Is Islam a religion of violence

A lot of people see Islam as a religion of violence. If interpreted literally, it can be. But the Bible is just as potent an instrument of hate if also interpreted literally. The punishment for homosexuality in the bible is death (Leviticus 18 and 20), The punishment for worshiping other gods is death, the punishment for blasphemy is stoning… to death. In the bible, a lot of crimes that we would consider petty are punishable by death. We look at acts done by muslim extremists as primitive because that’s exactly what those acts are. They’re following books written at a different time when the concept of civility was not as we know it now. But why is it that more acts of terrorism are committed under the name of Islam than in the name of the Abrahamic God when both religions promote similar punishments for the same crime?

The Roman Catholic church hasn’t always been peaceful and humane. It took its sweet time. Up until the 16^th century, The Catholic church was burning people at the stake for heresy.  A lot of European conquest was partly fueled by the need of the church to convert as much of the world into Catholicism. A lot of people died in the process.

Muslims had a very prosperous civilization in the middle ages. But most muslim countries now are poor and have not been very progressive for a long time. Those that are rich became rich just recently. The hotbeds for terrorism are usually the poorest of these countries. Al qaeda in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq -theocracies that progress has barely touched, where life expectancy is short and death is a way of life

When people aren’t dying around you, the value of human life goes up. The death of one soldier in World War 2 doesn’t have the same impact as the death of one soldier today in peace time. We’re not used to death anymore. And when a person doesn’t worry about death happening within the immediate future, that person is free to think about other things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with survival, such as the rights of your fellow man as well as your own. And most especially, since death and killing become taboo, you don't think of killing your fellow man when his beliefs contradict yours.

A lot of the more violent aspects of Catholicism have been slowly rooted out by modernization in Europe -a process that is still continuing today in the free world. It wasn’t too long ago when racism was state imposed and slavery was legal (slavery was permitted in the bible). Look where progress has brought us now. State imposed racism and slavery have been practically eradicated and several states have legalized same sex marriage.

A lot of people claim that religion is the root of a person’s morals but in the modern world, it’s not. . Morality evolves as civilization progresses. As life becomes less of a privilege than it is a right, concepts such as equality gain a foothold in a society's collective consciousness. We no longer live our lives based on the morals of bearded men who lived at a time when human life was a disposable commodity. Morality evolves as society evolves. And we live in a world where morality has evolved to encompass everyone’s rights, including those who don’t belong to our group and those who don’t belong to our religion. Unless you live in Davao, death is no longer the only possible punishment for any given crime.

There are of course those that progress has left behind. Those who choose to hold on to archaic laws and morality. And I think therein lies the answer to the first question in this entry on why one group tends to produce more extremists than the other. One group has progressed more than the other. I think one lesson that we can learn from the Catholic church is that it doesn’t matter if your religion promotes violence and bigotry or not. One can go beyond it and still practice the same religion.

This is not a post against religion. It is a post for reason... For a morality that is carefully thought out and not based on doctrine or dogma. That’s more or less what we have right now in the free world. And it’s something that a lot of people who subscribe to Islamic extremism could use. 

On the INC demonstrations

Photoshopped, you’d say but is it really? Hard to tell exactly considering that plenty of the INC flock who participated in the demonstrations most likely had no idea what they were doing in the middle of edsa and being a bother to metro manila’s normally peace-loving motorists who were then probably quite irate. They managed to bring metro manila’s traffic on a Friday night which is usually at a standstill to a… standstill. I avoided edsa during the demonstrations but as someone who passes through edsa regularly, it’s hard for me to imagine how traffic could be worse on a Friday night at rush hour on a payday. If I tried really hard to imagine it, I’d probably see cars going at negative speed in my head… going back to the offices from which they came, in reverse.

