thursday.

Hegazy made a public splash when he took the unusual step of going to court to change his religion on his national ID card. His first lawyer filed the case, but then quit after the uproar; his second is still considering whether it’s worth pursuing.

Hegazy said he received telephoned death threats before he went into hiding in an apartment with his wife, a Muslim who took the name Katarina when she converted to Christianity several years ago. She is four months pregnant.

He said he wants to change the religion on his ID for two reasons: to set a precedent for other converts and to ensure his child can openly be raised Christian. He wants his child to get a Christian name, birth certificate and eventually marry in a church. That would be impossible if Hegazy’s official religion is Muslim, because a child is registered in the religion of the father.

There is no Egyptian law against converting from Islam to Christianity, but in this case tradition takes precedent. Under a widespread interpretation of Islamic law, converting from Islam is apostasy and punishable by death — though killings are rare and the state has never ordered or carried out an execution on those grounds.

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Sunday August 12, 2007 – 06:28am (CST) Edit | Delete

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• Samurai
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An interesting yet profound article to make one think; Very well written and so true…have a great day..

belonging and alienation

Way back in college, there was this professor, Fr. Malley, who analyzed divine and human history in terms of alienation and belonging, instead of thesis and anti-thesis, the latter being more popular to the students considering the political temperature during Marcos time. The Marxist dialectical materialism took man as a mere object, a mere commodity in the historical moment. Fr. Malley’s analysis however considered man as the focal point of history. If history has to be understood, we have to dig deeper on the nature of man. To him, history is the full stretch of the tensions of belonging and alienation, played in the recesses of the human psyche and outwardly projected in our collective history.

twas in the Garden of Eden when alienation started

The Garden of Eden, although more allegorical than historical, jump starts the connection of the divine with the human and at the same time the alienation of man. At the end of the story of the Genesis, when God already breathed into man the breath of life, the Creator gave man an abode, which was a paradise on earth, the Garden of Eden. Man belonged then to the embrace of the Creator. But the snake in the garden which tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit, opened man to the other world, the possibility of living beyond God’s reach.

It was in the Garden of Eden that man strayed away from completely belonging to God. Throughout the Bible, there is a constant struggle to belong to God and at the same time to be alienated therefrom. Moses, in leading his people to the promise land, was faced with pagan-worship, bacchanalia, sex orgies, and all vices in complete defiance of God’s commandments.

Moses parted the red sea only to be betrayed by the people he wanted saved

Human history is a mere extension of the biblical tension in terms of religious wars. In fact, the most gruesome war is not political but religious; the former war aims to conquer territory, but the latter is concerned with the conquest of the soul. What we witness today by way of terror attacks is not a clash of civilization but of one group trying to consolidate its piece in the already fractious religious debate, claiming their religion as the only path to salvation and the rest will lead to the road of perdition. The issue, to what religion should man finally belong, Christianity or Islam, has only alienated man from the source of love and belonging. In an attempt to spread its own version of salvation, people have been killed, and when called upon to account for the deaths, these groups would only charge the killings to collateral damage.

But why should man kill if he only wanted to belong to his divine? The answer lies in the estrangement of man. If we have to read historical moments, we have to go back to human nature. Without roots in the divine, man is a broken piece. The sentient, and intelligent man needs to belong, to the divine and to the people he truly loves. According to Saint Agustine, “My heart is restless until it rests in thee”. Ironically, the jihadist that kills is moved by the overpowering mission to accomplish a mission that is, for him, truly divine. If he fails in his mission, he not only fails his Allah but the people around him as well. He needs to belong, and if he has to kill to achieve this, then kill he must. Alienation is at times worse than death.

So too the Crusaders who slaughtered the Muslims on their way to redeem the Holy Land. The medals of war conferred on them were mere testaments of their deep desire to be accepted and to belong in the bigger Christian community.

