Christianity has played a prominent role in Philippine history, culture, and society. On the shared understanding of the Christian faith, it has endured for some 400 years in the country with millions of Filipinos drawing spiritual strength and inspiration from its teachings.
This has translated into the willing, collective submission of Filipino Christians to Roman Catholicism as it has been imbued in their minds by centuries of religious indoctrination. This has come at the astronomical price of surrendering critical thinking. Whenever faced with doubtful or dissenting viewpoints as regards to their beliefs, Filipino Christians have never wavered in choosing to protect the religious doctrine with little regard for logic or even common sense. But that’s what faith is all about—enlightened examination or fact-finding are anathema. The faithful are expected to take the religious teachings at their word.
So when Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte bluntly included himself in the row of skeptics on the religious tale of Original Sin, the Christian faithful came at him hard and fast and with all the indignation they could muster. This time you see, Duterte—known for his uninhibited usage of foul language and primitive insults—went too far in their eyes by calling God “stupid” and a “son of a bitch” for engendering the Adam and Eve story which in turn led to the guilt of Original Sin.
More specifically, Duterte was getting at how he surmised that Original Sin was not only preposterous, but wholly unjustified. We should be reminded that to accept Original Sin is to swallow that all of mankind is born in sin as a result of Adam and Eve’s all-too human vulnerability in giving in to temptation. The story is one of Christianity’s sacred and iconic narratives which easily explains the exasperated reception Duterte received for his disparaging remarks.
Atheists or agnostics like myself would dismiss the claims to veracity that Christians ascribe to the Adam and Eve story. People of our persuasion would strenuously argue that there is categorically no scientific proof whatsoever that the Adam and Eve episode ever took place. To accept it as historically true is strictly a matter of faith.
With that in mind, Duterte’s criticism of Original Sin and the God that allegedly cast it upon humans cannot be passed off as a mere fancy on the president’s part. The fact of the matter is that Original Sin, if we are to speak intelligently about it, is what Duterte says it is: a product of God’s—if God truly exists—fatuousness and cruelty.
Duterte’s loathing for Christianity’s “stupid” God and Original Sin is consistent with the late atheist writer Christopher Hitchens’s conviction that one of the problems of the Christian faith is that it gives rise to the disturbing idea that as human beings, “we are created sick” but that we are “commanded to be well.” It’s an unequivocal summation of Original Sin but also one that is accurate nevertheless. It is a summation that will offend religious sensibilities but Original Sin as it was conceived deserves to be taken to task.
Original Sin fails to live up to some of the very Christian teachings it is meant to form the basis of. The concept helped spur on the notion of existential guilt that Christians have been taught to believe they have been born with no thanks to the “rebellious” behavior of Adam and Eve. Herein lies a huge problem with Original Sin: through absolutely no fault of our own, we come out of the womb already immersed in sin, as if we somehow committed transgressions as human cells and embryos. It is in the worst possible spirit of what can be called a preexisting condition.
And we have it all because of the purported actions of two equally-purported individuals whose existence there is no historical evidence of.
The idea of being born in sin despite being inculpable in any rational way is both unconscionable and absurd. That is, if you think that God is an omnipotent, all-powerful, all-knowing force which Christians indeed think he is. Well then, the question has to be asked in regards to Original Sin: why would an almighty deity who is supposed to know literally everything that has happened and literally everything that will happen beforehand need to conduct some pitilessly, conjured up loyalty test for his first two human constructions?
I can think of three cogent explanations for this conundrum. Either the Christian God is a sadist who, akin to someone casually watching a boxing match on television, sits back and gleefully watches his creations twist and turn in pain and agony as part of their teleological mission as it has been set out for them by him. Or, the Christian God is simply not the eternally all-knowing, infinite power his followers have been led to believe. Or even more simply, God does not exist. Which is it? Is God a callously divine spectator of human failings or should we chalk it up to his insecurity and ignorance? Or has he always been a gross figment of our imagination to begin with?
Such sentiments are blasphemous to the Christian faithful because they cast doubt on either God’s omniscience, his integrity, or his presence in the universe. But from a rational viewpoint, those same sentiments speak even greater volumes in that they reveal a distressing predicament embedded within Original Sin: if God created Man in his own image according to Christian teachings, then Adam and Eve’s original sin is a reflection of God’s own weakness and imperfection. Either that or the whole story of Original Sin is an out-and-out myth.
Let me say that the two related main points I’m ultimately making here is that one of them is unaffectedly clear-sighted. At the same time my distrust of the Original Sin story is emotionally difficult for me to assert. It came quite lucidly to me to make a stand in putting the idea of Original Sin in a deeper, more critical and judicious context. What is bothering me then is that my need to be consistently objective about all things religious has forced me to take the side of a man I personally loathe and believe to be a murderous war criminal, Rodrigo Duterte.
So yes, I do agree with the gist of Duterte’s criticism on God and Original Sin. But where he went wrong was with his all-too typical bluntness which has served him well in the past. Duterte should have known better than to candidly state something that would infuriate Filipino Catholics who happen to constitute the majority of the Philippine population. Not that Filipino Catholics would have understood the president’s aspersions even had he said them respectfully. But his contemptuous manner of disagreeing with the Original Sin narrative was to pour fuel on the fire of Catholic umbrage.
Duterte could have found a more civil way of expressing his views on a core value for Christians. At the very least Duterte could have shown a certain amount of modesty and humility in letting Filipino Christians know his contrarian views which he is entitled to like any other free thinking individual. But we all know by now that modesty and humility are rare phenomena in Duterte’s vernacular and political discourse.
And while Filipino Christians vent their fury at Duterte for reasons of a spiritual, otherworldly nature, what those same Filipino Christians should be really more focused on is Duterte’s own original sin here on earth, the original sin of promoting and facilitating the extrajudicial murder of thousands of suspected drug users and dealers around the Philippines.
Whether you agree with me or not, what should be at stake among Filipino Christians is not the moral veracity of Original Sin or whether or not there is such a supernatural state. What should be at stake for Filipino Christians is the temporal sake and social and personal well-being of their fellow beings. When thousands are unapologetically being murdered without due process, without pity or compassion, what good does believing that you are born in sin do anyone? Our priorities should lie with the world we can hear, see, smell, and touch and not in, as Prince Hamlet soliloquized, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
ALLEN GABORRO
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