Perhaps separation of church and state is a fool’s dream in a country that is so deeply religious. Artificial birth control, gay marriage, divorce: these are concepts that may never find general political acceptance in your lifetime. A religious group could order its flock to paralyze one of metro manila’s main arteries and they would unquestioningly do so –because the same laws that are applied to every man were applied to their leaders. They’d make democracy work against us if their church leaders also tell them who to vote for. I’m glad that never happens. What is democracy but an illusion in a country where individual thinking is controlled by an elite few who claim to be arbiters of morality and truth.

I am not a religious person and that may even be an understatement but I have no problems with people practicing their religion as long as it doesn’t impede on the rights of others, as long as they don’t force their values on people who don’t share the same views and as long as they don’t force their version of the truth on me.

Going back to that picture. At first glance it may not make sense but if you come to think of it, it’s completely logical -makakapunta ba sila sa kalsada kung di sila nagpunta doon? It only doesn’t make sense because you’re looking for rational thinking where it doesn’t exist. It was photoshopped but it might as well be real

What is my Opinion on Gay Marriage

What is my opinion on same-sex marriage? The US just legalized gay marriage nationwide so people have been expressing their strong opinions on the matter, especially the religious variety. It’s unnatural, they say; It offends them, they say. Some try to rationalize their distaste for same sex marriage by arguing that same-sex couples are unfit to raise kids, by arguing that kids need both a father and a mother -nevermind that the issue of adoption is separate from the issue of marriage itself, that there are plenty of parents not fit to raise a family but are legally given the right to do so … nevermind the fact that single parents are actually allowed by law to adopt children. –let that last phrase sink in for a moment. Also, I’m not sure what passes for “natural” in this hitech age of ours but I imagine that the people complaining that gay marriage isn’t natural aren’t living in the jungle and hunting their own food.

The bottomline is: It doesn’t matter what my opinion on it is. It doesn’t matter what yours is. None of us should be able to repress a group’s rights on basis of personal opinion. Two adults, regardless of gender, should be allowed to spend their lives together and be afforded the same legal rights and recognition as the rest of us. Anything less is no different from state-imposed racism, sexism and other state-imposed isms that we’ve left behind in the past. If the general public finds the idea offensive, they must know that they have a right to be offended but what they don’t have is the right not to be. They also don’t have the right to force their outdated religious sensitivities down people’s throats.

Several decades ago, people of different races were not allowed to get married. It was considered a criminal act punishable by incarceration. Not only was racism popular among the public, it was also state imposed. It seems so backwards to us now that interracial marriage is widely accepted but it was considered taboo back then. At some point in the future, when rejection gives way to tolerance and tolerance gives way to acceptance, people will see same-sex marriage the same way we view interracial marriage now. When they do, wouldn’t you want to be on the other side of the fence?

On cyberbullying part 2

I wrote about cyberbullying in my previous entry and this rant is a continuation of that

There seems to be this recent trend of mainstream publications trying to incite a lynch mob by publicly shaming ordinary people for what wouldn't even be considered misdemeanor offenses.

The video below was shared on top gear and went viral shortly afterwards. It’s a video of two young women in a car trying to ruthlessly awaken a commuter from his deep slumber by viciously blowing their horn. Watch the video below to see the very face of evil (/sarcasm) Seriously, who hasn't tried waking up a friend for the Lulz. Maybe the guy thought that it was mildly annoying but i doubt that he was seriously offended by it. He probably slept again and moved on with his life unlike majority of the commenters on the site. I seriously think that if you replace the two attractive women with two ordinary looking commuters there wouldn’t be as much hate. But because they were driving a car, they looked like arrogant, rich bitches and therefore deserving of the vilest insults.

