In an earlier article I inadvertently volunteered the information that “I am no longer a church-going Christian.” Before some family and friends would inquire on what exactly did I mean by the ‘confession’, or maybe just for my own edification, I deem it necessary to elaborate on that state of affairs to the best that my selective memory can muster.

Suffice to say, memory is, of necessity invariably selective. As an organism with instincts for self-preservation, we only retain what serves to reinforce the prolongation if not perpetuation of existential well-being. No conspiracy theory here. It is just how the cookie crumbles. No grandiose designs or sophisticated schemes on how life is supposed to unfold. For which a bit of background is in order.

I grew up in a small farming/fishing village of fewer than a hundred households, of mostly relatives with the exception of two or three families. Close family ties were so pervasive one had to reach out to the adjacent town to get married. In terms of societal and civic activity, it would compare most appropriately with the fictional village of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof, but for three qualifications that need to be stressed. It was a catholic community; it was a farming village by the sea; and it definitely was not fictional.

These first two attributes are more important than one would ordinarily suspect. Firstly, my father converted a sizable tract of homestead virgin forest into a coconut plantation by spear-fishing at night and using the night’s catch to hire help during the day to work the farm. This required proximity to the sea to be remotely practicable. Having grown up ‘by the sea’ has a definite indelible influence on my psyche, so much so that I have not lived more than an hour’s trip to the sea my entire life. To a boy, the sea always presented the promise of infinite possibilities. By contrast, farm work invariably gave me the feeling of being hopelessly and helplessly grounded, with no prospect of liberation from the clutches of the soil and the vagaries of the weather.

Secondly, the catholic aspect of it is important in the sense that mother was a devout catholic and father was a nominal practitioner. As a pre-school boy I would go to town with mother and father and I would end up spending the Sunday afternoon with father at the town cockpit. (Then, cockfighting was one of the most popular pastimes in the old country, and father was one of the acclaimed accomplished minder of fighting roosters in the town.)  Mother would invariably spend the Sunday afternoon in church.

Nevertheless, I grew up a devout catholic since around third grade, circa the time when I went through catechism leading to my first communion, up through sophomore high school. Being devout meant as early as a third grader, I was one of two boys in town who could lead the novena, and frequently did so in public without embarrassment or reservation, notwithstanding that the chore was traditionally assigned to girls. The other boy was my brother, two years and eight months older than me. The point is, I took religion rather seriously starting quite early on. Going to church was a weekly ritual until my high school sophomore year.

Around that time, they stopped conducting the catholic mass in Latin. The veil of mysticism was lifted off the mass as a ritual. When I started to understand what was said and done in church, I began to gradually realize that my main reason for being in church was to get close to Evangeline, the prettiest damsel and best dancer in campus, the girl I courted with the proverbial passion of first love. Somehow the realization made me extremely uncomfortable. Increasingly, the burden of inventing stories for the priest at confessional, so I could take the Sunday communion, became toilsome and intolerable. Sans provocation, my conscience started to kick in.

At the end of my sophomore year I was sent to represent my school at a national conference of students who were aspiring to pursue farming for a lifetime vocation. As a congratulatory gift, one of my maternal uncles, a practicing Seventh Day Adventist (SDA), gave me a bible. I spent a good chunk of my third year in high school reading that bible, which is one of the few books I have read cover to cover more than once. I may not be that much the wiser for the experience, but that was the first year of my not being a church-going Christian.

This was the first introspection phase of my religious meanderings. The days spent in the wilderness, so to speak. Or to borrow Omar Khayyam’s  brilliant formulation,

LXVI
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Having quit following her to church and miserably failing to learn the tango, or any dancing skills for that matter, I of course began to drift apart from Evangeline, the love of my life. But my love affair with the bible persisted through my final year of high school. It eventually led me back to church. During the first two and one-half years of college, I found myself a guest member of an SDA congregation right in the heart of the largest Muslim city in the country.

