Duterte: Show me proof that God exists and I’ll resign
MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday vowed to immediately resign if Christians can prove that their God exists.
“If there is anyone of you there, the noisy ones, who would say that you have been to heaven, talked to God, saw him personally, and that He exists, the God that is yours, and if He does is true, I will step down the presidency tonight,” Duterte said in a freestyle speech.
"I just need one witness who will say, ‘Mayor, those fools at the Church ordered me to go to heaven and talk to God. God really exists. We have a picture together and I brought a selfie,'" he added in Filipino.
He then hit the members of the Catholic clergy for asking for donations from churchgoers.
“If you are really helping people, why do you ask money from them?” he said.
Duterte has sparked public outrage in the predominantly Catholic Philippines after he called the Christians’ God a “stupid son of a bitch” for creating Adam and Eve only to allow their purity to be destroyed by temptation.
In the same speech on Friday, Duterte questioned anew the Church’s concept of original sin, which he said taints people “even if you are just a seminal thing inside the balls of your father.”
“So where is the logic of God there? You create a perfect then you spoil it through the snake and an apple. And you give us the sin that we never even agreed to commit and that is the original sin,” he said.
But the firebrand leader maintained that he is not an atheist, adding that he believes “there’s a universal mind somewhere which controls the universe.”
The hugely popular Duterte and the Church, which has a significant political and social clout in the Philippines, have repeatedly locked horns amid mounting death toll in the government’s bloody war on drugs.
To ease the tensions sparked by his controversial remarks about God, Duterte has agreed to meet with Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines president and Davao Archbishop Romulo Valles on Monday at Malacañang.
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