Top gear is especially fond of this practice. It’s one thing if it’s a random internet nerd posting this story on facebook for his or her friends to see. It’s an entirely different thing if it’s a mainstream publication with magazines that you see in newstands that’s supposedly manned by adults. When you have more than a million followers and you ask the masses to lynch somebody, they will do it with relentless passion. The owner of a maseratti who punched an LTO officer in the face. He was publicly insulted, along with his family without waiting for his side to be aired. Later on it was discovered that the LTO officer was notorious for being an A-hole. Not enough reason to be punched in the face, maybe (?). but at least if there had to be lynching, it shouldn’t have been as one sided as it initially was. Or just leave out the lynching altogether and let the parties involved settle it among themselves. Then there was the beast mode guy, cars parked incorrectly with their plate numbers in full display –also lynched online

I specifically like the comment about not "murdered-ing" the english language. What's most disturbing about this story is not the prank itself but the fact that there are more than 11,000 comments and i'd say more than 90% of them are at least this brutal

I understand the need of these websites to generate traffic but at the very least blur faces out or plate numbers, especially if there’s no illegal offense involved.  There's a reason why plate numbers on cars are usually blurred in photos. You can find out a lot of information about the owner of the car by displaying its plate number, including his or her home address.

Some of these viral stories can be pretty funny and worthy of ridicule. I do laugh at them sometimes but I move on shortly afterwards. I don’t feel the need to dig out more private info about them and then make them public, I don’t feel the need to start facebook pages shaming the people involved in the videos. I don’t feel like raising pitchforks and inviting my comrades to do the same until we receive a groveling apology from the person whose life we have practically destroyed. I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this lynchmob mentality is getting way out of hand

On Internet Virality

If you’ve driven a car long enough, you probably have been exposed to the predatory beasts that prowl our streets, dressed in green, yellow or sometimes blue. Maybe you’ve been stopped by one of them and maybe you have given in to the temptation of slipping a bill or two. I will not judge you. I don’t have the figures but I strongly believe that you are the majority. Maybe, even I have done it. I used the word “maybe” because sentences sometimes have to be made ambiguous in this very quick-to-judge, social media-savvy society. Really officer? You saw me not wearing a seatbelt from 30ft away in the middle of the night in a tinted car? Well I was wearing a seatbelt. It was my passenger who wasn’t. So you stopped me first and then looked for violations later in the hopes that maybe you’ll get kotong? I’m gonna raise my voice at you and if anyone thinks that I’m a douche for doing so…. I’ll just hope that they don’t have a camera with them. Because I don’t wanna go viral that way. And no, you’re not getting kotong.

The problem with criticizing people through the lens of the internet is that you don’t see your own face until you turn off your monitor and see your reflection on the empty black screen. And then you realize that you have pimples and acne scars just like everyone else. Maybe in the past, you were having a bad day and a security guard said something that irked you off.  Maybe you said “Amalayer? Amalayer?” Maybe you had a heated argument with an MMDA officer -I hope you didn’t punch him in the face like this Maserati driver did just last week. Maybe you did something stupid like drive through a flooded street that resembled a small lake and then blamed the government for your misfortune, just like Christopher Lao. Just be thankful that a TV crew wasn’t conveniently waiting around when it happened.

There’s no question that what the Maserati driver did was WRONG but If the Maseratti driver punched another driver in a Ferrari, the headline would’ve been “two rich men having a spirited and expected altercation”. Instead, it was about an arrogant rich man abusing the poor, in this case a poor and therefore saintly MMDA officer. We’d probably laugh about the former headline but I doubt if there’d be as much hate especially from the masses. One may argue that an MMDA officer is a person of authority and should be respected but you tend to not respect authority very much when you regularly see it being abused.

We tend to see ourselves in groups. The rich, the poor, the abusers, the oppressed. The poor see the rich as evil, some of the rich may see the poor as undesirable. Members within our group are saintly and those outside our group are three headed demons. We demonize those whom we don’t understand, those who are not “us”. I think that’s why in all of these stories, the parties involved usually come from different social classes.