The congregation consisted exactly of four resident families, with two to six members to a family, and four to five students from my newly opened university, as guest members. The fifth member of our group went to church rather irregularly. The four of us, more often than not, walked the five to six kilometers separating the campus from the city, both ways every Saturday regardless of the weather.  There were times when we got an occasional break from the motor pool personnel and were able to hitch a ride, but they were too few and far between.

The congregation elder was a medical doctor and we held the worship services at the waiting room of his clinic. I was positive that he was not a pastor or an ordained minister because we never addressed him as such. Although I did not quite have a chance at a one-on-one dialogue with him, (I was only a taciturn college kid, he was the accomplished elder of the bunch) I held him in high regard and respect.

The congregation on the whole had a very congenial informal ambiance. The resident families took turns hosting us, the student guest members, for lunch each Saturday. I was content and comfortable with my new identity as an SDA congregant. I even managed to leverage my religious entitlement to have ROTC deferred for two semesters because a Saturday drill violated the SDA Sabbath protocol. Ditto with any special examinations, like the competency classification tests (which landed me into remedial English course) scheduled for a Saturday: we were allowed to take them some other time.

During this period, I however admit to cringing with consternation and resentment every time I heard somebody remarked that I was a person who could be trusted because I went to church every week. This was, to my mind, the cliché case of putting the cart before the horse. To date I hold the deep seated conviction that I went to church on a regular basis because I was a decent person, mainly due to my upbringing. To formulate it otherwise would be an affront to the honor and achievements of my parents, the most monumental of them I consider to be the success of their children.

I was blessed with loving and caring parents who inculcated into my consciousness an appreciation of the notion of the good, the beautiful and the true, along with the value of hard work and the mental habit to examine the merits of any proposition that needs to be acted upon or taken as gospel.

This is seriously important because my parents got married when they were in grammar school. Father was nineteen just on the verge of being promoted to seventh grade. Mother was sixteen, still in the sixth grade. Both of them were scions of farming/fishing families. Their moral and spiritual moorings essentially consisted of the goodness of their hearts and the desire to do what was right, tempered by the rigors of the elements associated with farming and fishing life.

It was against the backdrop of these introspections (my second over the last five years) that I was caught off guard by a sermon. The occasion was the Saturday following the second anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. The congregation elder chose the life and death of the iconic celebrity as the subject of his sermon. His thesis was that no amount of glamour, glitter, wealth and fame can work to your benefit if you live a life of sin. The thesis as such was fine. But in the process of expounding on it, he proceeded to berate her judgment and vilify her character and probe into every conceivable aspect of her memory and legacy to prove his point.  In his passionate eloquence he managed to impute the most negative nuance to every facet of her life.

Somehow this violated every fabric of decency that was planted in my soul by my parents. It took every fiber of self-restraint for me not to walk out of the service right then and there. From my farm boy upbringing one just should not speak ill of the dead. I cannot remember being taught the specific reason for the proscription, but I hasten to guess: that it is because the dead is inherently incapable of defending itself. Or if you subscribe to the wisdom of Shakespeare’s formulation that

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;”

the evil deeds have ample chance to speak for themselves. Therefore it becomes incumbent upon common decency to highlight the good deeds, especially when they are buried with the carcass. Thus the practice of delivering a eulogy at a funeral is a protocol of decency.

What I even found more outrageous was the fact that no other person seemed to have found the sermon objectionable. It might of course be that everybody was just as taciturn and reserved as I was then. Be that as it may, that was the last time I attended a church service as a congregant. Since nobody asked me why I stopped going to church, I did not think I needed to come up with an explanation, till now.

With Iran being in the crosshairs of international concerns and the preponderance of what I dub the Repugnant Obama Paradigm, which includes, inter alia, the recent groveling and pandering of this White House towards the Moslem world, I deem it essential to share the sentiments herein with as wide a public as I can possibly reach.  

