Do We Love One Another

DO WE LOVE ONE ANOTHER?

By: Poch Suzara

Do we love our rivers and lakes and beaches? Do we love our flowers, plants, and trees? Do we love our birds, butterflies, and other living creatures of the forest? Do we love law and order? Do we love our policemen in the streets and our lawyers and prosecutors and judges in the courts? Do we love our mayors, governors, congressmen, and senators? Is ours a lovable government of a lovable people, by a lovable people, and for a lovable people?

Developing countries in Asia today are the results of, if not due to, developed minds and cultivated hearts. Thanks to the power of education based upon science and technology. Thanks also to that simple yet powerful human sentiment with them that has always been a traditional reality: love of country and love of fellow-citizens. For us Filipinos, however, -- love of country is as yet a traditional fantasy.

In Asian countries developing today, teamwork means dividing the effort and multiplying the effects. With us Filipinos, however, it is the exact opposite: teamwork means praying to God for miracles to forgive us of our historical defects.

But then again, in this only Christian country in Asia, if we are not praying to God to lead us not into temptation, our high government officials too are praying to the same God to lead us not into deeper economic degradation. The results thus far: graft and corruption, political confusion, social dislocation, and especially pollution and population explosion.

Are we ever going to wake up in this country? When are we going to stop kidding ourselves enjoying the sacred lies we tell each other each day of every year? Are we ever going to solve, intelligently, our problems as a people and our troubles as a nation? Must we continue with our stunted sense of humanity as inspired by our love for incomprehensible divinity?

There was a time when every single man, woman, and child believed in a loving God. It was a time when no one dared to question anything. It was a time of spiritual poverty and moral bankruptcy. Everybody also believed the world was not round, but flat. It was a time of fear and mental paralysis. Everybody held on to faith not in the human capacity but faith only in human stupidity. It lasted for a thousand years( 5th to the 15th century ). Historians refer to those centuries as the Dark Ages.

We Filipinos are still living in the Dark Ages. We carry superstition on our backs and we are crippled by its weight. We make no bones about God being a panacea – that all our social troubles and problems will vanish into thin air if only each and every one of us will kneel down and once more have deep faith in God.

The holy bible is found in almost every Filipino home today. It is a book written not by Filipinos, but by foreigners. If, however, we wish to understand why love of country does not exist in the Philippines, please read the bible. It clearly states what we adhere to daily and faithfully: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not with him. “ John 2:15. Indeed, why should we love our country when the bible clearly tells us that if we do so, the love of God is not with us?

Now if we wish to understand why we do not love each other as a people please read again carefully what Jesus admonished in the bible: “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26. Is it any wonder why we all love God up there by hating one another down here?

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of abandoned and hungry Filipino children struggle to exist in the streets of our major cities. Their bodies are rotting with malnourishment. They live off garbage and trash.

Well, millions of children too exist inside our school buildings. Their minds and hearts are rotting too. They are taught to believe that this world is depraved and sinful and corrupt and that this life is nothing but a transition to a better world to come after death with God in heaven. Indeed, these are the same millions of children who will become parents themselves one day. And like all of us parents and grandparents of today, they too will be the stupid victims of our so-called “ social, moral and religious values.”

We are born ignorant, not heartless nor mindless. In the Philippines, we are indoctrinated to be mindless and heartless with the power of education.
Poch Suzara
High School Dropout Association
Of the Philippines
Makati City

Corruption By Education

Corruption by Education
by: Poch Suzara

We rave daily about corruption here and there and everywhere in our sick society. Corruption in government and private industries. Corruption in the military and in the priesthood industry. We hardly notice, however, where the seeds of corruption come from. Indeed, it is in our schools, colleges, and universities where we learned corrupt values and corrupt beliefs. We are all products of a corrupt system of education.
It’s the easiest thing to corrupt individuals. Take normal boys and girls in school and teach them to believe the following:
· To believe that we are all guilty of sin until we have no more pride, dignity, and self-respect.
· To believe that faith is always better than reason and that prayer rallies are the first solutions to our real problems.
· To believe that the saints of God are more worthy of emulation than the ideals of human brotherhood.
· To believe that it is needless to improve social conditions because there is a better life to come after death with God in heaven..
· To believe that it is needless to save our minds and hearts for the kingdom of man as what is crucial is to save our souls for the next life in the kingdom of God.
· To believe that the miracles from theology are far more reliable than philosophy, science and the scientific way of thinking, and technology.
· To believe that the revealed truths need not be revealed as such truths are far beyond human understanding.
· To believe that to love God’s mother up there is far more precious than to love our own mothers and grandmothers down here.
· To believe that God will always provide for those who are good, even if they are good for nothing.
· To believe that pain, suffering, misery, poverty, and squalor are paths toward eternal salvation. Never mind the growth of human civilization.
· To believe that success in life can only be measured with money. Never mind where the money comes from as long as we have plenty of it.
· To believe finally, that no matter what sin or crime we commit, as long as we continue to believe and have faith, there will always be available from God the forgiveness of sin and crime.
Do this to millions of children in school and we have then ideal Christians. We also have criminals. A person who longer respects himself can no longer respect anything. One who does not love himself, cannot love anything. If he hates himself, he hates the world.
It is in our system of education where we learn our sense of worthlessness and our unspeakable burden of sin; where the stage is set for corruption as a way of life. Indeed, the real cause of corruption in our sick society is not due to lack of discipline. On the contrary, it is discipline based upon sick values. Owing to our system of education, we learn to have no faith in the best of the Filipino capacity. We do not love our country nor do we love fellow-Filipinos. We only love what makes for the Filipino incapacity.
We certainly live under a culture of corruption, The worst of it is the corruption of human intelligence. Corruption by education is certainly keeping us spiritually poor as a people and morally bankrupt as a nation, indeed, - the Sick Man in this only Christian country in Asia.