It’s understandable to laugh or ridicule the people involved in some of these viral videos/stories for a brief time. But the seething hate and the bullying that goes on for several weeks to several months, I think is a symptom of something I would like to call “internet induced self-righteousness”. Because everyone’s life or morals appear better on facebook. We see ourselves as better men or women when the truth is we just haven’t been filmed having a meltdown or paying an “unofficial fee” to avoid a queue. Pick an evil. If you’re over 30, I’m sure you’ve done more than a few things that you are ashamed of –things that could be subject to public ridicule

The internet is the ultimate democratizer in that it gives everyone who has access to it a voice to challenge anyone, including those who are much higher up. But when the same power is used against normal people who just had the misfortune of being at the wrong place, with the wrong mental disposition at the wrong time, it just seems like overkill. Facebook becomes a courtroom of a million jurors and instant verdicts. Destroying someone’s life becomes as easy as waiting for him or her to make a mistake and then pressing the record button. It’s all fun and games until you stop to think that it can happen to everyone, including yourself. And then you ask yourself, What skeletons do I have in my closet.

On Typhoon Mario

Once again a freakish storm hit Luzon. Prophesiers of the apocalypse will have a field day, I can picture it already. I remember when Ondoy hit metro manila. It was described as a phenomenon that happens once every half a century or so. Now it’s more like a once a year thing, like other yearly pinoy events, like the  sinulog, pahiyas or the Manila auto show. If it happens any more frequently, we’d be seeing resorts sprouting along edsa.

On the brighter side, we’d have use for our salbabidas all year round –More value for the money, I say. We can market our country as the premiere urban-aquatic destination in Asia. Could be good for tourism. Imagine the reviews "Playing DOTA with your body half submerged in water... definitely a unique experience. 5 out of 5. Would try again. It's definitely more fun in the Philippines"

Of course we must never forget that this is Manny pacquiao’s fault for switching religions, climate change doesn’t exist and we Filipinos will get sarcasm and satire the first time we read it.

The Beauty of Melancholy

Happiness has been put on a pedestal, often described as the ultimate goal in a human being’s life. Depression has been demonized endlessly by thousands of internet quotes. So it may surprise some that there are those who find appeal in melancholy. I for one, can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had not lived through it. I speak from the vantage point of one who was once almost always depressed and alone to someone who has come to terms with his own skin and isn’t as lonely anymore.

All throughout my youth until my early 20’s, I was perpetually depressed. I wouldn’t call it clinical depression because I had plenty of good reason to be depressed. It was mostly because I didn’t have a lot of people around me, also because I wasn’t living up to my high expectations of myself. My self esteem was incredibly low and it severely affected my interaction with people. It was also during this time when I was at my creative peak. My creative outlets were visual art and writing –most of this blog was a product of that particular time in my life.

 Now my life is quite different. I now know what it’s like to be valued by another person, which I’ve discovered, is the biggest self esteem boost that one can get. I also have come to terms with myself, so to speak. The downside is I no longer paint and I rarely write. When I was depressed, all I wanted was for the depression to end but now that I’m quite settled in, I look for it. I’d listen to sad music, watch tragic films. Weird as it may sound, I occasionally try to induce sadness but It doesn’t come as easily as it used to.

The appeal of melancholy is difficult to describe. One sees beauty in it though it’s hard to determine if you actually feel pleasure or satisfaction from that beauty. It feels like viewing the world through a different lens. You see things that you wouldn’t normally see if you’re in a jovial mood, in the company of others. It makes one introspect more. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that most artists and thinkers also tend to be depressive. Marcel proust once said that Happiness is good for the body but it is grief that develops the strength of the mind.

Perhaps everyone is drawn to sadness to a certain extent. We watch depressing films, listen to sad music, we try to induce tears when we’re perfectly happy and it feels good, I think.

Or perhaps this isn’t something that everyone can relate to. But to the artists, the musicians, the writers, the couch philosophers out there, I think you know what I’m talking about -to look at the world, desaturated of color with a slight tint of blue, to appreciate the soft shadows cast on a cloudy day, Maybe it does take a keen eye to see beauty in gloom