A CASE CAN BE MADE against certain private religious schools — namely the biggest, most lucrative and most prestigious ones — for exercising a little-noticed form of mental child abuse. Both in the manner and content of instruction, I assert that early childhood education by organized Religions is a form of brainwashing against helpless children long before they reach the Age of Reason. In Catholic catechism classes for example, certain outrageous absurdities are solemnly trotted out as Infallible Truth. The religion textbooks in gilded places such as Ateneo de Manila or De La Salle or Marian Imaculada Schools, the Iglesia ni Cristo and Adventist schools, Muslim madrassahs, Hindu temples, etc, are full of malicious fairy tales and insipid and vapid “dogmas” such as creationist myths, fantastical gods and goddesses and impossible histories of the earth, universe and man. But are these considered “errors in textbooks”? Oh no. It’s Freedom of Religion that has inexorably led to adults worshipping stone-n-wood idols and worshipping at the beck and bell of men in funny hats and silly costumes. This mental illness of epidemic proportions affects most Filipinos, whether they labor as GROs and trike drivers, jueteng or drug lords or as newspaper publishers, extortionists and innuendo-mongers.
What does more damage, I wonder, to the Filipino youth: the absurd but seriously made claims in religion and catechism classes, or some erroneous and badly written science textbooks?
Yet we are all asked to respect and reverence this system of mental child abuse in the name of freedom of religion. In this post I ask only that we, the People, recognize the limits of religious freedom in private and public schools and strictly impose the separation of Church and State, of Morality and Theology in the Constitution. For real. For the future. For the Children.
And please see the recent marvelous discussion on secularism hosted by Benj.
Popularity: 1% [?]
You have the power of choice. You choose what
you believe. If your priest or imam tells you
to whack other’s people skull because it is
what the holy books say.
Then, you are a blind believer. You let your
mind be placed on the control of other peeple.
interesting if you consider this message board as an equivalent of what’s really happening out there.
if this thread lasts let’s say a thousand years, whose side will remain, whose will convert others, whose side will morph, etc… or will it still be exactly how it is this morning?
…and on that thousandth morning. of what posts/replies remain… does it prove anything?
carry on brothers and sisters:-)
“the ‘Bencardian Principle’ that Faith is unreachable with Reason…djb @2:37pm
there you go again, jorge, misrepresenting my position by slanting it, make a strawman deduction out of said distortion, then come up with some verbose pomposity like “ululation” and howl with fiendish laughter.
for everyone else’s edification, here’s what i said in djb’s post ” Santo Nino de Bernas, Conyo”: (speaking of faith in God vis a vis human reason) : “…but faith, without an unimpaired reason, is not possible and that’s why there can be no “spaghetti monster” in reality”. bencard @2:22pm, 1/21/09.
of course, faith in GOD is not reachable by HUMAN reason, even an “unimpaired” one. it’s either you believe or you don’t. once a “religion” or faith starts questioning or demanding for empirical evidence, it ceases to be religion or faith. it becomes “science”, djb’s “god” (even though he claims to be an atheist).
@Monsoon on February 5th, 2009 2:09 am
hahaha.. yup. but at least DJB has abandoned his first conjecture, which is good, coz frankly he’s got no proof.
so we’re back to proving (or not) God’s existence…
Bencard,
The hardest thing about you is you won’t even let people agree with you. But that’s okay. Sometimes the hardest thing to see is what’s right in front of your nose.
Inidoro,
You seem to have left out the premise of the quote. IF Democracy is to be regarded in any manner as being “theistic” then how indeed can it be “neutral” towards other, contradictory theisms? By nature theisms don’t agree with one another on the most essential of points.
I have only asserted that Democracy has to be closer to atheism than theism if it has any chance of being neutral towards ALL theisms, not just the majority’s particular Faith.
Perhaps an argument could be made that neutrality can also be achieved if Democracy is officially “agnostic”–I might accept that — but it is simply oxymoronic to claim the existence of a “theistic Democracy” — which really amounts to a theocracy!
Neutrality towards all religions demands a godless basis for the kind of morality the Constitution expects of its citizens, otherwise it will “respect an establishment of religion.”
That basis is the preternatural secular humanism of Religion Without Theology. Without gods or goddesses. Atheistic.
Inidoro,
From the 1987 Bill of Rights:
You ask…
Not all religions are intolerant of other religions, but they cannot agree on key theological points–that is why they are different religions.
However, by definition, Atheism has no “theology” so it rejects or contradicts ALL religions that worship supernatural deities.
However, what the Constitution demands is that Democracy as a particularly civilized form of Atheism, must forever tolerate the free exercise of ALL religions, without discrimination or preference.
