Got delusion?
Is God Dead?” read the coverline of one of Time magazine’s most controversial and iconic covers. This was 1966: sex (via the Pill) had just been invented, the counter-culture movement was gaining ground and fast, and pop was in full swing from London to Haight, Ashbury in San Francisco. (That same year, Anton LaVey and his circle would form the Church of Satan, which did not advocate the belief in a literal devil, but whose presence, ironically, just added to the belief in one.) But the anti-establishment sentiment of the times hit the right apocalyptic note: the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the Vietnam war, Nixon, the Weather Underground, Charles Manson… Even in the main article of that Time issue, several theologians state the case for the His demise: “We must recognize that the death of God is a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence,” said Thomas J. J. Altizer, an associate professor of religion at Atlanta’s Emory University, a Methodist school in the piece. His colleagues such as Paul van Buren, an Episcopal minister and associate professor of religion at Temple, states in the same story that “any talk of God — including the prospect of his reappearance — is philosophically meaningless.” They were called the “Godless Christian Thinkers” and they didn’t think it was such a contradiction as another one of them, William Hamilton, wrote in his book: “If Jesus can wonder about being forsaken by God, are we to be blamed if we wonder?”
But in the Philippines, we’ve taken the line that we’re more godforsaken than godless. We’re quite far from being a secular society, but as even the recent floods have shown we’ve begun to exempt God in most talk of the disaster and rightfully placed the blame on the government — an all too human institution that was brought to its knees by the calamity (perhaps to pray for the rain to stop?) This was far from the thinking during the flood of 1972 where even the mayor of Manila blamed the non-stop pour from the skies as divine retribution for the theft of the Sto. Niño statue from the Quiapo church. Teodoro M. Locsin rightly called out the farce in The Philippines Free Press, writing, “It had been raining like hell for days before so that only a screwy logic could lead one to the conclusion that the floods came because the Sto. Niño statue had been stolen and God was sore.” Who needed to blame God when the truth was written all over National Disaster Council head Gilbert Teodoro’s face? Or who actually thinks that it was in the name of Allah that was at work while that backhoe in Ampatuan was doing its grisly labors?
True, this may be a sign that belief in God has waned or at least its practice has come to disuse in this Catholic country of ours. But as the devotion of thousands to the Black Nazarene has proven it hasn’t disappeared. Nor will it ever. If there’s one thing our evangelical atheists or secular humanists can’t seem to tolerate or understand is that religion is inherently part of being human. They can’t certainly deny that; and the bulk of history across world cultures supports this. If anything, their belief in science and progress through reason is as faith-based as the apocalyptic writings of St. Paul; and is contrary to Darwin’s writings as the theory of Intelligent Design, in the sense that they don’t seem to accept man as not being separate from the other animals. In the Philippines, it’s especially curious since despite our Christianity we seem to accept this more readily than Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Maybe living in the third world does that to you. Or maybe watching a Brillante Mendoza film does go a long way to reinforce that creeping feeling that we’re no different from the stray dogs that litter our streets and occasionally eat. Perhaps that’s why we pray more.
Dead or not, no one is answering back. But just because you don’t feel it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
