BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 03
Jan 19, 2005

 
 
 social criticism by
 Vicente Soria de Veyra

Table of
Contents


ARCHIVE:
2004
2005



Literary website:
Warphoto

Christianity, The Anti-Christ Religion?

SOME OF MY friends say the best comfort in life is to be derived from religion, and they were of course mostly referring to the religion that worshipped Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

I beg to disagree while agreeing. True, Christianity has allowed us the comfort of the concept God that offers psychological and material well-being for the price of a mere prayer. At the outset, I’d have nothing against such a concept, and even if I had I would still end up praying at night before I lay me down to sleep. A religious authority of a friend also said he believes God already knows what one wants before one even prays for it, but he didn’t say if I should still pray. Does he believe that God is a jealous or testing God that demands praying and faith? Well, the faith itself – or so the tracts of the New Testament as interpreted and underlined by preachers testify – seems to teach us so.

I regard myself as a Christian in more ways than one, albeit I might have a different interpretation (from others') of what Jesus of Nazareth (as the revolutionary theologian of his time and location) said in regards to his being a son of Man. I would tend to believe that he meant that he, a man instead of a god, was a son of Man. I believe he meant to explain we are all children of God, perhaps implying that the ancient Jewish concept of a Messiah might be flawed and mythological and hierarchical. Christ as an anti-myths hero preferred practical life virtues over church ceremonies. In the end, Christ seemed to have preferred a rock as his church for the people over the corrupted church of the priestly hierarchy.

Interpreted this way, then, one might say that Christ ultimately failed, seeing the present with his supposed followers going in the same paths the Jewish of his time treaded. These followers of the present have a corollary concept for that failure, however. The phrase used is “Second Coming”, a kind of mythological device perhaps to dismiss the failure qua failure, explaining this coming as a sort of final exams and judgment day for those who failed to pay their tithes or agreed to believe that God has white hair and is male and has divine corporate representatives in the bishops.

The movie The Name of the Rose and the more popular Stigmata may have amply represented the voice that reiterates a supposedly more real Christian direction, one departing from the religion of churches to the mass-based religion of peoples’ hearts and minds. But nothing can be ample. For the majority will always be suckers for the more facile mythology that gives comfort to the self over the difficult set of virtues that gives comfort to the other. It is by this axiom that the ambitious always find a tool in religion for either vanquishing or pacifying a people.

Another concept flaunted by the so-called religious Christian is the idea of an “anti-Christ”. This is an extension of the Satan fallen-god persona concept. In practice, the targets of that politico-religious tag are usually such pronouncements as this essay. Yet, consider this: if Christ failed and ultimately created a following practicing the very things he hated about the Jews’ faith and hierarchy during his time, then we might be able to say that Christ himself would be labeled an anti-Christ were he “alive” today. The tag "anti-Christ" habitually also targets scientists, intellectuals, people who “intellectualize” over faith. So-called intellectualizing has always been the enemy of political hierarchies, including religious hierarchies. Christ himself was a theologian, therefore an intellectual.

Communists hate intellectuals other than their own textbook intellectuals. Government officials hate academic intellectuals who they still like to call communists or merely "kulang sa pansin". Christian dogmatists hate people who will question such things as the empty effects of the Catholic Mass on the religious.

This hatred is what I would deem the mother of real anti-Christs. When a certain institution or hierarchy would rather that a people put blind faith over and above the mechanics of everyday virtue, it’s the height of being anti-Christ. For I believe, as a Christian, that Christ would teach otherwise. When a religious institution would rather place its focus on the salvation or curing or happiness of the self over and above the virtues of understanding, compassion, charity, forgiveness, and populism, that would be the other high hill of being anti-Christ. It is obvious around us. Each Sunday, the people we see in church would be the very same people who would engage in calumny and envy only a few minutes after mass. And if 90% of the people who go to mass each Sunday are like this, it should be no wonder that we have a nation and government virtually devoid of real and full compassion.

A BOOK TITLED The Missing Years conjectured (with evidences of possibility) that Jesus of Nazareth traveled to Asia to learn from Buddhist monks.

I don’t see any fearful contradiction in the direction. In fact, my immersion in Taoist philosophy has enhanced instead of shattered my admiration of Jesus’ heroism. Unless you’re a guardian of a religious corporation that wouldn’t enjoy the idea of mergers, then reading Taoist and Buddhist philosophy along with Christ’s teachings won’t lead to contradictions, excepting in matters of mythology via geo-personas.

My interpretation of the New Testament is this. Christ was a revolutionary against dogma that destroyed peoples’ capacity to love and seek peace. Dogma leads to hatred, to stonings, to stake-burnings, to wars. But Christ ran short of exploiting the masses-unfriendly Taoist philosophical idea that deemed the simplification of God (or The Way) as the greatest sin that man could commit (against himself). Christ was still a mysticist and did not in fact reject his being a Jew. Yet by deriving from the mystical some inspiration for love and peace-making, he invented the basics of Christianity that would in our age be forgotten by self-serving prayer rallies, prayer meetings, and praying mantises in Congress and on TV.

But this essay does not intend to preach the burning of churches. Merely that churches put more of themselves in the teaching of Christ’s teachings other than those regarding faith. Faith has been politicized, and it is only the teaching of virtue, compassion, forgiveness, understanding, and charity that will bring Christ back to us and get rid of the anti-Christ within our own hearts and neighborhoods and nation.

Faith need not be preached. The greatest preachers of faith are astronomers like Galileo and scientists the Church has been wont to make enemies of. Faith is preached without words; it is better preached with a mere awesome view of the different kinds of black holes in space that – according to the physicist Stephen Hawking – may actually constitute a large part of the universe, most of them being invisible outside of the galaxies of visible matter, all of these holes warping (nay, eating) time and compressing matters and energies of the universe into tiny black balls that may actually be wormholes into other universes. In the journey to the other universe, the time and matter laws of the present universe are consumed and shattered, perhaps transformed too into the time and matter laws of the universe beyond. Hawking was theorizing about the universe as part of a system of universes that’s kind of like a sponge with its own wormholes.

Now, note that the system of universes that Hawking was theorizing about does not say anything about God’s non-existence. It merely challenges dogmas of textbook science through the things he is able to witness as a scientist and intellectual. Scientists are not atheists. They neither believe nor disbelieve in God. Or rather, they can’t believe in the Gods of dogmas. They’d rather not simplify God at all. It’s the highest respect for God, I suppose, which can lead us to the religion of thinking.

artist's depiction of a spinning black hole

And what is thinking but a compassion for the beauty and rage and dark secrets of God’s incredible creation, a compassion for the laws of nature that manifests God? It is sad that evil is usually represented in movies by scientific figures. Most of the evil actually derives from the extras, they who appear on the sidewalks of our lives with nothing more than a prayer for themselves and an ill judgment for another.

Simple everyday ill judgments send people to their crosses.

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Posted 01/19/05. Send comments to: bananacue_republic@yahoo.com

"Faith is preached without words; it is better preached with a mere awesome view of the different kinds of black holes in space that – according to the physicist Stephen Hawking – may actually constitute a large part of the universe, most of them being invisible outside of the galaxies of visible matter, all of these holes warping (nay, eating) time and compressing matters and energies of the universe into tiny black balls that may actually be wormholes into other universes."