Democracy can comply with this Constitutional demand for neutrality and tolerance towards all creeds by ditching any particular theological basis for its own moralistic demands.
Otherwise it becomes a form of intellectual dishonesty. (“We actually believe in the Father Son and Holy Ghost, but we will let you call Him Allah.”) For as soon as we think the Constitution gets its morality from Christianity, we have peed on religious freedom and imposed a religious test on the exercise of civil and political rights!
DJB,
Very eloquent and reasoned-out arguments, indeed. But won’t you even pause a while and consider that while man, although constantly thristing for knowledge, would wish some rest purely of spirituality (or as Madonna mentioned, unexplained vagueness).
Inodoro stated it: pure science could give you a headache. And nobody wants that.
If things were so straightforward, man could not have invented the ancient and still practical practices of Zen, yoga, meditation, and the rest. Don’t even mention that those ancient philosophers were not thinkers. They thought a lot about reason: logic, mathematics, science, and physics.
I believe than Man was meant for Higher Knowledge than Pure Science. Think about it.
monsoon,
Consider the provision, “No religious test shall be required for the exercise of civil and political rights.”
This is a powerful statement about what the Constitution considers to be moral behavior (“the exercise of civil and political rights”).
That no “religious test” is required for acceptable moral behavior to be achieved clearly makes the foundation of morality under the Constitution something very different from “religion” or “God.” — even when the individual citizen is doing or not doing something out of a religious motivation!
The State itself is forced to judge things on a completely different basis that may be a little hard to describe succinctly, except to say it is not allowed to be “religion” or “God”.
Perhaps it is a primordial sense of the good that existed in men even before organized religion. (I cannot believe Jews only became a moral people when they started getting circumcized!).
Democracy is not theistic. The plain words and sense of the Constitution proclaim this.
phil manila,
Sadly, it is true. Ignorance is bliss. But Madonna’s “unexplained vagueness” does not describe Religions, since they claim to have absolute and ultimate truths already engraved in their ancient and dusty books. It is in fact atheists and scientists who glory in the unexplained, but with humility and intelligence, not vagueness or the self-certain conceits of Religious Dogma. We are prepared to be proven wrong. They claim to be infallibly correct and the Secrets of the Universe already revealed to them.
Still, Madonna is just another heretic and apostate, from what I have read. She agrees more with science than she realizes. It’s unavoidable nowadays to be immersed in the memes of science, unless you are a recluse and a monk. Corruption by science is inevitable since the medium is the message.
I find this paradox in many so called believers. They hedge on Religion so much that those Religions would not recognize them as devout, even if they would not revoke memberships.
To them religion is just an anarchy of personal opinion and some vague declaration of a belief in God is thought to pass for a religious attitude….until a one ton bomb blows up somewhere in the name of religion, or someone is kidnapped and held for ransom. Or shot in the back for capital apostasy… then one sees the true destructive power of religion in the long era of its slow but sure decline.
now, now, jorge, the guy who detonated the bomb, or shot someone in the back, was the criminal, not the “religion” that motivated him. if joe blows up his neighbor because he (joe) believes it will please maria, his sweetheart, you wouldn’t blame maria for the crime, would you? you are better than all these illogical “logic”, i think.
“If things were so straightforward, man could not have invented the ancient and still practical practices of Zen, yoga, meditation, and the rest. Don’t even mention that those ancient philosophers were not thinkers. They thought a lot about reason: logic, mathematics, science, and physics.”
The above statement is so hilarious. Meditation is all about learning not to think of the superficial consciousness around us as science has proved that it is all simply an illusion. Why does it seem that the earth is flat?
It is about tapping into our subconscious mind.
The maths invented by man parallels infinity. The observance of counting created decimals and fractions that can be extended without end.
DJB,
primordial sense of the good or of survival?
i was watching this tv show called “living with the kombai tribe.” the kombai are from papua new guinea. they are a simple, superstitious, and very old people.
then i read a book (just kidding i also watched it on tv) about the sumerian civilization. a grand people with many great achievements definitely world-class at any time. invention of the wheel and arithmetic are some of the things that some experts attribute to them. the term ziggurat is even sumerian.
the kombai show was reality television, the one where the tv crew blends in with the subject (often using dizzying handheld videocams). the subject being the living/breathing kombai people.
the show about sumeria was a documentary. the sumerians were depicted in pictures and dug-up archaeological artifacts.
Come, come Bencard. These last few comments have really been directed at you.
What now do you think of Separation of Church and State and its ultimate, practical meaning for morality in the Constitution?
