Some random thoughts on my 75th year

I take this opportunity to share my feelings on today’s concerns and the many developments in recent memory.

The COVID pandemic has focused many life issues front and centre.  It broke open people’s feelings about Science, Politics, and Religion.  It is as if the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, work-at-home arrangements, school disruptions, and a general curtailment of normalcy brought out the worst in many.  Donald Trump came in at the worst time of human vulnerability in the US and arguably the world. But, unless you are in a dark corner of the thawing Arctic or some far-flung places of the world, his presidency probably did not cause any ripple in your life.

The rise of conspiracy theories, one that did not register in the minds of most Canadians, has become so pervasive as to cause vaccine hesitancy, the storming of the Congress, a rise in bigotry, and prejudice. As well, lying has become omnipresent; some politicians have politicized the pandemic, the vaccines, the masks, and the silliest misinformation as long as it supports the “Big Lie” and a slew of mislead constituents.

From the time Donald Trump endorsed injecting bleach as a potential COVID cure, subtle support of conspiracy theories, or claiming climate change as a Chinese hoax, I thought he was the reincarnation of a moronic Neanderthal.  To be sure, he had a long history of racism, narcissism ( identifying himself as ” John Barron” to brag about himself on talk radio or in a fake cover of Time ), and fraud before he became president. Nevertheless, his primarily white constituency saw an anti-establishment man, ready to turn back the clock: anti-globalism, coal and big oil, trinket manufacturing, protectionism, gun laxity, etc. There is a lot today in our social upheavals that can be traced from his presidency.  

Top historians and political scientists have ranked Donald Trump as the worst president ever. Nothing more to add there.  That says it all!   If anybody still think otherwise, I say, you are not reading, listening ( or listening only to FOX ) or paying attention.  I believe we are going to see more revelations in the coming years. The man has closets full of skeletons!

We see volatile US-style protests in the current federal campaign. Racism has also become more visible, acting out the dark recesses of a prejudiced mind  ( read: the London, ON.  killing of a Muslim family ), a clear departure from the Canadian norm.  I will argue that if it had been the presidency of Reagan or Barack Obama, we wouldn’t be in such a state.  A more rational hand in the new administration has already given us some respite, despite some pitfalls.  Oh, what a  great feeling to be Canadian these days.

I don’t get it.  Why would a vaccine-hesitant or an anti-vaxxer Joe think he knows better than the combined wisdom of the worldwide scientific and medical minds.  What kind of mentality would get duped to disinformation from a pastor or politician peddling anti-mask mandates.  A question of freedom, they say.  Huh?  We’re surrounded by mandates that have given us longer life expectancy;  seat belts, speed limits, and laws that have curtailed our freedoms in the interest of ourselves and society.

How long would it take for humanity to find comfort from a  less volatile undertaking like religion and into the realm of reason and rationality?  Should we be thankful that a Theocratic government does not run us?  ( Iran; Saudi Arabia ) The Taliban is back, and once again, we see the face of Medievalism; fully covered (Burka ) women are back, no school for girls; back to the caves in one form or another. (It reminds me of the classic caricature of a Neanderthal holding a club and dragging a woman by the hair ).

“ if I were Cardinal Tagle, I would resign my cardinalship, run for public office, and put in practice all that he has been preaching.  Sooner or later, he will find that absolutist positions are the enemies of progress.” 

Yes, but that’s them.  We are Christians, and we know better.  Oh really?  The Residential Schools are back in the news.  In case you haven’t paid attention, new horrors are just now coming out.  Physical, emotional, and sexual cruelty perpetrated by the Catholic ( and  Anglican ) churches in Canada and the US mainly against the indigenous peoples.  Unmarked and mass graves and ruined lives of survivors.  Priests and nuns of the day brainwashed the natives into believing that being Indian was a sin.  They pried them out of their communities, destroyed their language and culture, and in the end, consigned them to unmarked graves.

Even the most casual reader of history knows that the Catholic Church was at the center of a millennium of wars against supposed heretics ( Inquisition ), the Crusades against the Saracens.  Agustine’s “just persecutions” is a concept to justify punitive massacres as “good” because the motivation is the love of the Christian Church.  A lesson that Hitler took to heart.  The complicity of the Reich and the Vatican made it possible for the “Holocaust,” aided by the New Testament’s consignment of the Jews, to “hellfire.”  

