Loss of faith in religion

By Herbert Vego

BY chance, I ran into Bloomberg news footage of Russian President Vladimir Putin attending a service of the Russian Orthodox Church in Valaam, Russia on July 24, 2023.

Earlier, Wall Street Journal (January 7, 2023 issue) reported, “President Vladimir Putin thanked the Russian Orthodox Church for backing his war in Ukraine as he marked the first Orthodox Christmas since he launched his armies on a full-scale invasion, a conflict he has cast as a kind of holy war against a decadent West.”

So, what’s new?  So many other power-mad politicians have gone into war with more or less the same excuse.

Organized religion has always foisted on faithful followers the “spirit of obedience,” in our case nurtured by 502 years of Christianity – counting from 1521 when Magellan planted a cross in Cebu.

Most Filipinos practice Christianity – whether Catholic, Aglipayan, Protestant or any other sect – because of foreign influence handed down from generation to generation.

The Jews, the Buddhists, the Muslims and the Hindus also dominate “territories” that have been receptive to their sets of beliefs. Their adherents who come to places where they are strangers tend to defend their faith.

There was a time in the 1980s when I asked a visiting American Jew why he was asking us Christians to convert to Judaism.

His blunt answer: “Why?  It’s to follow Jesus Christ, who was a Jew!”

I agreed with him that while it has evolved from Judaism, Christianity itself  has divided into a thousand and one sects and subsects with conflicting teachings.

The Latin saying, “Vox populi, vox Dei” could not be right. If the voice of the majority of Filipinos were the voice of God, then Roman Catholicism would be “it” in the Philippines.

However, imagine a situation where the Spanish conquistadors had not come to colonize us in the 16th century. Then this nation could have gone as Islam as Indonesia and Malaysia. In fact, a quarter of Mindanao residents are Muslims.

Conversely, let us imagine ourselves born in Saudi Arabia where the Bible is banned. Would we not condemn the “evil Christians”?

A big Christian organization wields a “treat or threat” for being the only true Church of Christ; only its members would be “saved.”

Pastor Apollo Quiboloy has made his followers embrace him as “the appointed son of God” even if he is wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for a labor trafficking scheme that brought church members to the United States, via fraudulently obtained visas, to solicit donations for a bogus charity. With tithe money pouring in from everywhere, he has built himself an 8-hectare “paradise” known as Tamayong Prayer Mountain in the foothills of Mount Apo in Davao.

I firmly believe that while the goal of their followers is to gain eternal life, that of the cult leaders is to gain power and wealth.

The flood of money cascading from millions of followers has fueled the rise of many religion founders.  You must have read that when the Korean founder of the Unification Church (since 1954), Reverend Sun Myung Moon, died in September 2012, he had amassed billions of US dollars from five million adherents worldwide.

Locally, religious organizations also make money from politicians, mostly crooked, who generously “donate” – or “invest” — in exchange for their blocked votes.

A popular doctrine in Christendom “legitimizes” the notion that when a man dies, his soul zooms up to meet Saint Peter, who gives him the key to any of three destinations: heaven, purgatory or hell. This is not found in the Bible.

To quote Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, “Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.”

-oOo-

THE QUEST FOR GREEN ENERGY

KUDOS to the people behind the Tripartite Agreement aimed at propagating renewable energy in Iloilo City through a one-stop net metering system.

This August 3 agreement among the Iloilo City government, the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) and MORE Power is aimed at encouraging households to patronize renewable energy sources,

“What we want is really to get solutions closer to the consumers and we are grateful to Iloilo City for not just acting positively to our request, but more importantly acting so swiftly,” said ERC Chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta during her visit to the Iloilo City Hall.

Mayor Jerry Treñas assured her of the massive use of solar panels in the city, and more so with the implementation of the tripartite agreement.

MORE Power President and CEO Roel Z. Castro said, “I’m very happy to let the ERC chairperson know that our collaboration with the city for a one stop shop has been working since three years ago.”