Among the great miracles I ever heard…
One of the things I always do when writing about religion is to be mild in my criticism of others in order not to offend friends. Countless people cling to beliefs, no matter how strange they may seem, due to a miracle they believe occurred because of their faith in that object. I watched people on television say that they promised total dedication to the idol of the black Nazarene (whoever and whatever it is) because I prayed to it, and I got what I wanted. You can’t accuse these people of lacking intelligence, given that they include former Vice-President Noli de Castro and Erwin Tulfo, both household names in the Philippines.
I realized, though, that if I find other religious faiths weird because of their worship of images, they find mine likewise more bizarre than most because, without graven images, they can’t understand to whom I am praying. That's really funny; ha!
People want something tangible that they can communicate and relate to, something with substance, so to speak. People worship graven images of Jesus, some looking Chinese, Japanese, blue-eyed European, and some plainly stupid and scary like the black Nazarene and, yeah, a discarded doll, and say this is the child Jesus. They worship graven images of Jesus’ mother, Mary, and a legion of saints, the latest being Pedro Calungsod, whose graven image is modeled after the still-alive and kicking basketball player Ronald Tubid. I wonder how this guy Ronald feels about his statuettes, caricatures, and pictures being worshipped by millions. More than a billion worship the images of Buddha and a million human and animal Hindu gods, like elephants and monkeys. Sorry…I just find it mind-bogglingly crazy.
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