So as you can see, the Residential School fiasco was only an extension of a long history of the Church’s complicity ” to the eradication of redolent paganism.”  In our contemporary midst, we have people of the Church following this historical malfeasance, assaulting the children, indoctrinating fear, feeding biblical propaganda, covering up all kinds of corruption and impropriety.

It is not and cannot be a source of comfort to a rational person. But people are too resigned to continue believing what was reassuring when we were ten years old.  Fear has consumed us.  We have become paralyzed, unable to think for ourselves.  We continue to be mesmerized by pseudo prophets, by a Mother Theresa, whose message of “poorness” and suffering as a ticket to heaven, or by Trump holding the bible in front of a church as a political prop.  You can’t get any faker than that.

Just now, as I write this, twelve US service members were killed in Afghanistan while in a humanitarian mission of getting US citizens and allies out of the country.  Suicide bombers by the ISIS-K ( Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the K faction ( Khorasan) is the more militant version of the old ISIS ), the old hand of religious intolerance, the sworn enemy of the Taliban ostensibly because the Taliban is not devout enough to Islam.  I will not go into the details of what the Taliban and ISIS have stood for- intolerant and puritanical, substandard in today’s worldview.

At their core, these are religious fanatics, extremists, and the ideologically flawed.  No other ideology harbours zealotry and extremism outside of religion.  The absolute creed and culture propagated by blind faith lend themselves to a modern time bomb. I cannot think of a better example of this than suicide bombing.  But this is just the contemporary version of a millennium of death and cruelty perpetrated by all people of faith against their perceived religious enemies.

We can go on and on with this seemingly intractable impact of religious zealotry, which is at the heart of thousand-year Israeli-Palestinian acrimony.  The estrangement and hatred between nations in the middle east and Africa originate from sectarian lunacy. The killings, kidnappings, persecution, and rape are hallmarks of power-hungry men ostensibly practicing their faith. Yet, as we in the west watch all the mayhem most recently in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we have a collective shrug and ask what else we can do differently?

SECULARISM, THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE

Yes, there is something we can do differently, one that is quietly beginning to take root. Of course, it will not change the Status Quo overnight, and you will never see the older generation change their stripes, particularly in theocratic nations and where religious traditions run deep.  But take a closer look at what’s happening in the west and the young people today.  Secularism is taking over the old worldview.

Major federal parties are reading the tea leaves and have concluded the unmistakable shift of Canadians to a secularist worldview.  It is said that the churches in Toronto are only filling up by recent Christian immigrants. But even this is going through severe pressure as the young people leave Church going to the old folks.  Ask a young catholic when he last went to confession.

To be more pragmatic on this issue, as I have been throughout, we ought to review religion in the present day.  It had its day, and it may have served humanity when it was the only source of comfort.  It did not matter that it was man’s invention and drive to subjugate our minds.    Putting all your eggs in one mythological basket only prolongs an ideology steep in falsehood and lore.  Myth and superstition had their heyday, but we can no longer allow a medieval mindset to proliferate.

 A hundred years ago, religion oversaw a  pandemic that killed over 50 million people.  Today, science is presiding to another pandemic that has so far killed less than 5 million.  Suffice to say that I am hedging my bet with people like Bezos, Gates, Branson, Musk, Dawkins, and countries of Northern Europe, happy, peaceful, content, and… atheist. So let the Pope, the Grand Ayatollah, and all the Theocracies of the world minister to their dwindling constituents. Even the Taliban 2.0 seems to be opening up to the realities of the present-day world.

THE WORLD IS CHANGING RAPIDLY

By this, I mean everything ( there was no Facebook yet on 9/11), and the pace is such that even futurists are not keeping up.  Take the rate of ice melt in the arctic; every year, they have had to revise the figures upwards.  The drought and flooding, while predicted, are catching us with our pants down. Forest fire into the Northwest was never supposed to be in the cards.

The speed by which computerization has changed our lives can only be described as breathtaking.  Consider Amazon.  From its humble start in a garage, Jeff Bezos ran a loser from 1994 ( selling books and delivering them by himself) until 2001 when it finally turned a profit ( 1 cent/share).  Today the company is valued at 1.3 trillion, and Bezos, the richest man globally with a net worth of nearly 200 billion. On the other hand, eighty-year-old Disney ( also started in a garage ) is only worth 320 billion.

These high-tech behemoths ( Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and  Apple ) are worth over eight trillion. ( the Philippines’ GDP is valued at 1 trillion ). They have transformed the way we shop, connect and interact. Moreover, they have spawned a near-total reconstruction of humanity; cognitive, emotional, and intellectual.  They have revolutionized our cultural,  political, and spiritual outlook. All these are mentally exhausting to the uninitiated.

