Still, imagine

There were a couple of interesting letters in this paper over the weekend.

One was from Benjamin Mallorca Jr. who said he felt moved by my column on the 9-year-old Japanese kid who gave to others though he himself had lost everything. The kid had lost all his family to the tsunami, but after being given rations by a cop as he queued up at a food line, he brought the rations to the distributing officer so others could partake of them.

Mallorca agreed with me that “the Japanese boy and Vietnamese cop are not Christians, yet as the story showed us, they had more Christian charity than we do, and they demonstrated a capacity for self-sacrifice more than we Filipinos do.”

“How soon will we Filipinos, who are mostly Christians, transform our society into one that can produce a generation of Filipinos with values like those of the 9-year-old Japanese orphan? When can we produce a generation of Filipinos who ‘understand the concept of self-sacrifice for the greater good’? Or will we just remain as we are now, mired in the culture of corruption, where selfishness and greed are (rife)?”

The other letter was from Reginald Tamayo, which runs along the same lines. “I once listened to a homily of a priest-friend who said it is the degenerating Filipino culture that is the culprit behind our present difficulties. I agree: a malignancy afflicts our culture. Government anomalies no longer scandalize us. Corruption and immorality no longer outrage us. We have become numb to heinous crimes. We are no longer incensed by the arrogance of the powers-that-be. We no longer cringe in the face of brazen dishonesty, blatant lying and lawlessness.

“It’s as if we’re back under the yoke of the colonizers… Our forebears fell into apathy and low self-esteem, and they developed a willingness to be exploited and abused. We manifest these attitudes in similar fashion these days.”

Tamayo goes on to call on us to revive bayanihan, pakikisama, and pakikipagkapwa-tao so “we can bring back our country to its old glory.”

These are thoughtful letters and reflect an ache that is widespread among, well, the thoughtful. And again it compels us to ask if religion—or at least the kind of religion we’ve known, which, courtesy of the friars, is not altogether removed from superstition—is not a factor, and a huge one, in the culture of backwardness blighting the country.

I remember in this respect an Australian (whose name escapes me now)  who incensed a lot of people here a couple of decades ago by writing letters and articles blaming Catholicism, or our brand of it, for pretty nearly every ill in this country. It was the one thing that stood in the path of science and reason, he said, things that have long held sway in the civilized world. If he had to name one factor that thoroughly screwed up the Filipino, he said, it was that.

From the other end, Tony Meloto, the founder of Gawad Kalinga, notes the same thing but finds it totally unacceptable. We are the one predominantly Catholic country in Asia, he says, but we are also the one country that has fallen far behind, home to a teeming poor and even more teeming hopelessness. He believes that that should not be the case. He believes the opposite should be so, that the power of the Catholic faith lies especially in being given to tending to the poor—Christ was so, and did—and can be employed magnificently toward that end. He at least walks the talk.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. The problem is not religion, or even the Catholic faith per se, it is the kind of religion or Catholic faith we have. True enough, as Tamayo says, we never seemed to have shirked off the colonial yoke, and a good deal of the reason for that lies in the mental yoke the friars bequeathed to us, a set of beliefs that conduces dysfunctional behavior.

At the very least it encourages self-centeredness. You do only as much as is necessary to save yourself, or your soul from perdition. In fact you can buy a berth in heaven by accumulating indulgences the way you accumulate money in the bank. Such as by donating to the Church, which many landlords fearing for their souls did on their deathbeds in Spanish times. Contrast that with what the 9-year-old Japanese boy did, which was to share what little he had, or what virtually nothing was left to him, for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do, for no other reason than that it was the only thing he knew how to do. It had nothing to do with saving his soul, it had nothing to do with feeling big-hearted, it had nothing to do with, well, being Christian.

At the very most, it is a system of beliefs given to form over substance, to ritual over essence. Why worry about corruption? All you have to do is hear Mass and receive the sacraments, preferably before dying, and you’re good. You can spend the rest of your days, lying, cheating and stealing, or even murdering. I bet GMA considers herself a very good Catholic.

The opposition to the RH bill is a variation on that theme. The people who do so feel a lot more fervor for the “unborn children” (who must number in the trillions if you include concupiscent youth jerking off) than for the born ones, the ones who forage in the mountains of trash or sleep the effects of cough syrup in the sidewalks of the city. They would rather defend the mythical existence of the “unborn children” than the existence of the very ones who have neither the life of the body nor the life of the soul, neither the life of the heart nor the life of the mind, whose existence is slow-motion suicide, if not homicide. What is this but form over substance? What is this but ritual over reality? What is this but saying, “I love humanity—it’s people I hate”?

Still, imagine.