A RELIGION-ORIENTED radio station repeatedly quotes the first three verses of Romans 13: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”
Are we to believe that admonition just because “it is written”?
To do so, common sense tells us, is to bow to murderous dictators and atheist leaders for being “God-sent”.
If we believe in the four freedoms – freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech and freedom of religion – why not freedom from religion?
Freedom from religion means thinking for ourselves, shielding us from religious dogmas that transform us to mere robots.
Freedom from religion also means ignoring the “hate campaign” of the religious sector against politicians who support artificial family planning, premarital sex and divorce, or other advocacies contrary to Church.
Who has given the bishops and priests authority to chart the future of married couples? To dictate us whom to vote for and whom to reject during elections?
Certainly not God, who has given us a rational mind. Any modern man who allows his brain to be manipulated by the clergy belongs to that era when disobedience to the Church was punishable by death.
On the lighter side, their hypocritical vow of celibacy makes the bishops and priests “killers”. Celibacy results in “sperm failure” or inability to create human life.
While it has already been more than a century since we gained our independence from Catholic Spain, 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 for heresy in 1633. He had taught that the earth revolved around the sun.
But the official position of the Church at that time was that the sun revolved around the earth.
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.”
During the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337 AD), heretics (persons who opposed church teachings) were sought out, tortured and eventually murdered.
On March 25th, 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.
The inquisitors grew very rich, accepting bribes and fines from the wealthy who paid to avoid being prosecuted and dispossessed of property.
The Church even used the Bible to justify burning people to death: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” (John 15:6).
Fast-forward to the present, it is no longer a secret that the clergy still harbors homosexuals, pedophiles and other “immoral” sectors of society.
Eighty percent of priests at the Vatican are gay, according to French journalist Frederic Martel, whose new book Closet of the Vatican is the result of interviews with 1,500 cardinals, bishops and priests, among others. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
