GRPundit

The Catholic Church and many organised religions in the Philippines continue to be very powerful, influential, and profitable institutions. And it is in their interests to maintain the status quo and the dismal state of enlightenment of the source of their power -- the average Filipino. Because many Filipinos continue to be beholden to Church dogma, politicians who, as in most democracies, are elected by popular vote, will continue to pander to and, worse, defer to the influence of the Catholic Church. It is an interlocked matrix of tradition that Filipinos are imprisoned within. I'm not an expert in world history but if I recall right, enlightenment and a re-surgence of critical discourse that started in ancient Greece (which was lost to the Arabs during the Dark Ages) somehow began to bubble up from the grassroots in Europe sometime in the 15th Century. Still it took centuries before the scientific method triumphed over religious primitivism in European governance. Again, consid...

Acclaimed scientist Leonard Mlodinow who co-authored A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking, offers a succinct and elegant rebuttal to the claims of celebrity spiritualist Deepak Chopra who argues that our universe possesses an encompassing consciousness that governs its evolution... The human animal evolved to have the capacity for both good and evil, and it does plenty of both, but there is no hidden hand of universal purpose or consciousness behind what we do, only our own consciousness, our own purpose. Each of us chooses to love or hate; we give and we take; we leave our own imprint on our family, our friends, and society. We don't need an eternal and conscious universe to give our lives meaning. Our lives are as meaningful as we make them. The above is an excerpt from the book War of the Worldviews where in a series of essays, Chopra and Mlodinow articulate their arguments on various topics relevant to the on-going debate between supernaturalism and science.

The Philippines recently received yet another "Number One in the World" distinction after the unveiling of what is purported to be the world's biggest tablets depicting the Ten Commandments. The building-sized carving of the Jewish deity's charter that was handed down to Moses in Mount Sinai back in the days of, well, biblical events has been recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest of its kind . Indeed, the scale of this worldly representation of the Word of the Lord fits the society that hosts it. The gigantic size of this now noted Filipino rendering of the Ten Commandments for me is symbolic of the monumental challenge of getting Filipinos to observe the most basic of codes articulating ethical behaviour. The words of Congressman Bernardo Vergara who represents Baguio City which hosts this edifice summarises where the thinkining underpinning this whole enterprise had gone so wrong... "This beautiful and divine edifice will serve to drive away the e...