If you had to choose an adjective to describe the attitude toward Religion demanded of the State by the Constitution, which would it be closer to? Atheistic or Theistic? (Since these are polar opposites you can hardly say none of the above, but you may propose alternatives if you like…)
It’s just an interesting Constitutional question: What does Freedom of Religion in the Bill of Rights mean for the foundation of Morality in the Constitution itself? What happens to Theology and its relationship to Morality as a result of the Separation of Church and State?
The inescapable answer is that Democracy literally and figuratively untethers Morality from Theology (all theologies) and anchors it instead on the TEXT of the Constitution itself, the Word of the People Incarnate, their Free Will distilled in the poetry inspired by 1776 and 1896 and largely intact though it was manhandled by Damaso and his Men in 1986.
Luckily, they didn’t get it either about the Principle of Religious Freedom!
“Neutrality towards all religions demands a godless basis for the kind of morality the Constitution expects of its citizens, otherwise it will “respect an establishment of religion.” – DJB
So what is now the basis of this “kind of morality” that the Constitution expects of its citizens? what is the foundation of this morality that the constitution abides by when it is outside of those religions of its citizens? human rationality? Huh!
Is your thesis here not self-contradictory? You want a godless – so neutral – constitution that does not recognize, let alone abhors in itself the existence of God, yet recognizes the same i.e. existence of God in its citizens.
By that, or by your form of logic, that godless constitution of yours recognizes the same i.e. existence of God in the real sense.
“Why which ‘God’ is it are you thinking about when you read that passage?”—DJB 12:10 AM
Reply: The “God” that the other Constitutional provision I also cited (Sec. 3, Art. XIV) refers to, which is, “of the religion to which the children or wards belong.”
There is this wall that necessarily separates the Church and the State, since the Church deals with the “SUPER…Natural,” the State, with just the “Natural,” whose “God” of “the religion to which the children or wards belong,” is, to them, merely the creator of.
oh yeah, domingo? Well then what about the majority of parents who do not agree to have their children subjected to religious instruction? Which God are you talking about underpins the moral foundations of their exercise of civil and political rights.
You are hanging on mere rhetorical flourishes in the Constitution, where God is mentioned, there is no specific God. There cannot be. In that sense, no religion can accept such a God, for it is not their God.
How can you deny that there is not a whisp of theology in the moral demands of the Constitution when it says so explicitly:
“No religious test shall be required for the exercise of civil and political rights. ”
The Constitution’s Morality does not depend on any God! How can it? It is explicitly secular and cannot favor any God.
The “God” that is there mentioned is merely code for the Good we believe is in human beings.
Danilo,
I’m sure you want Allah to be the God of the Constitution, the Catholics their Three-In-One God, the Jews Yahweh, and maybe the masa, Erap.
Well you both can all jump in the Holy Water, it ain’t so. It is the Free Will of the People Incarnated in the text of the Constitution. That is the foundation of constitutional morality.
We, the People!
IF Democracy is to be regarded in any manner as being “theistic” then how indeed can it be “neutral” towards other, contradictory theisms? By nature theisms don’t agree with one another on the most essential of points.
Im surprised this question is being asked at all. Again we have to go back to the Creed. It is both theistic and neutral. And no, DJB, the Founding Fathers werent all Deists; they were an entire rainbow of religious beliefs. Franklin and Jefferson were. Jefferson himself wasnt a Deist in the same sense Voltaire was, that is he didnt believe God went on vacation after establishing his laws. When he was having a crisis of conscience due to his compromise with slavery, he wrote, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” His justice cannot sleep forever? That isnt Deism in the strictest sense. I leave you with Jefferson’s bill on Religious Freedom:
So yes, democracy can be theistic and neutral. I thought you wouldnt tinker with history anymore, DJB. Move on. You have bigger fish to fry.
Jeg,
I think it is you “tinkering with History”. I have said the Constitution ought to be read as poetry. By this I mean that the TEXT of the Constitution is itself the Word of the People’s Free Will. It stands alone, in a rhetorical sense, compleat and self-contained. History is relevant, but once the text had been written and ratified, it is largely independent of that history for the purposes of the future. The principles must be in the text already. That is how I am viewing the Constitution, specifically its attitude towards Religion for the purpose of establishing civic morality.
Here it is crystal clear: there is no theology at the foundation of Constitutional Morality that is needed to justify it.
We, the People, simply decree that thou shalt and thou shalt not in such and such circumstances. We define Morality without any particular God or Religion. What else can Separation mean?
Can ‘democracy’ be theistic and neutral? Yes, we have established that. It is not necessary for it to be atheistic, only to be neutral. So closed topic, yes? Next.
*WE* define morality? By what right? By what possible warrant do we have to define what is moral and what is not? Again absent the giver of those universal morals, whom the Founders called Nature’s God, we only have Nature itself, and Science the tool for studying nature. And what does that Science tell us? That men are NOT created equal; that to the fittest belong all rights. Ubermensch over untermensch. We the People is a myth according to Science.