QUESTIONS for THEOLOGIANS

QUESTIONS for THEOLOGIANS

With great interest, I read your article: WE NEED TO STUDY THEOLOGY published in BusinessWorld ( May 11, 2005 ). You mentioned and I quite agree that there are lots of people who are real giants in the fields of modern technology and other sciences. Regrettably however, I am unable to agree that such scientists and philosophers are ‘like babies or pygmies with clearly stunted growth’ in matters of faith and religion. For my part, I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher; in fact, I am a high-school dropout. Perhaps, as you are an expert in theology, you might be of great help in answering for my own enlightenment, the following theological questions:

If God were the Designer of nature, how come He had to design 23,000 different kinds of beetles? What went wrong with the first beetle design? Or, if the human body were God’s design, how come there exist about 2 billion kinds of virus, germs, and bacteria living inside our human body that will eventually kill us all whether we have free will or not?

If God created everything, including space and time, where was God located before he created space, and when was it before he created time?

The sun is such a giant that it can take one million ( 1,000,000 ) planets the size of earth and fit them all inside it. The sun, however, may be large but it is not the largest star in the sky. According to the science of astronomy, there is an even bigger star called Betelgeuse. It is 500 times larger than our sun. Comparatively, therefore, on this grain of sand called “planet earth” we humans are like the size of tiny parasites or the size of atoms. In this connection, what was God’s size when he created man in His own image and likeness?

Where did darkness come from? Wasn’t God shining bright enough to have lighted up everything even before he created the sun and the stars?

How could Adam and Eve be guilty of the Original Sin since before everything else there was, first and foremost, - the Original Creator?

God’s first Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Can you explain where those “other Gods” came from? Who created them?

If moral values were universally planted by God, then all people would believe the same things. There could never be disagreements over right and wrong. There would be no need for laws, courts, and battlefields. Can you explain why the history of the world has been a history of conflicts between moral values in God’s name?

According to the National Catholic Almanac, God is “almighty, eternal. Holy, immortal, immense, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, invisible, just, loving, merciful, most high, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, patient, perfect, provident, supreme, true.” Can you explain: how was it possible for theologians to declare God’s incomprehensibility and simultaneously list twenty-two additional attributes? If God cannot be comprehended, how can anybody get to know or even to love God?

If God were immutable and therefore cannot change the past, the present, and the future as God saw it, doesn’t that make our prayers utterly worthless because when we pray, we are asking God to change his mind?

If God so loved the world, why does he tolerate the devil to inspire the believers of one religion hate the believers of another religion? Indeed, why does he inspire as well the believers of the same religion to hate each other as we all do in this only Christian country in Asia?

Christ said that if someone smite thee on the right cheek, turn the left cheek also. Can you explain what is so noble about turning the other cheek, if one knows that each time he does so, he piling up greater rewards in heaven, while the one who strikes is earning his rewards in hell?

If Christ died on the cross to destroy the devil, how come the devil is still alive? How come he’s doing quite well inspiring the Filipino to embrace not the growth of human civilization but only to be involved in the rat-race for eternal salvation?

Philosophy of science is committed to the discovery of truth; it is not obliged, as a discipline, to defend any particular set of beliefs at any cost. Such is not the case with theology. Theology, as a discipline, is concerned with the defense of a particular set of beliefs. As theology is still at the foundation of our system of education, is it any wonder that in our schools, colleges, and universities, we all come out not as useful thinkers for humanity, but only as useless believers for divinity? by Poch Suzara

WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN pamphlet
published by the Bertrand Russell Society, Phils
* A reproduction of the article written by