Our Filipino Christianity and Our God-concept (UPDATED)

"I helped the poor and they called me a saint, I asked why they were poor and they called me a Communist’" – Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara

When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that's my RELIGION.” - Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, Sixteenth President of the USA

"Many Filipinos are what I call Sunday-religious, that is they go to church every Sunday, take in confession and communion, but the rest of the week they bribe and do corrupt deeds..." - Dr. Pura Santillan-Castrence

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Hi All,

I do not consider myself religious in any way - lest someone charge me as riding the high morality horse; here-under  I only want to highlight many, if not most, believers' inconsistency to their professed Christian religion or belief system. 

I address all Christians, though Roman Catholics are the majority, our homeland. Not our Muslims who generally see their religion as a way of life and internalize their beliefs, and therefore not comparable to the "split-level" or compartmentalized Christianity exhibited by native Filipino Christians, i.e. Catholics and/or those of Protestant varieties..

Sometime ago, I attended a wedding ceremony. I normally do not attend such happenings but can not say no this time. During the Mass, I guess it's part of the churchy game plan, the officiating priest talked about what is labeled as the two greatest commandments of God, that is, love of God and of neighbor. 

I will not elaborate on the first love though I believe many so-called/professed Christians concentrate on that. God is supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, etc. (as I remember my grade school Baltimore Catechism rote); therefore God must be so self-sufficient and thus should not want more love and attention.

My interest is in the second love, the teaching of loving one's neighbor. This exhortation refers to loving in the Good Samaritan-sense, per one of Jesus' parables. This parable teaches and encourages Christians to be helpful or charitable (to total strangers that is, beyond family, relatives, friends). It is on this account that many self-proclaimed Christians, native Filipino Christians, fail.

One sees inconsistency or outright hypocrisy when people, especially those who have "made it," i.e. attained material success or wealth and thus ability to help, claim that they love their God, but at the same time not really care about their neighbors, most importantly, the neighbors in need.

It seems many native Filipino Christians (Catholic, Protestant, Evangelicals/Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, etc. varieties) spend so much time on God trying to buy their "salvation" by saying "Praise the Lord", "Love God", "Jesus is Lord", mouthing special prayers or incantations, etc. Such exercises remind me of the biblical Pharisees and Sadducees.

Our so-called Christians seem to remember their God when they feel the need to directly ask for more favors; or appeal for intercessions by their favorite saints,  praying -for more financial "blessings," to be free of sickness, etc. (such impressions remind me of the Bruce Almighty movie character which made me really have LOL). 

Native Filipino Christians see their God as a sort of granddaddy or Santa Claus and their saints as facilitators (when saints should be seen as role models to be emulated). Essentially Filipino Christianity as escape from reality.

Thus, if our so-called Christians are materially successful or other, they attribute it to their being "blessed," same if they are physically normal, unharmed in an accident, etc. It makes one wonder about those who are sick, harmed in accidents, born physically abnormal, killed/murdered, etc. Are these latter ones, not blessed? And those Africans, young and old, dying of hunger or being massacred; are they not blessed that they therefore suffer or die prematurely? All those victims of natural disasters, i.e, earthquakes, floods, etc.

With these mindsets, those who have become wealthy or have attained upper middle class or higher economic status, seem to profess, knowingly or unknowingly, a sort of "prosperity theology." They think God loves them because they are successful in their material pursuits. 

Those who have "made it" are oftentimes enthusiastic supporters of Globalization or Neoliberalism in the homeland, and often suggest or imply that the poor are poor either because these latter folks do not work hard enough, or are sinners; or at best, deservingly destined to be impoverished and to suffer. I have personally heard this sort of statements from people I know who are either Catholics or "born again.".

Such claims exaggerate and twist the Bible's teaching on blessings by God, affirming and upholding the rich --without analyzing systematically why in our kind of society some are rich and many others are poor. This individualistic and self-centered distortion of beliefs soothes the conscience of the affluent, but poses radical challenges in the articulation of social and economic justice.

Overall, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) hierarchy and its lay leaders in our homeland to date, have failed to properly send the Christian message -- called the "good news."  Remember, the RCC as an institution has historically been identified as a chief defender of the status quo and as part of the Establishment. It has been and is mainly a church of, for the rich and educated elite and left the impoverished to bear it.  While being very influential as a cultural and sociopolitical force, potentially for good or bad. 

However, I qualify that it is not equal to or as powerful as the Catholic hierarchy during our Spanish colonization or vis-a-vis Spanish Catholic Church during "El Caudillo" Generalissimo Franco's 37-year fascistic rule in Spain (whose legacy and memory are still controversial since his demise in 1975; and present-day Spanish dislike of the Catholic Church as an institution, in sharp contrast to its historical prominence.).