I therefore solicit your indulgence and present the original piece in its entirety, neurotic trappings included.

{*******}

By now I gathered from your messages that you are pretty much disappointed with the websites I routinely visit and the tendencies I’m inclined to read and indulge my fancy at. I know that you know that you are not alone in that regard. Since quite a few of my messages were left unanswered, I don’t know where to begin. 

Let’s start with the question of moderate Moslems: where are they, what are they doing a propos of the Jihad that is unleashed at the West, what is the most likely influence they will have in the direction and outcome of conflict resolution.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument that they exist. I submit to you that to the extent that they are silent on the issues, they render themselves irrelevant to the process, let alone to its outcome. The silent majority become de facto collaborators to the factions that drive the events that set the agenda.

I have to concede: my over all knowledge of Islam is limited to a one-semester course on the Cultural History of Islam in the Philippines. This is supplemented, perhaps by three semesters of working as a Research Assistant to a professor doing her doctoral desertion on the subject. I therefore would not presume to give an analysis of the various sects of and tendencies in Islam to probe into and prove or disprove were moderation lies.

Rather, I’d propose to speak from real life experience with our version of Islam in the Philippines. Admittedly, this experience is not as extensive as yours. Garnered between the ages of 18 and 29, I submit to you however, that it is equally instructive and diverse: as a student, an office worker, a manual laborer, and a faculty member in a prestigious university. I had classmates, professors and students who were Moslems.

I have shared working and lodging quarters with both the politically active and the completely apolitical. I had argued with them, fought with them, played with them, joked with them, negotiated with them, lobbied with them. At one point I even fancied romantically courting one of them. I had my life and limb threatened on more than one occasion resulting from differences in opinion on rules of procedures in Student Government elections.

The conclusion gleaned from this experience, as obtains in the Philippines, at least: there are no radical and moderate doctrines of Islam.  There are only varying degrees of adherence to the same doctrine. This distinction is by no means academic.

It is one thing to have an institutionalized deliberation of what the doctrine entails, teaches and promotes or prohibits, i.e., an institutionally conscious architecting of a belief structure and its societal and sociological implications. It is quite a different story to have individuals decide to adopt or discard certain parts of the doctrine as a matter of practical convenience.

The former is wont to produce religious/ideological enlightenment. The latter, more often than not, results in political and/or commercial opportunism and cultural relativism of the worst kind. In effect, the typical Moslem intellectual assumes a split identity: one when he is conscious of his adherence to Islam, (his “Islamhood” so to speak), and the other when he discards, wittingly or unwittingly, the religious affiliation and constraints.

To state it mildly and kindly, it is extremely difficult and problematic to make long-term programmatic political allies out of people with lukewarm convictions. They can reach out and deal with the outside world in a less than antagonistic manner only to the extent that they are able to transcend their identities as Moslems.

This translates into always having an ulterior motive in their dealings with the outside world, i.e., with the infidels such as you and me. Whatever alliance you made with them should be understood to be in the context of a specific set of circumstances. Any bonding that ensues from such alliance is non-transferable to the next set of conditions.  In other words, you cannot expect any form of loyalty from them because you cannot expect that they will shed off, even temporarily, their Islamic identities for your sake.

When you are in conflict with any one of them the notion of who is at fault is decided by the fact that you are not one of them. You should not expect that any one of them would voluntarily look after your interest and intercede on behalf of objective facts of the conflict. When an atrocity is committed on someone who is not one of them, nobody protests, and nobody bears witness for the victim so the perpetrator is tolerated.

Incidentally, I should mention that the university where I studied and later worked in was established for the express purpose of promoting integration between the Moslems and the rest of the nation. When five Iranian students were robbed, murdered and mutilated in a nearby town, it was the non-Moslem constituents of the university who demanded that the local and provincial (roughly comparable to State here in the U.S.) authorities at the very least condemned the atrocious deed. The rest remained silent. Presumably those Iranians were not Moslems. Or if they were, not the version of Islam preached and practiced in the locality. Of course nobody got arrested or answered for what happened.

