Prudence and Madness

Here’s one reason why I fear religion so much:

“‘I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it,’ says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya’s 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers. ‘These sorts of silly views are killing our faith.’

He’s calling on his flock to boycott the exhibition and has demanded the museum relegate the fossil collection to a back room ? along with some kind of notice saying evolution is not a fact but merely one of a number of theories.”

Hearing a bishop saying or doing something like the one cited in the Yahoo! news article makes me shudder. I just realize now why there are wars fought, not just because of politics, but because of religion: we just won’t tolerate another person’s beliefs.

Sam Harris succinctly put it in his book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

“All are perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: ‘respect’ for other faith, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus instrinsic to every creed.”

I remember a sermon I heard when, one of those rare times, I attended a mass conducted inside a shopping mall. I was almost awed with the priest saying the mass because, at first, he came across me as someone who’s progressive, fresh, not old school. There was a different vibrance with his way of saying Mass. But then, he went on about how the world is divided into Christians and the “Pagans” and that it is our duty, as Christians, to convert these “Pagans” to Christianity so that we could save their souls from going to Hell. I just can’t believe what I heard. Did I just hear that the world was improperly put into a dichotomy of “Christians” and “Pagans”? What about the other religions? Should we categorize them under “Pagans”? So has it become the “Christians” against the “Pagans”? What happened to religious tolerance? Has he just equated “Christians” with the Good and the “Pagans” with the Evil?

How I wished then that the mass was inside a more confined church. So that he could have seen me walked out of the place.

Maybe Sam Harris was right. There wouldn’t really be religious tolerance because intolerance is intrinsic to every organized or institutionalized system of beliefs. Instead of uniting everybody in search for the Truth, religions have divided us, prevented our eyes and our minds from possibly seeing the Truth that we seek by pulling over our eyes some righteous fallacies pretending to be true, which cannot be debated upon because, in the beginning, they are fallacies. Illogical. How can anyone rationalize with that?

I can almost hear every religion saying, “you must come with us because we know the Truth! We have it! And they don’t! We are the Chosen not them!”

I have become afraid of Religion. It has failed to be a conveyor for spiritual enlightenment. It has become a tool for division and organization. A tool for power.

I began missing some Sunday masses. The parish priest in our area is even worse than the shopping mall priest. He just keeps on reading his homily every Sunday. He goes about the entire ritual of the mass mechanically. Thus, he finishes the mass in 30 minutes. Even less. Worst is the other parish priest. He condemns women for not obeying their husbands, saying that it was written in the Bible that woman is just created from a man’s body part and so women should always be dominated by men.

So I stopped going to mass.

And then, I would hear my parents complain that I haven’t been attending Sunday masses anymore. That I am not being “good” anymore. And though they may not say it, I believe they are starting to think that their daughter has become “pagan”. As if not attending Sunday masses make someone “unspiritual”.

We are a country composed mostly of Catholics. Day in, day out, religion pervades our lives. Perhaps we got so drenched with religion that we have become “overreligious”, setting aside rationalism as being “evil” or “not God’s way”. I believe God gave us our rational minds for our own enrichment and for our eternal search for happiness and fulfillment.

But most people are stubborn. They refuse to take in the truth, even if it’s staring right in their faces, only looking at “faith” as the only thing that rightfully exists. And these are the dangerous people because they will only believe what they want to believe and no amount of reasoning can convince them otherwise because they believe they have the “truth”. These are the people that have wreaked havoc in our lives with wars, claiming that it is “God’s will”.

While this kind of “faith” exists, there will never be peace on Earth. Isn’t that a dreadful thought?