The most lethal assassin is not one who brandishes his weapon with dexterity; it is one who is willing to die in the pursuit of a mission imposed upon him by his group that sets the common vision. If he dies, he will be a martyr to his brethren, no matter the scorn of the society that he has wronged. Unfortunately, in man’s desire to belong to a common mission, divine or worldly, he sets him apart, by force of circumstance , from the larger community. What we see now are packets of cohesive groups unwittingly annihilating each other.

The necessity to belong is both divine and human. It is existential in character. There is a proverbial hole in a donut. A donut ceases to be one without the hole. Man is suffering from an existential hole, an emptiness that he carries to his grave; he is forever in constant attempt to fill-it up but never succeeds. The members of the family, friends, and other humans who we love and care are sources of

the hole remains till we die

belonging that somehow fill-in the hole. But while still alive, we look upon God as the source of total completeness, as the Being with whom we truly belong.

Historical movements are manifestations of this existential hole in every man. People seek salvation in recognition of this hole. Otherwise, if man feels complete, there is no need to look for the beyond. Push to the extremes, we see congregation of people, who, in their search for their own version of salvation, have relegated others as mere collaterals.

Is man cursed to kill each other in the name of salvation? Look at the mayhem in Bali.

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Sunday May 20, 2007 – 08:30pm (CST) Edit | Delete

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soulmates

February 14 is St. Valentine’s Day when as the cliche goes, love triumphs above all. Today, I commit to digress from my brand of writing, in honor of somebody to whom I promised to write a topic about – soulmates. She asked me whether I believed in soulmates, by way of an answer, let me assay further….

 

More in depth in Classical Definition

 

“Plato wrote in his Symposium that humans have been looking for their soul mate ever since Zeus cut them in half. In his mythic story, Plato describes a world where there were men, women and people who were both men and women. Apparently, humans began discussing how they could climb up to heaven and replace the gods. The gods were upset by this and discussed what should be done. The simplest solution would be to destroy mankind, but Zeus came up with a better idea. He suggested cutting all human beings in half. This would serve two purposes. First, it would immediately double the number of people making offerings to the gods. Second, it would weaken the humans, so they would not be able to carry out their plan. Zeus’ idea was accepted, and the humans were all divided into two. Naturally, the humans were upset at this, and Zeus decided to enable each half to have intercourse with their opposite , symbolically creating a whole. Consequently, the males sought other males, the females other females, and the people who had been both male and female sought their other half, allowing population to reproduce.”¹ This concept is outlined in the modern musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch

 

New Age concept of soulmate

 

There is a prevalent concept in some segments of the New Age movement that some souls are literally made and/or fated to be the mates of each other, or to play certain other important roles in each others’ lives. These souls are thought to have created something in a past life and they have chosen this lifetime to help each other “heal.” Following this concept, one can have many soulmates. For example: One could see another person they have never met in this lifetime and instantly hate or love them because of previous interaction(s) with the other in one or more previous lifetimes. The most popular use of this concept is in applying it to those who were loved intimately in other lifetimes which were then found in this one.

 

Also, being conscious of the “soul mate connection” is not necessary, according to this idea.

 

Soulmate Emotional Destruction Theory

 

Ultimately the consequence of this notion is the unfortunate reality that soulmates often possess the ability to inflict serious emotional injury unto their twin flame, greater than any other being could. This often results in the separation of idealized love, due to the severe emotional impact. Many soulmates are destined for an eternal search, not for lack of meeting, but rather lack of acceptance. The encounter is often analogous to the collision of matter and antimatter, a violent explosive reaction will occur, but if held through to completion only pure energy, and thus harmony, will result. Unfortunately few encounters are held through to completion.