INSTITUTIONAL BIAS

You only have to read some commentaries in any newspaper to find who their readers are. So tell me, who do you think Fr. Jerry Orbos ( “Moments,” Phil. Daily Inquirer ) is ministering to?  Mostly, the dead or those whose eyes, ears, and brains are no longer in synch.  Another Fil-Can paper, published here in TO, features a monthly torrent of 13th-century panorama that fails to connect with a progressive ethos.  When you hear Bloc Quebecois leader Ives-Francois Blanchet in the current federal campaign blasting religious ideology as regressive ( in the context of the Secularism Bill 21), you know that there is a very profound wind of change in the country and especially in Quebec, traditionally the most Catholic province in Canada. This is akin to demonizing Catholicism in the presence of the Pope.

Bible Study ( BS for short ), if you pay even a smidgeon of attention to what it preaches,  is the epitome of the fear-mongering mythology rampant before Galileo, Pasteur, and Darwin.  Further back, we can learn from Diagoras, Epicurus, and Lucretius, or if you are so celebrity inclined, you can read what Clooney, Pitt, and Jolie are saying about this endless source of so much ill will in the world today.

The ten commandments are nothing more than what our DNA has already given us. Even the earliest Homo Erectus know that killing and stealing is wrong.  Respecting our parents and not being adulterous are essential in good relationships.  The others have no relevance in bettering humanity. 

THE EXISTENTIAL CRISES OF OUR TIMES

I believe we are standing at a crossroads. Either we fearlessly tackle the obstacles to our progressive path or slide back to the world of our ancestors.  We must now look at religious rituals only as a cultural event and not a prescription for any nirvanal destiny.  We need our collective energies to fight the real threat to a prosperous, tolerant world of the future.  If anybody tells you that prayers and liturgical rituals can mollify the climate crisis and the Delta variants, they are lying, and any rational person knows it.  What it does is to soothe an old brain unable or unwilling to let go of this albatross that’s been a drag to our psychological well-being.  It is a very liberating feeling to know that there are other avenues for blessedness beyond the traditional. Unfortunately, this Bible-thumping, anti-science crowd is allowing the virus to mutate further.  The Delta variant (a renamed Indian variant ) resulted from the relentless religious pilgrimages in India, killing tens of thousands within India and now worldwide.

 The ongoing COVID crisis is but one of many requiring a re-allocation of a mindset shored by pseudo prophets, racist demagogues, conspiracy theorists, and political operatives with a self-serving agenda. We can shorten this (COVID ) crisis by following the science and lending our hand to those charities helping the most affected.  It may take a while, but these actions have the feeling of reassurance and solace we get elsewhere.   It is channelling all the mythological nonsense into a concrete intervention that could be life-changing to many. It is the secret of what I call compassionate atheism. Nobody can persuade me that kneeling in a Sunday service or Friday prayers helps humanity better than putting volunteer time in a food bank or visiting the sick. There is no shortage of charity and advocacy work. Have a purpose, a real one!

We need to involve ourselves in the pressing issues of the day.  Better still, it is high time for Filipinos to come out of the rabbit hole and exercise some control to protect the interests of Fil-Canadians.  Becoming more proactive against emerging anti-Asian sentiments, being an active participant in the socio-political life of the community are some of the ways we can contribute. 

It is heartbreaking to see continued political inbreeding and ongoing corruption in the homeland. A must-read from columnist Cielito Habito  (https://opinion.inquirer.net/144166/pathetic-laggard) calls us a  Fine, but who reads this? We may have an excellent hypercritical print media, but sadly, it is not comparable with the broadcast counterpart ( which would probably have a larger following ). We don’t hear enough from the local business, academic, and political analysts the way CNN does.

My, my, if I were Cardinal Tagle, I would resign my cardinalship, run for public office, and put in practice all that he has been preaching.  Sooner or later, he will find that absolutist positions are the enemies of progress. Mr. Tagle, deal with something tangible for a change. All for the greater good!  Will we ever see a visionary like Lee Kuan Yew, the strength of characters of a  Nelson Mandela, or a Margaret Thatcher.   There is not a sinew nor muscle in our tired leadership.  As my wife would say: “all porms” ( all grandstanding ).  Goodness freaking gracious, does anybody know where we are going? 

In my 75th year, there is a lot to reflect on, but more importantly, new opportunities to make a positive difference.  How about you?  What are you waiting for?

edwingdeleon@gmail.com