Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is sending several copies of the Bible and rosaries to Tacloban and nearby provinces to fill the spiritual necessities of those affected by supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name Haiyan).
According to the CBCP, the Episcopal Commission for the Biblical Apostolate (ECBA) will be sending 1,000 copies of the Bible to help strengthen the faith of the typhoon victims.
On the other hand, the prayer support network of the pro-life movement Rosary for Life donated to the CBCP an initial 3,000 rosaries for Tacloban to help uplift the spiritual morale of the devastated people in the city.
“We know that through prayers somehow we will survive as a people and persevere in life. The primacy of the spiritual dimension in our lives must be emphasized to our people. We, of course know that the physical necessities of life are important but also important is the spiritual side of the people in this recent calamity. We are making these rosaries available to people to help them pray in this time of trial and tragedy,” said William Lorenzo, the communication officer of Rosaries for Life, in a statement.
Lorenzo said they would visit the affected areas to help rehabilitate the Catholic spirituality of the people of Tacloban.
He added that rosaries would also be sent to Samar, another province badly affected by the supertyphoon.
Meanwhile, Dr. Natividad Pagadut, ECBA’s executive secretary, believes that the distribution of the Bible should be coupled with formation and counseling of the people in order to guide them on how to use it.
“We hope that the Bible would help the victims recover from the tragedy, strengthen their faith, and improve as persons,” she said.
“It is best to couple it with formation, counseling and to guide them on what to read in the Bible during this time. With this, they will be consoled, challenged, they will gain hope to move on, and get up from this terrible experience,” Pagadut said.
The biblical apostolate also gave 100 copies of children’s Bible for kids to read to help them get up from the devastating experience.
WTF? These people have lost EVERYTHING and with all of the money at their disposal the Catholic church sends them Bibles and beads?
They don't care about the well being of these people, they are just worried that they will lose members of the flock who might be questioning the wisdom of worshiping a God who either sent this typhoon on purpose who was unable or unwilling to prevent it.
These people need physical help, not more proselytizing.
I may be nothing more than a heathen but I have sent two different donations already.
Cash donations.
And I did it not to earn my way into heaven, or to buy my way out of hell, but simply because it is the right, the human, thing to do.
"Gryphen surely you realize that this does not represent the truth found in the Bible, nor the truth about Christianity."
But alas I realize no such thing. In fact I think the evidence suggests quite the opposite to be true.
And that evidence is found in the pages of the "good book" itself. Here are just some examples:
A wife is a man’s property: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:17
Daughters can be bought and sold: If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. Exodus 21:7
A raped daughter can be sold to her rapist: If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. Deuteronomy 22:28-29
Women, but only virgins, are to be taken as spoils of war: Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Numbers 31:17-18
I could go on and on, but you get the drift.
As much as Christians might wish to make the point that morality flows from the Bible as the word of God, and that how we conduct our lives should be shaped by the messages within, that is absolutely false on the face of it, and is, in practice, quite harmful when taken literally.
In fact what is true is that the reason we have so much justice in many parts of the world today is in spite of rigid religious doctrine, not BECAUSE of it.
As we have become more aware of our humanity, and more empathetic to our fellow creatures, religion, including Christianity, has been forced to adapt to those changes in order to survive, not the other way around.
The Bible has not only been used to subjugate women, it has also been used as an excuse to wage war, to enslave other people, and to engage in genocide when there is land or resources that Christians want to access. (The Iraq War anyone?)
The thing to keep in mind is that the Bible was not written to bring peace to the planet, or to provide guidelines for treating all people equally.
It was written to instruct its adherents that THEY had been given dominion over all things on this planet, and that ANY who stood in their way were standing in the way of God and should be treated with extreme prejudice. And the evidence of how that has been carried out through the ages flows like arterial blood from the pages of history.
But how the book treats women specifically may in fact be its most egregious crime of all.
Not only does it steal from women their very birth right, the power of creation. It hands that power to a single, heartlessly authoritarian, male figure, whose every word must be followed without question, and instructs that those who refuse to do so be struck dead.
In other words he is the very antithesis of the female goddesses who preceded him.
And if THAT were not enough, it also lays the blame for ALL of human suffering at the feet of the very first female, and states that her descendants must be punished with immense pain during childbirth and must forever subjugate herself to the will of man for daring to "defy" this patriarchal figure; Genesis 3:16:
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
President Barack Obama consoled grieving victims of Superstorm Sandy on the ground and surveyed disaster zones from the air on Thursday, visiting parts of New York City still struggling to recover 17 days after the storm devastated the U.S. Northeast.
Wearing a wind breaker and sturdy shoes, the president walked through destroyed sections of the borough of Staten Island, hugging and chatting with people whose lives were shattered when Sandy slammed ashore on October 29, bringing a record storm surge and killing more than 120 people.
During his FIRST visit to the areas devastated by this incredible storm, the President was criticized for using it as a photo-op for political gain. Well now the election is over, and here the President is again, doing the job he was elected to do.
Clearly it was NEVER about the photo-op, it was about helping people in need.
I am sure that Mitt Romney probably has the help that FEMA provided these devastated people on his list of things the President GAVE voters in order to buy their support.
By the way you can watch the President's statement by clicking here.
It had become one of President Obama’s signature routines in the White House, a habit he mentioned in dozens of meetings and hundreds of speeches: Every night just before bed, he read 10 letters pulled from the 20,000 that Americans sent to him each day. The notes reminded him of why he wanted to be president, he liked to say. He called them his most intimate link to the people he governed.
Most sobering of all for Obama, his self-described “direct connection” to Americans had also awoken him to a growing disconnect. People wrote because their problems demanded immediate attention, and yet the process of governing the nation was so slow that Obama sometimes felt powerless to help them.
A few times during his presidency, Obama admitted, he had written a personal check or made a phone call on the writer’s behalf, believing that it was his only way to ensure a fast result. “It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” he told me. Many other times, he had forwarded letters to government agencies or Cabinet secretaries after attaching a standard, handwritten note that read: “Can you please take care of this?”
“Some of these letters you read and you say, ‘Gosh, I really want to help this person, and I may not have the tools to help them right now,’ ” the president said. “And then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person that wrote describing their story, there might be another hundred thousand going through the same thing. So there are times when I’m reading the letters and I feel pained that I can’t do more, faster, to make a difference in their lives.”
And just in case you think this a ploy to make the President appear more compassionate than he truly is, reporter Eli Saslow goes on to add this:
Months after these people wrote to the president, when I mentioned their letters to Obama, he remembered the details of their lives. Their letters had shaped his speeches and informed his policies, but it was their personal stories that stuck with him. “Reading these letters can be heartbreaking,” he said. “Just heartbreaking.”
It is almost impossible to imagine any of the current Presidential candidates in the Republican party taking the time to respond to Americans personally if they had the job, or EVER sending somebody a personal check to help them out in a time of crisis.
I have recently been hearing this criticism of the President that he does not connect in a personal way with the people, but I think that is a media contrivance and it is certainly not something that I have perceived from interviews or from pictures like these:
I believe that the President is a very decent, caring man, who very much wants to do the absolute best job that he can for this country. And I further believe that it is that very decency which the Republicans perceive as a weakness and just one of the reasons they want to take his job away from him.
Personally I would much rather have a President who cares too much, than a President who cares too little. How many prisoners in Texas have been put to death while Rick Perry has served as its Governor again?