 

Eastern View

While the Greeks had the idea of soulmates as mythology, Eastern Philosophy, Hinduism more particularly, has believed in the idea of soulmates as something real and experiential. Man has many past lives, not necessarily as humans but as other forms of organism. In man’s quest for nirvana, that is, complete bliss, he undergoes the wheel of reincarnation, sometimes as a cricket, a frog, a cow, or as man. But the spirit behind this earthly manifestations is the same constant spirit in search for nirvana. In this wheel of reincarnation, the spirit , in one of its earthly lives, encountered its true mate, which due to temporary existence is cut short by death. But in future lives, as if by coincidence, the two constant spirits would meet in other bodily presence. Their past lives would be re-awakened in an instant as if two combustible materials ignite each other, and they identify and recognize each other. In that one particular lifetime, they realize that they are only complete in the presence and love for each other. But alas, their present circumstances may not be similar in their past lives, so the love for each other is muted and pounded in the arms of another person.

The deepest love of all has cosmological origin, and in the spread of eternity, that kind of love may not find fruition at all. But when these two spirits indeed meet but are trapped in different circumstances, in time and space, they still recognize their true love for each other, that kind of love that is not imprisoned in the flesh and circumstances, the love that springs eternal and magical.

The celebration of Valentine’s Day is not necessarily the celebration of true love, but the sanctity of the search itself.

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Tuesday February 13, 2007 – 08:32pm (CST) Edit | Delete

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of dying and thereafter

 

      Last December 2, 2006, we attended the burial of my wife’s auncle. He was suffering for almost two years of cancer of the tongue. One month before he finally succumbed, he suffered a severe bleeding due to a rupture of one of the veins  caused in turn by the spread of the cancer cells.  When I saw him, I immediately called his brother, my father-in-law, and told him that within twenty four hours, his brother could expire. Actually, the prognosis of the doctor was that he would last for not more than seventy two hours.  Amazingly, he survived for another month. Thanks to a sheer will to live, to hang-on to dear life.

       During his last days, he would let the windows of the hospital open so that he could see the trees outside.  He would talk of going to his farm, and of doing his other routinary activities.  He would walk us through his previous triumphs and pains, and he intended to do more. His body was so emaciated in contrast to his once athletic physique.  Anytime then, he would expire.  Once, his eldest son Reno , asked him, “Dad, are you afraid to die?”   His unmistakable reply was a curt, “Yes”.

 

        During his burial,  my son who is still six years old, kept on asking why his “Papa Remy” was sleeping in the coffin.  I said, he is already dead, and would have to be buried soon.  As usual to a precocious child, I was bombarded with follow-up questions, as if I were  under cross-examination.  But the question that jolted me was ” What would happen now that he is dead?”  I could not answer . Otherwise, I would have to go to a long and unending discourse of the afterlife, which until now, I too am still grappling and searching for answers.

 

 

       When the coffin was finally lowered to the ground of his final rest, I noticed that my son shed a tear or two.  Other grandchildren also were teary eyed.  During the vigil and the church ceremony, these children were still playing and frolicking around, seemingly unmindful of the solemnity of the occasion.  Yet, at the final moment when the coffin was lowered to the ground, the same children who were playing were sobbing.  I asked my son why he cried, he retorted, “Should we leave him alone?”

 

        As a child, I was wondering what would happen after death.  “Physically, death must be very painful that I may expire in the process, ” so went my chilhood musing of death.  Is the afterlife, too dark, cold, and lonely?   Obviously, my son, gragarious and playful as he is, is concern more of the dead being alone in a dark grave than of the beyond.  As a child then,  the answers given to me only  raised more questions.  

 

       I have always been reflecting on death.  Are we afraid to die because we leave love ones and memories behind or is it because, life after is uncertain? 

 

        When I was in college, I majored in Philippine Studies and Philosophy, a recipe of challenging beliefs.  I was so enamored with eastern philosophy that I almost went to India for further studies, if not for my mother who wanted me to become a lawyer.  But by then, I lost  my catholic faith.  At the age of nineteen, I became a non-believer of Christ although I still believed then on the Supreme Being. (or was it the Universal Principle? Or Nirvana? Or the Great Cosmos)   In times of doubt, one thing becomes certain, uncertainty.

 

        During the period of doubts, the most nagging idea to me was about the afterlife.  I held on to many possibilies, that I was not certain of what death would mean.  Lately however, when I regained my christian faith, death to me is a painful process, of leaving the loved ones and the memories with them, for something, as the Bible promises, eternal life.