Perhaps, we differ in approach against the power of Damaso, DJB. I want to change him; you want to kill him. But he won’t die. He’s been here longer than the both of us. I think I have the better approach.
“The ‘God’ that is there mentioned is merely code for the Good we believe is in human beings.”– DJB 10:30 AM
To repeat the specific constitutional text in the Preamble you are referring to–“imploring the aid of Almighty God.”
So, the 1987 Constitution recognizes, after all, such a thing as the “Almighty God” of any religion (and not just that of the Catholic), which you now define as one representing the “code for the Good we believe is in human beings.”
Is this “code for the Good” not a religion by itself already?
@DJB:
“The problem with Mindanao are these Two Religions”
I thought the problems in Mindanao had to to with LAND, not religion.
Not just for the Moros, btw, but for all the other (animist) ethnic peoples.
“We, the People, simply decree that thou shalt and thou shalt not in such and such circumstances. We define Morality without any particular God or Religion.”
But such moral/ethical assumptions must have a basis behind. Otherwise, having no foundation at all, they can not stand alone nor can withstand the raging tide of time as universal.
So, I am asking again DJB, (as I am already tired of asking what is your proof of your Inexistence of God theory, never mind which god’s name is, which you always dodge)what is the basis or foundation of this “thou shalt, thou shalt not…” of yours here?
Please tell me and I shall keep my silence afterward – even if you’ll say the basis of this morality of yours is Physics!
danilo,
you ask the right question…it will be the central concern of my next post! What is the basis of Morality in a democracy? Thanks for that?
it will be the central concern of my next post! What is the basis of Morality in a democracy?
That means my comments to that future post will be the same as the ones in this one. Haha. What a great time-saver. Seriously, you have expounded on your alleged basis in the comments section already. Is this absolutely necessary? What about Padre Damaso and the price of rice in Tuguegarao? ;)
DJB,
Ambiguity is different from vagueness. I said science cannot tolerate ambiguity, which is just as well because the nature of science is to have neat concepts — constructs for reality. The vision of reality of religion/arts is “complete” — not that it captures all aspects of reality — but it offers a vision. Science can never be complete in its vision — it is always tentative.
Now, when does a religion or any ideology for that matter become absolute and infallible as you assert? It when human beings who believe in them turn to dogmas or become raging dogmatists.
All ideas or religions have in their center of influence the tendency to become dogmatic or infallible. But the mainstream modern society has already learned that what’s dangerous is dogma – not religion or ideas per se. Dogmas are strewn everywhere in our conscious universe, forever festering in their little hells — and taking unaware human beings in their twisted logic.
Madonna,
If you think about dogma as “festering in their little hells taking human beings unaware in their twisted logic” — then there is definitely hope for you, since you are already a “damned heretic.” [which is really a compliment, I hope you know.]
But science revels in ambiguity too, because the essence of the scientific method is to try and falsify the reigning hypothesis. Of course whatever does not disprove the latter makes it stronger. But if there is a better hypothesis, yes, science does not hesitate to change its “current view”.
As for vision, I assure you, Scientists are great visionaries. They are ambitious big thinkers and are always in a hurry, in a tizzy, in a froth. For they know their time is strictly limited, and therefore, most precious indeed! There is no time to waste on false visions, which only lead to false hopes.
Only the Truth can console us, if we have the Courage to face it.
Naks, so let me say thank you for the heretic label. Ain’t you sounding like Padre Damaso or those fanatical born-again Christians who insist that you should accept Jesus as your Saviour or else you will go to hell, hehe? (“There is definitely hope for you”.)
You didn’t understand what I was trying to point out. Ambiguity, meaning here that in a piece of information can be taken into different meanings — the turf of artistic disciplines (music, fine arts, literature)is not taken up by science as a discipline because it relies on concepts — scientists cannot possibly establish findings if they are at least in agreement on the definition of concepts being used for a particular study or experiment.
Say, when Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry, Starry Night he did not explain its meaning, he just allowed or given us a vision of reality. Whereas, a scientist would explain the make-up, the distance of stars, how they came to be, etc. I am thankful for both.
Re: vision. I used it in a way that any singular piece of art/religion (meaning a set of beliefs) is complete when it provides a vision of reality. Note here — you diverged on the using the vision thing with regards to artistic disciples versus scientific disciples (instead you referred to the “vision of scientists”).
Seriously, DJB — I understand what you’re trying to drive at or advocating against — just please focus on your real enemy. A lot of us are with you on this.
The Iglesia Ni Cristo-owned school (New Era University) doesn’t include Theology in its curriculum. From grade school to college.