The Church teaches its starving faithful that they will inherit the kingdom of God via the "beatitudes". I see that teaching as disgustingly cruel, a perpetuation of the God-concept that is cruel and narcissistic, of creating and expecting humans to spend their time praising God and asking for salvation while they suffer in their existence.

I do not think the present church leaders and ministers conspire to mislead the poor. But it appears these men-of-God learned erroneously or inadequately themselves and therefore taught badly throughout the centuries.

It is only after Vatican II in the 1960s (and thanks to then Pope John XXIII a saintly priest with an authentic, simple peasant background) that some in the hierarchy became concerned about social realities, especially the predicament of the poor and tried to impart social consciousness for the ignorant masses and social action, e.g. through Basic Christian Communities in the Philippines and even more radically, Liberation Theology as widely preached and practiced in Latin America in the late 1960s-1980s. 

Unfortunately the long reign of Pope John Paul II and now succeeded by his former "dogma-hit-man" (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) Pope Benedict XVI,  turned back all these enlightened beliefs or interpretations of Christianity and the gains of Vatican II. 

Thus, the Roman Catholic Church in general and the hierarchy in our homeland is back to being for the status quo, more a church for the rich despite its lip-service of being the church of the poor.

If one is to believe that man was created in the image of the christian God, then that God in the preceding must be discarded since it is a cruel and distant God -inasmuch as many of his supposed creatures are left to suffer. 

It is therefore the urgent and primary task of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to emphasize and demonstrate the "love of neighbor," of the neighbor in need; to teach more fully this critical or major part of Christian teachings.

It behooves the RCC hierarchy to stress the need for internalizing this teaching so that each native Filipino Christian, and especially those who have power to change or influence the direction of the homeland will actively lead with honest, utmost social concern and moral ethics in their governance and business dealings, but most especially towards the poor native majority.

The world is not just a stage on which man works out the eternal salvation of his "soul." Forget the emphasis on loving God with incantations and formulas or staying within the confines of otherworldly or afterlife concerns, or spending most time protecting the church as an institution. 

Instead the Catholic Church in the Philippines and its members should be responsible and put emphasis on loving one's neighbors, that is, by seeking and fighting for social justice, by informing themselves and teaching the ignorant mass about their rights for a just society.

For no social system is just if it deprives its people of those earthly goods which are necessary for a truly human existence, whether the system is market-driven capitalism or socialism or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-what-have-you communism. It is by teaching/informing. striving and acting for a just society can believers demonstrate their love of their christian God.

Oftentimes in the history of man, cults or movements led by great men with their great teachings/ideas are revolutionary. But as they proliferate and become a major part of society, of the Establishment, those movements become reactionary and pillars of the status quo, if not moribund. That is how Christianity since the 4th century started to gradually change, that is, when Constantine made it the official religion.. 

To me, much of the authentic Christian followers were from that long past earlier era.

- Bert

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NOTES:

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   Primary Blog Posts/Readings for my fellow, Native (Malay/Indio) Filipinos-in-the-Philippines

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" Fear history, for it respects no secrets" - Gregoria de Jesus (widow of Andres Bonifacio)

Use of Religion in Desperate Times (Updated)

"Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." ~Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

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PLEASE DONATE CORE SUBJECT BOOKS TO OUR HOMELAND (i.e. your hometown public schools, Alma Mater, etc.). Those books that you and/or your children do not need or want; or buy books from your local library during its cheap Book Sales. Also, cargo/door-to-door shipment is best.  It is a small sacrifice.  [clean up your closets or garage - donate books.THANKS!]

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"I helped the poor and they called me a saint, I asked why they were poor and they called me a Communist’" – Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara (1909-1999)

NOTES:

1. Colored and/or underlined words are HTML links. Click on them to see the linked posts/articles. Forwarding this and other posts to relatives and friends, especially those in the homeland, is greatly appreciated). To share, use all social media tools: email, blog, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, etc. THANKS!!
2. Read on Scribd mobile apps: iPhone, iPad and Android.
3. Free download as PDF, TXT or read online for free from Scribd, point-click to open-->SCRIBD/TheFilipinoMind

4. Click the following underlined title/link to checkout these Essential/Primary Readings About Us Filipino Natives:
   Primary Blog Posts/Readings for my fellow, Native (Malay/Indio) Filipinos-in-the-Philippines

REVISED/UPDATED 10/17/2019


Hi All,

We realize the growing alienation, i.e. increased feelings of indifference, helplessness and deep despair among fellow native Filipinos when people turn solely to religion or praying as the only way to the betterment of the Filipinos in the Philippines.