 

        Yet, even as I cling to christian teaching of the afterlife, I could not erase in my mind the other possibilities.  Afterall, no one has come from the dead to tell the living.  Somehow, the christian belief of the afterlife eases the burdens, clarifies some doubts, and give the dying fortitude in spirit to face the great beyond.

      Recent events though show that people abandon the present in favor of the  promise of bliss in afterlife.  They live for the beyond, while  smothering the here and now reality.  Terrorists would kill innocent people in the pursuit of the jihad, whatever the word means.  They may die in the process but that is of no moment so long as they go directly to the promise of paradise where they live in abundance, and they are surrounded by virgins whose  only duty is to satiate their pleasures.  There is too the christian teaching that  it is better for the poor man because he can enter the kingdom than the rich man.  Forget poverty, hunger, and malnourished children; the poor are sure to enter heaven.  People cease to live in the present.

 

        In his last days, Auncle Remy received the final christian rite, the annointment of the sick. Gradually,  he accepted death.  When he expired, he had a smile of serenity in his face.  Rightly so.  He died, but left the tracks of having raised a good family, made a loyal circle of friends, and contributed to the community.  These are things we would reminisce of him.  In the end, he had no more problem accepting life after death for although the road ahead would be ancertain, he lived a meaningful life on earth.  Although he had sights of the beyond, he did not cease to live the moment.

       It is precisely the truth that the afterlife is uncertain that we try to make our lives meaningful.  A good singer should sing, a boxer should know how to punch hard and fast, a lawyer should articulate the laws.  And what about me? I blog now because so long as the internet is around, my thoughts are forever recorded, and could be retrieved in the generations to come.  After all, when I take my last breath, I am not a mere speck in the stream of time anymore.  I made a difference.

 

        But faith in the afterlife somehow makes dying not too difficult to accept.  And if is the only way to ease the anguish of death, then I better hold on to it.  The alternative would only be more morbid.

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of holy wars

Imagine the two human species that preceded the homo sapiens: homo habilis and homo erectus who lived 1.5 million or so years ago. Without any plausible scientific bases, but with the capacity for rational thinking, they were confronted with the elements of nature: fire, wind, air, and water. During the day, they looked – up at the sky, and saw the searing sun, and in the stillness of the night, the moon illumined the earth. Put yourself in their shoes, and you realize the awe and wonder our ancestors must have felt. As one writer puts it, they experienced what we call tremendum et facinans. Extreme fear and fascination.

Owing to man’s rational capacity, there must be order to an otherwise chaotic environment. Bereft without any scientific explanations, the first men that walked on earth had woven tales about the sun, moon, fire, water, air, and earth. Owing to the reasoning power, man has to explain the reason why these elements exist, and if they cannot fathom , they have to embrace these elements as supra-natural; and thus, superstitions about these elements evolved into paganism – sun, moon, earth, fire, wind, worship. Yes, religious rituals evolved around a stone, a river, a mountain, and even animals.

The earliest religious stirring is paganism – a raw, almost reflex reaction to the mysterious earth the early men faced. The mind cannot have without explanation. Chaos is intolerable. There must be order and harmony of human existence, from the material to the spiritual. Beliefs were held, and myths were told, delineating the powers of the gods and how the mortal should relate to them.

Religions however went beyond nature-worship. In the western world, the three main branches – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – have posited a Supreme Being who is the alpha and the omega of the human race. In the east, Hinduism and Buddhism from which many groupings evolved, posited that human being has his supra-natural aspect that is imprisoned in the flesh. To reveal man’s divine nature, he has to unhinge from the karmic principle, to escape from the wheel of re-incarnation to attain nirvana, a state of total bliss.

Of the religions, it is the western groups that have defined the bloody history of the human race. While the pre-historic men embraced religious worship to give order to an otherwise mysterious nature, the modern western religions have created chaos and disorder, by the never-ending forays into another religion. Religions as we now experience, have evolved from a tool of explaining the mystery to a tool of subjugation and annihilation.

