On Sept. 19, 2024, Joel Butuyan’s Phil Daily Inquirer column, “Flea Market of Ideas,” published an article about the Pope’s recent Asian tour. The article “All Religions are Paths to Reach God” refers to the Pope’s bold and daring assertions.
I responded to Butuyan’s article on Sept. 30, https://opinion.inquirer.net/177171/religion-a-giant-conspiracy-theory.
This article is an expanded version of my response.
In an interreligious meeting with young people in Singapore, Pope Francis declared:
“God is God for all, and if God is God for all,” he said, “then we are all sons and daughters of God.” “All religions are paths to reach God,” the pontiff stated. “There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian,”
As a long-time silent skeptic, I had a similar sentiment since high school, but what kind of voice would that have been in a Parochial School where everyone sang the same exclusivist Catholic mantra— the one true God is the one held by Christians; “It is Jesus or bust!”
In the Philippines in the 60s, they made you believe that the whole world revolves around your faith. There was no hint of the other 84% of the 3 billion who did not share that belief and had no idea who J.C. was for the most part. Everyone skirted the obvious: What happens to the 600 million Chinese who have not heard of Jesus Christ.? Even at the tender age of 14, I was saying that there had to be something wrong and unjust when a supposedly loving God condemns people to hell because they were born into a different belief.
I do not remember the message of ecumenism when it first became a catchword among religious leaders in the Second Vatican Council. It was meant to be an inclusivist message of acceptance and tolerance. However, we are all eyewitnesses to the continuing religious wars that go unabated to this day. The ecumenical movement of the 60s came at the height of a religious possessiveness that saw adherents unwilling to share each others’ beliefs. The so-called “exclusivists” believed their religion was the only true path to the God of their faith. Indeed, as a young man going through a catholic high school and later a catholic university, whatever declaration of ecumenism was more of a diplomatic “paso doble” than a doctrinal unification.
HOW DID WE REACH TODAY’S WORLDVIEW?
We are in the throes of an evolutionary shift, a period of “punctuated equilibrium,” a faster pace of change after a time of relatively slow, meandering developments in our 200,000-year history. Whether physiological or cultural, there have been stages in this natural growth process that bring an accelerated epistemological worldview—the current period of growth started some 300 years ago in what we call the Enlightenment. The rise of Empiricism during this period slowly boosted science and secularism.
By addressing a generation of young people, the Pope showed that he is fully aware of the “crisis of relevance” in the religious life of a population segment that will determine the church’s future. The ecumenism of his address was a calculation to harness the congregation’s leading edge, a group most enmeshed in the dizzying pace of change.
Pope Francis has been a master of oblique statements that do not immediately cut into the heart of the matter. His latest statements are only a preamble to a more stark admission he would proclaim before he passes on. Religion is a kind of cultural conspiracy theory that humanity has clung to because the human species, in its early development, needed comfort and reassurance that only supernaturalism could bring.
The Pope will eventually gain enough support to declare that the one God of all religions is a mythological babble. For Catholics, this has created a spiritual conundrum: Exhortations from the Pope in matters of faith are a doctrinal sacred cow. The Doctrine of Infallibility is a church mandate that all Catholics must accept as an article of faith.
Mr. Butuyan and others are missing the subtle implication of the Pope’s bold declaration. The Pope and other religious leaders have arrived at an inescapable fact about religion: It is the seed of so much strife and discontent and, as Butuyan stated, “the underlying cause of many past and current wars.” Religion has been on a killing spree since man forged this intolerant beast. The term “terrorist” began with this ideological brute!
If you think the current war in Gaza and Lebanon started on Oct. 7, 2023, you have not been paying any attention. This war began 2000 years ago, at the beginning of the Christian Era. Have you noticed where these wars are? All in the Middle East, the seat of all Abrahamic religions (but now proxied by the U.S., Russia and China ) and has the potential to become a world war. The Pope, like many religious leaders, I suspect, has been guilt-ridden by the conflict and dissension they have created. 42,000 killed in Gaza in one year has to affect any thinking person.
THE FILIPINO EXPERIENCE
In the intervening years, there has been an explosion of migration. The Filipino diaspora saw every corner and every region on earth as a viable destination for many of our compatriots. South Africa, Lebanon, Greenland and would you believe Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, saw Filipinos toiling away there as well ( wow! What does it say about our country? ). Every ship in the world today is home to thousands more. Filipinos crew the entire kitchen staff of some cruise ships. Our experience is but a glimpse of the world today.
