PEOPLE POWWOW | A free thinker goes beyond religion

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, June 22, 2017
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OVER lunch in a restaurant the other day, I enjoyed a powwow with colleagues Florence Hibionada, Jun Lojero and a parish priest (name withheld) who saw “indirection” in the way President Rodrigo Duterte steers the ship of state.

At one point, I verbalized my dread over the way churchgoers “worship” an autocratic president who has no respect for the Pope.

“What is your religion,” the good priest asked me.

“I am a free thinker,” I quickly quipped. “My father was an Adventist; my mother an Aglipayan. In fairness to them, I opted to be free from religion.”

Religious freedom means being free to think for oneself, to believe what is believable and to junk what is not.  Belief in questionable religious doctrines would be self-deceiving.

As Dale Carnegie, author of the classic book How to Win Friend and Influence People, has written, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

Fr. Gregorio Aglipay, I cited to the three a bit of history, could not believe in the Roman Catholic Church’s dogma imposing celibacy for priests. It must have been one of the reasons why he established the Philippine Independent Church (better known as Aglipayan) in 1902 and married his girlfriend. Priests are human beings – may pusot’t damdamin.

God has given us a rational mind. Any modern man who allows his God-given mind to be controlled by the clergy belongs to the past – when disobedience to the Church could be ground for imprisonment or killing of violators.

Unfortunately, while it has already been more than a century since we gained our independence from the Spanish regime, we are still under the spell of religious leaders who threaten us with fire and brimstone if we don’t toe their line.

History throbs with cases of erroneous theocratic decisions. The most infamous of them all was the conviction and life imprisonment under house arrest of famous Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei for heresy in 1633. Galileo had taught that the Earth revolved around the Sun.        

The official Church position at that time was that the Sun revolved around the Earth – an idea borrowed from Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It was not until 346 years later in 1979 that Pope John Paul II declared that the Roman Catholic Church “may have been mistaken in condemning Galileo.”

In 1993, the Catholic Church officially “pardoned” Galileo. Ouch!

Shouldn’t the Church have apologized instead for misjudging the person who had rightly held that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun?

History does not uphold the “pro-life” stance of the Church. If that were so, why has She killed millions of “heretics” from the dawn of the Christian era to the 18th Century?

During the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337 AD), heretics (persons who opposed church teachings) were sought out, tortured and eventually murdered. Heresy was an offense against the state as well as the church.

On March 25, 1199, Pope Innocent III declared that “anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of god which conflicted with the church dogma must be burned without pity.”

The reign of Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) saw the beginning of the Inquisition, a campaign of torture, mutilation, mass murder and destruction of human life.

In 1254, to ease the job of the inquisitors, Pope Innocent IV decreed that accusers could remain anonymous, preventing the victims from confronting them and defending themselves. He authorized and officially condoned torture as a method of extracting confessions of heresy.

The so-called “water torture” inflicted by dictatorial governments on alleged criminals today is a take-off from one of the Inquisition’s torture methods. It refers to pouring liters of water into a funnel in the victim’s mouth till the stomach bulges, causing extreme pain and suffocation.

Facts I have said. Believe them, or not. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)

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