This act of withdrawal gives validity to what Karl Marx has stated a century and a half ago, his famous description of religion as–though incompletely quoted and understood- “the opium of the people”.

Karl Marx’s complete statement is: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.” (Italics in original text.)

If one reads Marx as such completely, we see that Marx meant that religion creates illusory fantasies for the poor. Economic realities prevent them from finding true happiness in this life, so religion tells them that this is OK because they will find true happiness in the next life. Marx agrees that people are in distress and that religion offers solace. [Just as physically injured people receive relief from opiate-based drugs, i.e. codeine or morphine.]

Marx’s statement is a critique of a society that has become heartless. For him, the problem lies in the obvious fact that an opiate drug fails to fix a painful injury – it merely helps you forget your pain and suffering] which is fine to a point, but only as long as you are also actively trying to solve the underlying problems causing the pain in the first place.

In a similar way, religion does not fix the underlying causes of people’s pain and suffering- instead religion only helps the alienated forget or not want to understand and/or act on why they are suffering; and instead gets them to look forward to an imaginary future when the pain will supposedly cease rather than working to change circumstances now.

Given the Filipino predicament and in the absence of other dominant or significant factors/forces, aside from religion, i.e. Christianity(Catholic}, for fundamental changes; the task for pursuing such changes should fall on the Catholic Church, its hierarchy and followers; to lead, make a greater effort ; make time to promote and put into action its social teachings:
1) seeking justice for the weak and poor [Pope Leo XIII -1891];
2) creating greater awareness and pursuit of the common good of society [Pope John XXIII -1963]; and
3) participating in social and political reform for their liberation from the structural roots of injustice [Pope Paul VI –1971], etc.

The immediate tasks of clerics and leaders of the Catholic Church in our homeland:
1) stop treating its followers as children,
2) stop preaching that being miserable, impoverished and oppressed in this world are good for their souls and that they will be rewarded in the hereafter. 

Their mission to themselves and their educated followers:
1) gain knowledge and understanding of the causes, not just the symptoms, of the Filipino predicament; and
2) share with their impoverished fellow citizens this acquired knowledge and understanding. The churchmen do not have to run for public office to accomplish such.

Note that this social goal for the common good is in contrast to many members of mainline Protestants, and especially religious fundamentalists (Pentecostals or Evangelicals) whose sole concern is their individual salvation [not correcting society’s ills]. 

We should not be surprised as this position is consistent with the foundational Protestant doctrine, i.e. Sola Fide, invented by reformer Martin Luther that led to the Protestant Reformation  According to this doctrine, one is not saved by his good deeds but by faith alone. If carried over to our national predicament as such, I call this attitude and behavior of indifference towards the struggle for social justice as "selfish individualism."

However, that is another story.

- Bert


Click to see also --> Our Filipino Christianity and God-concept 

"We receive and we give not to others. We praise generosity, but we deprive the poor of it. We are freed slaves, but we do not pity our companions who remain under the yoke. We were hungry, and now have a surfeit of possessions, but we ignore the needy. While we have God as a magnificent patron and provider, we have been stingy towards the poor and refuse to share the goods with them. Our sheep are fruitful, but more numerous are the people who go naked. Our barns are too small to contain all that we possess and yet we do not pity those who anguish." - St. Basil

Is Religion Necessary For Morality...Is There A Godless Morality?

  

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The following previous posts and the RECTO READER are essential about us native, Malay Filipinos and are therefore always presented in each new post. Click each to open/read.

1. WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW:
2. WHAT IS NATIONALISM [Filipino Nationalism]?
3. Our Colonial Mentality and Its Roots 
4. The Miseducation of the Filipino (Formation of our Americanized Mind)
5. Our Filipino Kind of Religion
6. Studying and Rethinking Our Philippine History

THE RECTO READER is presented in several postings. Click below for previous posts:

• THE RECTO READER: Nationalism,Internationalism,Ultra-Nationalism, Part 1A of 6
• THE RECTO READER: Mission of Nationalism, Part 1B of 6
• THE RECTO READER: Economic Independence,Economic Nationalism,Part 2A of 6
• THE RECTO READER: Economic Nationalism Means Industrialization,Part 2B of 6
• THE RECTO READER: Industrialization: The Alternative to Poverty, Part 2C of 6
• THE RECTO READER: The Fallacy of "Philippines First," Part 2D of 6
• THE RECTO READER: Parity Rights, Currency Dependence, Foreign Loans versus Foreign Investments, Part 2E of 6