I have been asked many times: “What happened to you? How did you become a “none”? (This is the current term for people who declare themselves unaffiliated with any religion.) The non-diplomatic version: How did you become an atheist?
Exposure. Let me explain: Most people are culture-bound; the formative years of our youth are the basis of our lifelong attachment to our beliefs. For most of our lives we live in a box, a “bubble” that insulates us from other people’s worldviews. The longer one stays in this “bubble,” the more impenetrable it becomes. Migration may have made many of us physically outside our ancestral homes but psychologically as beholden to the culture we left behind. The food you eat, the friends you keep, the language you speak, the conversations you engage in—the intensity of your attachment are almost a carbon copy of the relatives you left behind. You hear, see and think nothing different. Old biases prevail, and many never come out of this shell, but others get to see outside through isolation, marriage, or career.
As a science teacher, I found it easy to see the incompatibility of what religion preaches. ( it is not coincidental that over 80% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists or agnostics ) Getting out of the bubble was inevitable for me. My natural curiosity and engagement further affirm what I have sensed for a long time: Religion is a disaster, a major limiting factor in humanity’s quest for a good life. The world is a cauldron of contrasts: Afghanistan or Sweden, Japan or Iran, Denmark or Iraq, Canada or Syria—take your pick!
Some will engage further and become the opposition. I had gone further than what the Pope was saying— that all religion is a path to the same God. I say religion is a path to no one! Religion is an ideology of fear and intolerance. It does not lead to a God; you are not joining God in an afterlife because after life is death. When you die, you are “dead as a doornail,” end of story! ( I made this assertion in an article “Heaven, Hell and the Afterlife,” Balita, Dec. 1, 2018)
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE POPE’S DECLARATION
First, understand what the Pope said: “There is only one God; all religions are a path to the same God.” But Jesus said, as detailed in the Bible, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can come to God the Father except through me.”
Who or what God was the Pope referring to? He does not subscribe to his biblical God. What Muslim, Hindu, or Christian would subscribe to a different God? However, this is precisely what I was talking about; everyone, including the Pope, could come out of their bubble. But this Pope is not just coming out of a bubble; he is coming “out of the closet.” It is naive to think that he made such a remark out of the blue. It was a calculated treatise to engage the religious community outside the traditional worldview. This unifying concept gets people thinking and talking about a different perspective.
It may never register fully with a run-of-the-mill, church-going member of a religious congregation,— just as most catholics I know, but reading an interview with Ismail Haniyeh ( the Hamas leader whom Israel later assassinated in Iran ) gives us a sense of what religion is capable of doing to a human mind and how others take it beyond Friday prayers or reciting the Rosary.
After three sons and two of his grandchildren were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, this is what he said:
“Thank God for the honour of my children and grandchildren being martyrs. Through the blood of the martyrs and the pain of the injured, we create hope, we create the future, we create independence and freedom for our people and our nation.”
ope Francis and other religious leaders, past and present, have let the “genie out of the bottle.” No amount of prayers, contrition, or liturgical appeasement can put that genie back into the bottle. Many more Ismail Haniyeh are waiting their turn to be martyrs. ( think of 9/11 ). These religious wars will continue for many years to come until the sectarian forces have all killed themselves and humanity transforms itself into a secular community.
Two thousand years of religious delusion would have finally met their match, and the forces of the Enlightenment would have come to fruition. Pope Francis will go down in history as the first (openly) atheist Pope ( I made this assertion in my Balita article “ As a Matter of Faith” in April 2020) His successors will preside over a religio- cultural metamorphosis. St. Peter’s Square will be ringed with Diderot, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Sartre and other great (atheist) philosophers, including contemporary protagonists Hitchens and Dawkins.
Just as the Theory of Evolution took more than 100 years before its recognition, all these transformations will come in stages. By then, God would have been reduced to a “concept,” a view unlike those of peoples of the Middle East 150 years before. Sectarianism would have killed the last remaining Ayatollah. With the Taliban back in the caves, it would eventually have transformed the entire region into a secular entity.
I can hear it now: “If religion goes, where do we find comfort and reassurance?”
To them, I say: Get a dog!