Here's a youtube rant

It's Pat Condell on misogyny in Islam, and how some people dismiss it because it's their 'culture'. (I also can't understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist, not only in countries with extreme policies. When I talked to people here at home and tried to explain victim-blaming, I cringed when they said 'It's always the girl's fault'. We were talking about showbiz news and celebrity annulments!)

Girls have had enough of this. It's time to teach the rapists not to rape in the first place.

Other stuff: Last week (Sept. 5) was supposed to be my last University Day at school but I wasn't able to attend because my left foot accidentally got run over by our car. Just a slight injury, there was no blood, I can still walk, but was in pain and had to x-ray it to make sure nothing bad happened. So I was here at home since Thursday (Doctor's orders not to strain it too much), reading Valente, typing assignments, and watching anime.

When you assume, you make an ass of u & me

Assumptions irritate me, especially assuming people who feel that they "know" you, that they expect you to conform to their opinion of you because they truly know what you really are. They sound so smug as if they know you better than yourself.

I feel this all the time with my mother, of all people. Of course, parents have a tendency to want others to think the best of their children. But... its quite disgusting when it seems that she's already creating an imaginary good, perfect child when talking about me and my [imaginary] "accomplishments".

Example, some people from a church where I attend occasionally came over our house for lunch during my birthday. She's there, talking to them about what I am like, how we're so godly and religious and that we were "Salvationists" -- we did attend church some time in the Salvation Army but that was when I was a kid who had no choice but follow my mother. I last went to that church more than ten years ago.

I felt seething anger I kept hidden when my mother began talking about those things. It made me want to argue with her, tell her, "We haven't discussed anything about religion at all. Why are you telling them what I believe in, when you don't actually know what I think and haven't even asked? Its not me you're trying to praise here! You just want to look good in front of them!" I felt... kind of violated.

In fact, there was a period I no longer attended church since Grade 4. Its only now that I began to understand the soundness of Christian principles. Before that, I was much influenced by professors and atheists who argue against the existence of God etc., things I shallowly believed without thinking through.

I had to speak for myself. I told them I haven't stepped in Church for a decade, and that I still have doubts in my mind (that will still be there no matter how much you try to convince me otherwise).

I did mention it to her after they left. I felt embarassed, and I could feel she also does. She scolded me when I brought it up again weeks later. "Nag-ligad na to ah!" ['its in the past'] she'd say and I never mentioned it again.

What I know is, in the Bible, Jesus hated hypocrisy: keeping up appearances of what we actually are not. Right now, I don't hate my mother anymore.

I, not anyone else, must speak for myself.

Si Kali

Maraming relihiyon sa mundo. Dito sa Pilipinas, marami and Kristiyano at Muslim. Sa ibang parte ng Asya, may Buddhismo, Taoismo, Shintoismo, at Hinduismo. Iba-iba ang mga paniniwala at sinasambang diyos. Hinduismo ang pangunahing relihiyon sa India, at napakarami nilang mga diyos. Isa na rito ang diyosang si Kali, ang namumuno sa Oras at Kamatayan.

Si Kali ay hindi ang tipikal na dyosa sa atin, na supernatural ang ganda at kapangyarihan. Nakakatakot ang kanyang itsura sa mga rebulto. Siya ay nakahubad at sing-itim ng uling ang kanyang balat. Naka-bukas ang kanyang labi at makikita ang matutulis na pangil and mahabang dila na pulang-pula sa dugo. Ang tanging suot niya ay ang kuwintas na yari sa maraming bungo ng tao.

Apat ang kanyang mga balikat at kamay. Sa kaliwang banda, isang kamay ang may hawak ng putol na ulo ng tao, at ang kamay sa ilalim nito ay may mangkok para masalo ang tumutulong dugo mula sa ulong pugot. Sa kaliwang banda, isang kamay ang may hawak na espada at ang isa naman ay puno ng dugo. Nakatapak ang kanyang mga paa sa namumuting bangkay, na sa maraming depiksyon ay ang kanyang asawang si Shiva (na mabubuhay ulit).

Sa kabila ng pang-horror na itsura, hindi siya nakakatakot para sa mga deboto. Siya ang pinaniniwalaang may kapangyarihan na makatanggal ng takot at makapagbibigay ng kapayapaan. Puro patay ang kanyang mga simbolo, para ipaalala sa atin na ito rin ang huling hantungan ng mga mortal.


Artistic depiction from Vineet Aggarwal

Idolatry in everyday life

It seems that my blog is turning to a Tumblr reblog site. As for my life, I'm kind of late to the party in reading The Lord of the Rings but I finished it yesterday and its my current obsession, and I'm about to write a long post on that. Another school year is starting, two years left and this dreaded college will be over. I hope that this semester will be better.

Here's another quote:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

-David Foster Wallace, This is Water

ILLUSIONS: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah [review]

“What if somebody came along who was really good at this, who could teach me how the world works? If a Buddha or Jesus came to our time and landed in the same meadow with me, what would he say, what would he be like?” asks Richard Bach in his foreword to Illusions. Here he meets the mysterious ex-Savior Donald Shimoda, now flying around passengers on his biplane for a living, same job as his.

Ex-Messiah. Donald just decided to quit. He didn't like the crowds starting to praise him. He still can do miracles, though. His shadow passes over dead bugs and they fly away alive. He can walk on water, swim on soil, walk through walls. He can see the future but tries not to think of it. He's lived in many lifetimes here, in other worlds, and in different dimensions. He's been a wanderer lately.

“Stay in one place too long and people knew I was something strange. Brush against my sleeve, you're healed of terminal cancer, and before the week's over the crowd's there again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I came from or where I'm going next, which suits me pretty well.” He once walked off a crowd to the sea, and then disappeared.

He teases Richard with magic tricks at first. Richard wonders if Masters receive formal training or practice. Donald hands him the Messiah's Handbook & Reminders for the Advanced Soul, filled with epigrams.

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.  Being true to anyone or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of the fake messiah.

Richard doesn't pray to him, they're just friends. Don quit because people only came to him for the miracles and not for his message. Don teaches him about life in unconventional means, even walks on the lake with him. He tells Richard that all of us are unrealized messiahs.

In the end, Don dies. He doesn’t come back from the dead, though visits Richard for the last time through a dream. Life isn't the same. The last page of the Messiah's handbook says: Everything in this book might be wrong.
 - - - - - 
The whole book's message can be summed up by this short parable in the foreword:

Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all--young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom."

The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!"

And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure." But they cried the more, "Savior!" all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior. (© Richard Bach)

"On Pride" by C.S. Lewis

Reading the works of this author made me rethink religion. I started with all of The Chronicles of Narnia and moved to his nonfiction. This is an essay from Mere Christianity, with parts cut out for a speech.

- - - - - -

"There is one vice which everyone is a victim, and of which hardly anyone ever imagine that they are guilty. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I've hardly heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
 

I'm talking of Pride or Self-Conceit. In Christian teachings, it is the utmost evil. Unchastity, anger, greed, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Does this seem exaggerated? If so, think it over. It is said if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or patronise me, or show off?"  The point is a person's pride is in competition with everyone else's pride. It's because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. If everyone were equal there would be nothing to be proud about. It’s the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once competition has gone, pride has gone. Almost all evils in the world which we blame to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.

In  God  you  come  up  against something which  is in every  respect immeasurably superior  to  yourself.  As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and as long as you are looking down, you can't see something that is above you.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. 

I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

If anyone would like to have humility, I think I can tell him the first step: realize that you are proud. That's a big step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."