It was inconceivable not too long ago that one day, I would put memories and feelings in print and, more improbably, in a book. Apart from a short story I wrote when I was 12, my academic standing suggests that I could not write anything worth putting on the school paper. The editor, reporters and contributing writers all belong to the literary select. The few reports I did in high school were copied verbatim from the library. That was the expectation.
Writing a paper at university in my undergraduate years was identical to writing in high school but only sourced from a more extensive library. Research means going to the book repository, looking them up in as many books as possible and copying a mishmash of paragraphs about the topic you are writing about. If you think this was a ’60s thing, reading a comment from a reader in 2018 suggests otherwise.
The initial indication of my inadequate foundation manifested in a Biology Institute at the University of Hawaii. It was my first foray into a foreign university, merged with teachers with US credentials. Writing reports and making presentations almost gutted me out. I survived that first one by the skin of my teeth. The second Institute with U of H. was an exercise in reclaiming my self-confidence. By the time I started my postgraduate studies at MUN ( Memorial U of Newfoundland ), I had started rebuilding my meagre undergraduate training.
My first anecdotal piece was published by the Gander Beacon (NL) in the fall of 1995 and titled “Bowhunting: The Ever Growing Alternative .” But my first real break in a national paper was a “Letter to the Editor” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. (PDI) “Priest Contradicts one of the Most Basic Catholic Tenets,” in April 2014. As an avowed agnostic, I became a voracious reader of anything by Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett. As a retired science teacher, I found solace with the Association for Science and Reason ( now Skeptics Canada ) through meetings in Toronto.
I expanded my reading to include Carl Sagan—Stephen J. Gould, Sigmond Freud, and Lawrence Kraus, among many others. Countless hours of YouTube of Christopher Hitchen’s debates with clergy and religious leaders on the same topic gave me the confidence to seek membership with the Halton-Peel Humanist Community (HPHC). By this time, I had given up memberships with two other religious groups and a bible study with a local Christian ministry, all to further my knowledge of why and how people become attracted to beliefs. I reached an early realization that it does not matter what one believes.
Every creed generates the same neuro-hormonal triggers that set off our evolutionary predilection to religion. Science has not entirely taken over this genetic hangnail. Until humans take to a “secular god,” any traditional religion serves the believer the same spurious claim that there is an “afterlife.” It is the “raison d’etre” of every doctrine that exists and the ones that have lived in the past. My fight is the intolerant nature of these beasts and the extreme action ( think 9/11 ) some would take to achieve their perceived nirvana, a subjective reality gone awry.
Because of my interest in the subject and the many books I have read about it, most of the articles published during that period were about the Church and its doctrines. Starting with the March 25, 2015 commentary, “Is a Secular Church Inevitable?” Several religious-themed articles followed, including “Biology and the Bible,” “Have We Been Praying to the Wrong God,” and others.
Ruminations about religion led me to Hitchen’s best seller: “God is Not Great” – “How Religion Poisons Everything.” Perhaps not quite the characterization of his book, my articles came close: “As A Matter of Faith,” “Some Random Thoughts on my 75th Year” are expressions of my disdain for a long history of the Church’s complicity to an account of evil hiding beneath a veneer of faith. The so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” — rescinded by the Vatican in 2023 — justifies the seizure of Native lands and the program of assimilation of indigenous peoples. The Residential School scandal in Canada exemplifies it.
The most recent revelation of 200,000 sexually abused children in Portugal by 2000 priests raises concerns about why we should render a weary eye when dealing with this crowd. ( Update: Nov. 2023; Spain’s national commission released a report of “tens of thousands” of children sexually abused by priests since 1940 )
Nothing comes close to the “Doctrine of Infallibility” when subjugating the human mind. Infallible to matters of faith? Excuse me? Consider the so-called Immaculate Conception: a doctrine that Mary was conceived without a father — so she wouldn’t “inherit” Adam’s original sin. Virgin Birth is another one that says a ( holy ) ghost impregnated Mary to conceive Jesus. They are breathtakingly creative as they are at once a startling repudiation of nature. It also asks the faithful to suspend their rationality on behalf of these follies. All because, from the beginning, religion is averse to sex, i.e. can’t imagine a god that resulted from sexual intercourse! It is the type of nonsense that confines a rational mind to a lifetime of constricted thinking. And no, you cannot question it because you have been conditioned since you were seven to believe it or else…
“God has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you.” (Paraphrasing George Carlin )
This is precisely like the message the priests of the day repeatedly conveyed on organized “retreats” when I was in grade school. Subjecting your child or grandchild to this fear-mongering rubbish is child abuse. Call the cops!
When PDI started restricting the length of commentaries from 1000 words to 650, I found it too limiting to the kind of articles I wanted to write. So, I started reworking Inquirer articles with more details and statistics. With fewer constraints on length, I began writing for BALITA, a Fil-Canadian community newspaper based in Toronto. At the urging of my wife, who got tired of my faith-themed articles, I shifted to human-interest pieces. I was able to include pictures with scripts that range from 1200 to 2000 words. I reorganized my themes into a multi-segment “Memories” series. Among them is “The Games That We Played .” This three-part series chronicled my life as a young boy in Paraňaque, Rizal. “Memories of Newfoundland” and “Reminiscing My Years at the Rez” are narratives of my life during my teaching years in Canada.