Tell me of major wars, and you will see that the cause celebre of the same is rooted in religion. Judaism is the ancient of the three western religions. Yet we recorded its clash with the early pagan Egypt. Christianity saw the expansion of territories by the sign of the cross and the sword. Islam later on, avenged and even exceeded the adventures of the Crusaders. The war on terror right now , it is too, rooted on religion.

Why should man kill in the name of Jesus, or Allah, or Yahweh? Is it because we can now explain nature and de-mystified the pagan idols that we now project the superiority of our respective God by killing one another? Yet the irony is that the God of the west is professed as compassionate, the source of the ultimate love for humanity; and redemption can only be had by following the God.

There goes the clincher – there is only one road to human salvation. The compassionate God has admonished His flock to evangelize, to convert the gentiles and pagans and the infidels. The road to salvation must be shared. But must we kill a person who does not want to take the road we have taken?

But why the brouhaha? A man has yet to rise from the dead and tell the living that he has seen the road to salvation. The road we the living are talking about are mere glimpses of our faith. In a sense, the modern religious are still pagans. Enveloped in the modern mind is still the mystery of whether man has an afterlife. And in order to explain this, we embrace the concept of human salvation through a religion. But how sure are you that your road is the real one? Or are you even sure you have an afterlife?

Granting that your religion is the road to salvation, then your path necessarily excludes other religions. The rest of humanity then would be damned in hell. If your God is truly compassionate, then what kind of love that abandons the rest of humanity to damnation? Even if you combine the Christians , Jews, and Muslims, the number is still insignificant compared to the billions of Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and non-believers. Does it mean they will not find salvation? To reason that you have a compassionate God that leads you to the only road to salvation necessarily contradicts the true nature of your God. The whole argument collapses and so do the reason why you have to subjugate and kill to convert people into your fold.

Now tell me, why do you have to kill in the name of your God that you profess to be compassionate?

Our pre-historic ancestors worshipped in order to give them relief to the mysteries they have encountered with nature. They projected supra-beings to help them understand, in the absence of scientific explanations of things they saw and experienced. The spirit world was a tool for their meaningful existence of earth. But the modern man has made the spirit-world the end all and be all of human existence. Religion has ceased to be a tool; human existence instead has become a tool of religious practices that see the wastage of human lives. We have forfeited our present existence in favor of the afterlife which we have but only glimpses of our faith.

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read the current news (courtesy of my friend Millie)

Threats Force Egyptian Convert to Hide
Saturday, August 11, 2007 2:58 PM EDT
The Associated Press
By MAGGIE MICHAEL Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — An Egyptian Muslim who converted to Christianity and then took the unprecedented step of seeking official recognition for the change said he has gone into hiding following death threats.

Mohammed Hegazy, who sparked controversy when pictures of him posing with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in newspapers, was shunned by his family and threatened by an Islamist cleric vowing to seek his execution as an apostate.

“I know there are fatwas (religious edicts) to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country,” the 25-year-old Hegazy told The Associated Press from his hideout Thursday.

Hegazy made a public splash when he took the unusual step of going to court to change his religion on his national ID card. His first lawyer filed the case, but then quit after the uproar; his second is still considering whether it’s worth pursuing.

Hegazy said he received telephoned death threats before he went into hiding in an apartment with his wife, a Muslim who took the name Katarina when she converted to Christianity several years ago. She is four months pregnant.

He said he wants to change the religion on his ID for two reasons: to set a precedent for other converts and to ensure his child can openly be raised Christian. He wants his child to get a Christian name, birth certificate and eventually marry in a church. That would be impossible if Hegazy’s official religion is Muslim, because a child is registered in the religion of the father.

There is no Egyptian law against converting from Islam to Christianity, but in this case tradition takes precedent. Under a widespread interpretation of Islamic law, converting from Islam is apostasy and punishable by death — though killings are rare and the state has never ordered or carried out an execution on those grounds.