PEOPLE POWWOW

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Random thoughts on religion

MANY issues ago, this corner recalled how my friend Leo Navarro — an El Shaddai preacher and broadcaster – abandoned his boss, Brother Mike Velarde. In a TV interview, Leo accused Mike of having stashed away sacks of money from thousands of gullible participants in their weekly, overnight “family appointments,” and yet was denying his preachers a decent sleeping quarters. As a “thinking disciple,” he said he had no choice but junk the cult using the name of Jesus Christ to amass money for an “idol” who never cared for his flock.
If truth be told, the religious beliefs we believe in are mere “hand-overs” from generation to generation. This is especially true in the Philippines where Roman Catholicism dominates as a result of almost four centuries of Spanish colonization. Christianity has evolved into sects and sub-sects – whether Catholic, Aglipayan, Protestant or what-have-you.
In other countries, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Muslims and the Hindus are dominant for the same reason. But each individual adherent cites “convincing” defense of his faith. For example, when I asked a visiting American Jew why he was asking us Christians to convert to Judaism, he bluntly answered, “Why?  It’s to follow Jesus Christ, who was a Jew!”
By then, I had already “mellowed” in my quest for “true religion.” Born to an Aglipayan mother and a Seventh-Day Adventist father, I had repeatedly allowed myself to be “towed” to various sanctums of worship, only to shake my head.
One Saturday, three women Adventists invited me to accompany them to their central church. When we entered, two pastors were quarrelling over who would preach the sermon. Embarrassed, the three women explained that the “outgoing” pastor was resisting the take-over by the “incoming” one. .
With Christianity having a thousand and one denominations to choose from, a lifetime would not suffice to sort the grain from the chaff.
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” because most of us are Roman Catholics. But that would not be so in our Muslim neighbors like Indonesia and Malaysia
So why should we even embrace Christianity as our own when history tells us that it was   actually foisted on us by the oppressive Spanish conquistadors? If Ferdinand Magellan had not landed in the Philippines on March 16, 1521, this nation might have turned predominantly Muslim; our southern natives at that time had already known Allah.
If we were born in a rabid Muslim theocracy like Saudi Arabia, no doubt we would also condemn the “evil Christians.”
But we don’t even have to move out of Christianity to discover how convoluted religion could be. In this column many years ago, I lengthily recalled the religious “debate” between my late father Juan and his friend Gerardo.
“Jesus is not God!” Gerardo, an Iglesia ni Cristo follower, boomed, “He is the Son of God.”
Tatay, who had prepared for that conjecture, quickly retorted, “Well, then, if he is the Son of God, he must be God. In the same manner, since you are a son of man, then you are a man.”
Many other Christian sects have surfaced since then. A pastor of one of them has been exploiting the powerful TV media to proclaim himself “appointed son of God” worldwide.  With tithe money pouring in from convinced followers who believe he would lead them to heaven, he has built himself a “paradise” on a mountain top. The unconvinced, of course, think of his organization as just another cult.
To reiterate, the aspiration of a religious follower is to gain eternal life while the immediate goal of a cult leader is to gain money. While the follower waits for the fulfillment of his wish, the leader has already received his./PN
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