A highly personal two-part article, “Confessions of a Recovering Catholic,” was a forthright ascent into atheism. It was also a retrospective assessment of how school and religious upbringing had constricted critical thought. And how being mediocre academically can cascade into the self-fulfilling second-rate student that I was. Outside of my science courses, “Pasang Awa” ( teachers call this “social promotion”) was the ghastly label I got from my high school. Thank Darwin! “Cognitive Reorganization” had put a new life in my otherwise inconsequential journey.
Always at the forefront of contemporary issues, such as “Climate Crisis, It’s Worse Than You Think,” in two parts. Then, a very instructive article on medically assisted dying, “MAID in Canada,” surprised many with the legal status of MAID in Canada and the growing number of states in the US.
I underestimated the seriousness of the condition of Philippine Education with two articles: “Dark Clouds Over Education” culminating in the PISA debacle. This international test of 15-year-olds showed us being dead last in reading and second last among 79 countries in maths and Science. This lingering destitution in our educational capabilities led me to a follow-up article, “The State of Philippine Education: Revisited.”
To make sense of the dismal PISA results, I wrote a thorough analysis of the causes. Aware of a general lack of understanding of the process of evolution, the article “Evolution and the Covid Variants” explains how mutations can give rise to new variants.
Then, seizing on a scientific track, I explored the emerging technology in genetically modified animals for food and the latest trend in cultivated meat sourced from a lab instead of a feedlot. Explored in two parts: “Bio-technological (R) evolution.”
One subject that appears in many of my articles is former President Donald Trump. I have to say that even during the 2016 presidential campaign, I already found him to be “antipatiko.” This Filipino word is an all-encompassing term covering much more than being “obnoxious.” As it turned out, I have been the face of Canadian ( non ) support for Trump, which hovered between 15 and 20 %. He gets only 16% vs. Biden’s 84.
In various articles I have written, I have called him the “Neanderthal-in-chief,” the “Lying King,” and an “eFing Moron.” In the article “Conspiracy Theories,” I wrote: “He is a one-man conspirator-fool who has either started or promoted conspiracy theories— 29 in my recent count— from Birtherism to cancer-causing wind turbines, to global warming as a Chinese hoax, etc.” On live TV, he asked Dr. Fauci if bleach could be injected into a person to kill the virus. Is he a muttonhead or what?
But I reserve my worst sentiment to Filipinos conned by a white supremacist whose bigotry of a man of colour has been on full display since before and after becoming president. Targeting Mexican and African Americans as murderers, rapists and drug dealers, denigrating African immigrants as coming from “shithole” countries and then advising them to “go home.” I have sat down with an otherwise respectable Pinoy who genuinely thinks that Barack Obama was Kenyan-born. The man’s stupidity and implicit bias towards blacks were blatant but “par for the course” for a deeply flawed racist. This instance and many others in “Look No Further than Ourselves.“
When I began to write “My Okinawan Adventure,” I thought of the many hours spent in the Biology lab, camping, and field trips to places I still remember—snorkelling at Mission Beach and Maeda Point. The many hours spent learning taxidermy, photography, and darkroom procedures were memorable times of discovery.
Just as I was writing “As Time Goes By” and “The Perils of Getting Older,” an unmistakable jolt got me thinking. It’s time to put a book together, an anthology of all that I have written. My friend Jun Navia had been after me to do just that. At the time, I felt no compulsion to put anything together. While most of the manuscript has been completed, numerous edits have yet to be done.
The best justification for putting this book together is to allow my grandchildren and the generations after them to remember something about my time and role. Yes, recorded history has never been as documented as before, but the internet and social media that revolutionized everything began much later —in the early 80s and mid-90s, respectively. A first-person account of life before toilet paper or moose hunting before all-terrain vehicles cannot be more authentic than someone who experienced them firsthand.
Also, a personal cross-cultural perspective adds an extra dimension to the richness of any experience. One of the things that I learned in my life’s journey is how fleeting experiences can be. My interest in travelling has narrowed now only to where I can stay longer and participate in the cultural milieu of the neighbourhood. Visual intimacy no longer satisfies.
But I can write a whole article about “Caplin Gulch,” a narrow path into Eastport Beach in Newfoundland, where we would gather squid or Caplin and spin casting for Flounders. A recent overnight experience at Sonya’s Garden-By-The-Sea in a far-flung Barangay Papaya in Nasugbu, Batangas, was a nostalgic trip to my early childhood along the shores of Manila Bay, “The Games That We Played” Part I. The fishing boats, digging clams in a sand bar and the thriving Mangroves along the cove’s edge held me captive. The neighbourhood and the access to the houses nearby transported me to a time I thought I would never see again. At that moment, I felt my throat closing as my eyes began to tear up.
But I will reserve my foremost legacy as an early advocate of humanism. Going against the grain of a culturally established, predominantly Catholic mindset, the Filipino community will view it as heresy, a collective lament from people whose worldview has been contracted by a dominant but spurious creed. By the time my grandchildren become aware of the underpinnings of their Filipino heritage, they will be part of the larger community whose worldview is unconstricted by my era’s narrow and outworn mythology. They are humanists at heart. This book is my gift for posterity.
BOOK ORDERING INFORMATION:
EMAIL: edwingdeleon@gmail.com $20 plus shipping
Ebay.ca : search: Memories and Reflections, $24.95 plus shipping, tax
On Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 4:23 PM balita balita <balita@sympatico.ca> wrote: