THE INDICTMENT
Varghese Pamplanil
THE PROLOGUE
During the course of the last two millennia, the religions of the ”Sky Gods” with their so called “God revealed and God-dictated Books” have splintered into hundreds of mutually antagonistic warring groups fighting fierce battles of attrition to eliminate the opposite sides. Simultaneously they are at the throats of the followers of other faiths with all their teeth and fangs out to devour them alive. They bare their teeth and nails like wild animals to safeguard their turf and, if possible, expand their domain. They resort to means foul and nasty to achieve their ends. The reason for the bitter feuds may be aimed at bringing maximum number of followers into their orbit of influence on the presumption of security in numbers.
THE BLATANT “DOUBLE SPEAK”
The leadership of the Catholic Church exhorts its members to adhere to simple and frugal lifestyle, eschewing comforts. Poverty is glorified. Pursuit of happiness is frowned at, if not condemned. Pleasure seeking is a taboo. Maximum discomfort to the maximum number seems to be the motto. But Ecclesiastics occupying high echelons of power and position, in cahoots with its elite, while recommending moderation to the proletariat, enjoy all sorts of pleasures and indulge in conspicuous consumption and even lead amoral lives. There are reports of Popes John XII / Borgia style deviant sex orgies in and around Vatican. To most of the clerics, Mammon is their God. They may even strike deals with the Devil to achieve their nefarious ends.
The peoples of the Book are prone to unleashing mayhem of bombing, murder, rape, pillage, gratuitous violence in the name of their Gods and their alleged divine commands.
THE CONFUSED “GOATS/CATTLE”
Bewildered believers drift aimlessly like headless chicken. Their desperate pleas to their favourite Deities to help them tide over vicissitudes and problems of life obviously are unheard and unresponded. Their crazy running from pillar to post with supplications for boons, backed up with generous offerings of money and other materials, by and large, turns out to be futile. But the shaman priests and their henchmen tell the favour-seekers to wail louder and louder and undertake self flagellation for sins, especially those of the flesh, supposed to have been committed by them against their Gods. The clerics and their agents urge the dumb believers to participate in more and more novenas, conventions, prayer meetings, retreats, charismatic and other circuses for realising their wish lists. In the process the charlatans pick the pockets of the credulous dry. The wonder workers and pedlars of instant cure by nostrums still hold sway over misguided believers. They exhort the gullible to part with at least one-tenth of their gross income on each and every occasion till they are reduced to penury. In many cases the foolish credulous lot are compelled to beg, borrow or steal to pay even their taxes.
Many of the women especially, post menopause ones, pander to their compulsive obsession for acts of piety such as attending Masses and other “oppirukal” in the church on all days of the year; pitch darkness in the mornings, thunder or pouring rain notwithstanding. After wasting many hours of churching, they may indulge in their favourite habit of finding imaginary faults of others and spreading canards about all and sundry. Another pastime activity is gossiping. Reciting meaningless prayers cobbled up by clerics is yet another insane activity of theirs. There are prayers meant for various periods of the day and for different purposes: morning, noon, evening, night, before a journey, prior to an interview for a job, before an examination and may be even for peeing. These mass-produced prayers are so silly that any one with a modicum of IQ and common sense may feel nausea on reading them.
Sex being viewed as a dirty thing to be engaged in sporadically solely for procreation, many Catholic women tend to deny it to their husbands, who let go of their frustration in alcohol and all types of intoxicants, gambling and womanising and even pouncing on innocent and hapless children.
MODERN GOEBBELS!
Of late a nitwit group calling itself Pravachaka Sabdam stationed in the UK, apparently unemployed husbands of Kerala nurses, are acting as the new avatars of Joseph Goebbels. They wantonly indulge in all sorts of “double speak/ no speak“, George Orwell’s “ 1984” style These coolies and lackeys, obviously egged on and funded by SM Church clerics are inundating FB with exaggerated stories about many “so called saints” ostensibly unearthed from some abandoned, dirty, disused dustbins of history and urge SM “goats/cattle” to venerate them, the timetested ploy of disinformation and calumny. In addition to exhorting the gullible to venerate the apparition of the “Bleeding Heart of Jesus” alleged to have been seen by a “piriloose” Margaret Mary Alocoque of France between 1673 and 1675 and other mostly women nuts with deranged brains. In addition to the worship of the “Bloody Sacred Heart” veneration of imaginary Arch-Angels such as Gabriel, Michael, Raphael,Raguel, Remiel, Saraquel and Uriel, Saraquel are encouraged. They may even recommend the worship of Goethe’s Devil, Mephistopheles. These idiots may come out with even more bizarre characters for the “buffalo” Zero Malabar brainless types to prostrate before them and, of course, for emptying their wallets to the last 50 paise coin for filling up the wide mouthed gaping collection boxes kept conspicuously as well resorting to devotional knee jerkings.
What these idiots and half wits are unaware is that these types of madnesses have quite a history. According to the book “A History of Christianity – From the Beginning to the Threshold of Reformation“ by Kurt Åland, veneration of Mary and fourteen other saints had its origin in the unsettled times of Marin Luther’s Reformation in the fifteenth century. In addition to ever marketable icon of Mary, mother of Jesus, her mother Anne was also worshiped along with fourteen other saints. All types scatterbrains had their favourite saints. The pin-makers chose Christmas as their guild’s festival because they believed that Mary fastened Jesus’ diapers with pins. The arrow ridden Sebastian was chosen by archers as their patron. Butchers and tanners chose Bartholomew since he was said to have been skinned alive. With the assembly line production off “masses of saints“ by the Polish “actor turned zealot” John Paul II (who kept his torrid love affair with a married American lady under the wraps as a “deep mystery” – the previous Pope was poisoned to death by the Mafiosi of Vatican according to David Yallop). “We kiss the shoes and the filthy kerchiefs of the saints and neglect their books, which are their relics that are most effective and deserving of veneration” (Erasmus of Rotterdam). A Veneration of relics, pilgrimages to places touted as holy were the other idiocies forced upon the credulous. All these stupidities are “evidences of the decadence of Christianty”. They proliferate beyond leaps and bounds when things go grossly wrong for the clerics as is happening in Zero S.M. Church, as diversionary tactics.
THE GUILT THESIS
The “guilt thesis“ which evolved at the beginning of the 5th century of the Common Era enabled the Church to keep the proletariat in a tight leash. This pernicious abomination, in tandem with the pessimistic and anti-life view of Christianity, could have been a stumbling block in the path of progress. The abject submission to the autocratic authority of the priesthood and the surrendering of individual autonomy and freedom to think differently leads to intellectual stagnation. In this milieu, new ideas scarcely emerge. The condemning of pleasure-seeking, an offshoot of the Stoic regressive view of ideal human behaviour, could have stood in the way of enjoying life. Enquiry and experiment, the prerequisites for acquiring knowledge, was put down on the premise that the divine inspired Bible is the final word about the affairs of the visible universe as well as the world in the heavens. This view, along with the Judeo-Christian insistence of unquestioning acceptance of the Bible as the embodiment of all wisdom and the framework for human behaviour could have been another negative factor impinging on intellectual endeavours. No book can encapsulate the whole gamut of life and its multifarious dimensions in its pages, divinely inspired or not.
The enlightened in the West have realised that they can lead moral lives without the clutch of any Deity or religion. It has been empirically proved that there is no casual linkage between religious practices and altruism, tolerance, social empathy and cooperation in the social context.One need not a believer of God or follower of a religion to be a good human being. But the superstitious, unthinking people equate religion with ethical conduct and view non-religious persons with suspicion. This mindset is endemic among Catholics in Kerala’s back wood rural hinterland. An all-perversive aversion to anything contrary to the Church dogma prevails in the minds of these people.
For the modern man, technology is the new religion. The innovators in the Silicon Vally are in search of ways to improve the condition of humanity, a few aberrations notwithstanding. There the techno-utopian club, a mix of Ayn Rand devotees and engineer absolutists, see their hyper logical world view as the answer for everyone and everything, sure that one day soon enough, it will be possible to download human brain to a computer and let their algorithms take care of everything. The integration of technology – the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials and computing horse power – they are sure, will pave the way toward an age of astonishing machines and science fiction dreams made manifest. Elon Muskhas already made rapid strides in tapping solar energy, advanced rocketry and electric cars. He has plans to construct underground tunnels at different levels to ease traffic congestion in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco etc. The same technology will be used to dig tunnels under the crust of Mars making the planet suitable for human habitation. Humans may even migrate to the moons of Jupiter such as Enceladus, Europa and Titan where conditions favourable to human life may exist. Living in the moon is passé. Musk intends to transform the cold, barren red orb Mars suitable for human habitation. Turning humans into space colonisers is his life's goal. With a reliable energy source in place, humans may be on the way to becoming a multi-planetary spicies with a self-sustaining civilisation on other planets to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness. Other entrepreneurs are putting in place ways to make trips to galaxies far beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way .
The twisted views of the believer
It seems that the majority of Catholics hold the view that what they experience in their life is Maya and unreal and that the nether world and the existence after death is the reality; life here in this world is inconsequential; human body is evil and the abode of sin; that God has created the human race to serve Him (in practice serve the priests who arrogate themselves as earthly representatives of God). Can anything possibly change the attitude and behaviour of these people till the arrival of the dooms day as their Book has predicted?
The lait motif of the Catholic is the “ SINNER BUMAN“. The Catholic theology says that God the father has created the human kind like himself. If so, as the saying goes, “the son is like the father”. Ipso facto, the sinning human has inherited sin from the sinner Father God.
THE INDICTMENTS:
1. Ye Church what is your aim: To make every one of your followers wallow in misery in perpetuity?
2. What is it that the Church gives in terms of values?
3. Why is this religion out of sync with human nature?
4. Why is the Church teaching so out of alignment with reality?
5. Why is this dichotomy between precept and practice?
6. What is the contribution of the Church towards human happiness?
7. What is its road map for humans in search of meaning of life and the relevance of the human species in the overall scheme of nature?
8. Why is this religion so pessimistic about human destiny?
9. What is its hidden agenda?
10. Why has the Church degenerated as the messenger of doom?
11. Why does it not it make its moral code to harmonise with the faiths of other peoples instead of claiming that it is the sole custodian of all truths and that all other religions are in the wrong?
12. Is not its worship, a distorted version of the animal sacrifice of Jews and a rehash of the Roman spectacle?
13. Why does it encourage the worship of countless idols of the so called saints?
14. Can any civilised human view, without aversion, venerate the shrivelled up body parts of of dead persons?
15. Why does the church stoop so low by encouraging its followers to venerate the remnants of hair, tooth, bone, nail skin, as relics?
16. Does its theology stand scrutiny by the yardstick of common sense and bare minimum rationality?
17. Why is the message of Jesus buried under the debris of his miracles?
18. Why is this phobia about the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus?
19. Is not the prescription chastity for its priests more violated than complied with?
20. Why for a change, the Church does not orient itself for the improvement of the conditions of the have-nots of the world by selling its vast accumulated wealth and spending it for the benefit of the deserved?
21. Why not the Pope, the Cardinals and the Bishops come down from their lofty perches and follow the rustic Nazarene, whom they call their God Incarnate, by being with the marginalised, the dispossessed and the lost?
EPILOGUE
The charade seems to be heading for its inevitable and logical conclusion. The no holds-barred feuds are out in the open. The snarling dogs have spilled into the roads. The market place is overwhelmed by women of ill repute exposing their wares and quarrelling for customers. The atmosphere is polluted by the sound and fury of the yelling adversaries. From this mad house let all sensible people escape with their sanity intact.