 It is entirely possible, indeed, I think it is most likely that the Islam practiced amongst the Iranians and the one practiced in the Philippines are different. I am not going to venture into the difference between the Suni and the Shiite sects. That is completely beyond my domain.

I can say this for certain: of the different nationalities of Islamic cultural backgrounds I have been exposed to in Japan and here in the U.S., Filipinos (in general, and I in particular) seemed to have gotten along rather more easily with people from Iran and/or Turkey.  The fact that, by a confluence of circumstances, I got along well with Farid has very little influence in this observation. If anything, it probably is an indirect result, or at least an illustration of its verity.

Conversely, we seemed to experience more difficulty with people from Pakistan. In fact at the Chiba Foreign Students College, there was open enmity between the Pakistanis and the Filipinos. Granted, this might have been caused by specific incidents. So let us put this aspect of the issue aside and refocus on the treatise of the article, which triggered all this.

Maybe it is true that Iran has all the socio-political institutions conducive to the emergence of an Islamic moderate as a political force. Indeed, there were reports of Candle Light vigils on the streets of Tehran in reaction to 9/11 as compared with celebratory dancing on the streets in the rest of the Middle East. More recent reports of anti-Taliban demonstrations in Tehran also reinforce this encouraging tendency.

Unfortunately, however, political ferment of the sort that can reverse the tide of ideology takes at least a generation to take hold. The terrorist network is actively waging a war on Western civilization now, ironically using some of the tools only Western civilization could conceivably produce.

Are we then to wait around for another generation of enlightened intellectuals to decide whether or not it is a war worth fighting and another generation to actually fight this war? Or shall we deny that there is a war being fought!   The events of 9/11 changed a lot of things. The principle of self-preservation was not one of them.

When somebody comes to my house to cut my throat, my first order of business is to prevent it from happening.  I’m not going to debate on the merits and causes and motives of the mission.  I can take care of that after the mission has been successfully foiled.  It is too late to prevent 9/11 from happening.  It is imperative that we deter the perpetrators from making a habit of it.

And here lies my quarrel with Islam. A crime has been committed in its name. Where is the rest of Islam to at least condemn the deed? Where is the outrage? It is not forthcoming. The rest of Islam, as a doctrine, is simply incapable of condemning it because it does not see it as a crime. It sees it as an achievement in the name of Islam, something worthy of a jubilant celebration.   I definitely am not one of those who would argue that there is the slightest possibility to justify or explain away 9/11.

The role of American Moslems needs to be looked into in this connection. The only protest I have come across from that community is about its being victimized, resultant to, or as a “fallout” of 9/11.  In a way this is understandable if pathetically pathological in its absurdity.  It stresses the fact that this would be the last place to look for Islamic moderates.

At this juncture, I contend, assert and maintain that to convert into Islam from religions associated with the Judeo-Christian cultural traditions is a definite act of intellectual regression. The fact that geographically and historically Islamic cultures have been associated with repressive governments is no accident of history. It is rooted on the proscription of the notion of Free Will from the tenets of Islam that makes its adherents exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to fear and repression.

Conversely, the assimilation of the concept of Free Will into the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity has undeniably made these religions hospitable and conducive to the flourishing of liberty and kindred values associated with democratic cultures and institutions. This in and of itself makes the latter religions decisively superior to Islam.

It was the liberation of the power of the mind from the clutches of ignorance and religious dogma that propelled Western Civilization, as we know it. Converting into Islam is tantamount to renouncing the benefits, accrued by default, from the moral and intellectual legacy of the ages of reformation, renaissance, and enlightenment.  It is, ipso facto, a tragic and pathological intellectual suicide of the grossest order.  One must have been utterly and completely disenfranchised from such traditions to become an Islamic convert.

I think I have spoken my peace or have beaten this horse dead many times over.