NOTE: Recto's cited cases, examples or issues were of his time, of course; but realities in our homeland in the present and the foreseeable future are/expectedly much, much worse. Though I am tempted to update them with current issues, it's best to leave them as they are since Recto's paradigms about our much deepened national predicament still ring relevant, valid and true. In short, Recto saw the forest and never got lost in the trees.- Bert

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"I helped the poor and they called me a saint, I asked why they were poor and they called me a Communist’" – Brazilian Bishop Helder Camara

"Many Filipinos are what I call Sunday-religious, that is they go to church every Sunday, take in confession and communion, but the rest of the week they bribe and do corrupt deeds..." - Dr. Pura Santillan-Castrence

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Godless morality
Marc Hauser and Peter Singer

Is religion necessary for morality? Many people consider it outrageous, even blasphemous, to deny the divine origin of morality. Either some divine being crafted our moral sense, or we picked it up from the teachings of organized religion. Either way, we need religion to curb nature’s vices. Paraphrasing Katherine Hepburn in the movie The African Queen, religion allows us to rise above wicked old Mother Nature, handing us a moral compass.

Yet problems abound for the view that morality comes from God. One problem is that we cannot, without lapsing into tautology, simultaneously say that God is good, and that he gave us our sense of good and bad. For then we are simply saying that God meets God’s standards.

A second problem is that there are no moral principles that are shared by all religious people, regardless of their specific beliefs, but by no agnostics and atheists. Indeed, atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers, even if their virtuous acts rest on different principles. Non-believers often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, and have worked to abolish slavery and contributed to other efforts to alleviate human suffering.

The opposite is also true. Religion has led people to commit a long litany of horrendous crimes, from God’s command to Moses to slaughter the Midianites – men, women, boys, and non-virginal girls – through the Crusades, the Inquisition, innumerable conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and suicide bombers convinced that martyrdom will lead them to paradise.

The third difficulty for the view that morality is rooted in religion is that some elements of morality seem to be universal, despite sharp doctrinal differences among the world’s major religions. In fact, these elements extend even to cultures like China, where religion is less significant than philosophical outlooks like Confucianism.

Perhaps a divine creator handed us these universal elements at the moment of creation. But an alternative explanation, consistent with the facts of biology and geology, is that over millions of years we have evolved a moral faculty that generates intuitions about right and wrong.

For the first time, research in the cognitive sciences, building on theoretical arguments emerging from moral philosophy, has made it possible to resolve the ancient dispute about the origin and nature of morality.

Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank space with “obligatory,” “permissible,” or “forbidden.”
1. A runaway boxcar is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the boxcar onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ______.

2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _______.

3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical condition, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital, but there is a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die, but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s organs is _______.

If you judged case 1 as permissible, case 2 as obligatory, and case 3 as forbidden, then you are like the 1,500 subjects around the world who responded to these dilemmas on our web-based moral sense test (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/). If morality is God’s word, atheists should judge these cases differently from religious people, and their responses should rely on different justifications.

For example, because atheists supposedly lack a moral compass, they should be guided by pure self-interest and walk by the drowning child. But there were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds, with approximately 90% of subjects saying that it is permissible to flip the switch on the boxcar, 97% saying that it is obligatory to rescue the baby, and 97% saying that is forbidden to remove the healthy man’s organs.

When asked to justify why some cases are permissible and others forbidden, subjects are either clueless or offer explanations that cannot account for the relevant differences. Importantly, those with a religious background are as clueless or incoherent as atheists.

These studies provide empirical support for the idea that, like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance.

Our evolved intuitions do not necessarily give us the right or consistent answers to moral dilemmas. What was good for our ancestors may not be good today. But insights into the changing moral landscape, in which issues like animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, and international aid have come to the fore, have not come from religion, but from careful reflection on humanity and what we consider a life well lived.

In this respect, it is important for us to be aware of the universal set of moral intuitions so that we can reflect on them and, if we choose, act contrary to them. We can do this without blasphemy, because it is our own nature, not God, that is the source of our morality.

Marc Hauser is Professor of Psychology and Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Harvard University; Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

Source: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/godless-morality

"We receive and we give not to others. We praise generosity, but we deprive the poor of it. We are freed slaves, but we do not pity our companions who remain under the yoke. We were hungry, and now have a surfeit of possessions, but we ignore the needy. While we have God as a magnificent patron and provider, we have been stingy towards the poor and refuse to share the goods with them. Our sheep are fruitful, but more numerous are the people who go naked. Our barns are too small to contain all that we possess and yet we do not pity those who anguish." - St. Basil