LOIN EMPOWERMENT: CHURCH CRANKY POLITICAL DISCOURSE

LOIN EMPOWERMENT: CHURCH CRANKY POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

 

Religious fundamentalism is among the mega-waves of the moment. Secularism, which was a 19^th century wave yet, had reached its full circle around the 3^rd quarter of the 20^th century.

From 1980 onwards, with the advent of Islam Fundamentalism and Religious Right (Christian Right, Hindu Right), secularism has been taking the backseat as fundamentalism’s seductive new dogma delivered their devastating blows on erstwhile ‘enemies of God’. Catholic fundamentalism has been riding along this mighty wave since then, and had already dealt its own devastating blows on perceived God’s enemies:

(a) Irish Republic Army partisans killing thousands of children-women-aged ‘collateral damage’ folks;

(b) Croatian Army, armed by the Opus Dei, storming the Serbian bastion, killing thousands of ‘collateral damage’ folks, and declaring a separate republic, along a largely contorted notion of ‘nation’ (ethno-nation); and,

(c) Christian militias armed to the teeth in many parts of the globe, causing enormous damages and misery on the affected folks.  More such violent genocidal campaigns will be fomented by Catholic crypto-fascists in the months and years to come yet.

This is not to count those hundreds of millions of deaths caused by the Crusades, Inquisition, imperial conquests of Catholic powers (Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, Hapsburg, etc). During the Philippine Revolutionary War against Catholic Imperial Spain, no less than half a million Filipinos died, while millions died more due to the forced labor, population resettlements, and abominable cruelties by the Catholic Spaniards.

If we reflect on all of those past genocidal campaigns done by the Catholics, and add the death tolls inflicted by contemporary terroristic adventurisms of Church partisans, we may wonder what ‘pre-emptive right’ do Catholic cryto-fascists possess that render them as indubitably clean, spotless, pure souls who cry wolf whenever issues concerning population control and/or reproductive health are raised, in the name of a new distorted moron one-liner ‘pro-life’.

The same puritanical quacks, none of whom lives a life that is unblemished and sagely worth our emulation, are again in the heat of raising the same fear-based ‘pro-life’ in the electoral campaign in America.

Here in Manila, the same puritanical  quacks have been on the rampage over the legislative victory of the long-awaited Reproductive Health Bill, using the same pathetically bankrupt one-liner ‘pro-life’ spiced with highly nauseating lies about “the destruction of Philippine way of life” by the noblesse legislators. Nay, the same quackery has been raised by the fear-mongers to convince Filipino-Americans not to vote for Obama next week, for Christ’s sake!  

Come to think of it, if we examine the underlying logic of the puritanical quackery, we can see the fear of Church Hierarchs & lay leaders in a rapid diminution of church devotees across the coming decades.

The political economy of church operations clearly reveals thus: the more people participating in church life, the greater the power of the purse of the Bishops, priests, religious orders, and lay organizations. This reality of political economy explains why the Church today remains very powerful, because it is the world’s wealthiest corporate entity taken in the aggregates, whose wealth no nation or corporate group can ever surpass.

To restate the thesis in another manner: loin power means purse power. Following from that logic, purse power means greater prestige and political power by the Church. A diminished loin power, due to the meteoric ascent of ‘reproductive health’ and/or ‘pro-choice’ discourse in the realms of legislation and administration also means the consequent decline of the purses of the Church operators.

As the issues and defenses are raised across partisan lines, Islamic partisans are mobilizing their forces of engagement, ready to start a World War III in their region, a war that could embroil the entire planet in another 30 Years War and see the eventual erasure of nations in a Post-Westphalia regime. Catholic militias and terrorists are increasing by the numbers across the globe, evidenced in my own country by the return of the infamous Tadtad and Ilaga groups that have regrouped and mobilized to engaged marauding Jihadist terrorists in their Mindanao backyards.

Since the Church is awash with cash, gold bullions, estates, and hedge funds anyway, every Catholic diocese may as well begin arming militias and related partisans who would be tasked to run after Catholic infidels or those who do not follow the faith in the manner so dictated by Paleolithic fogey dogma. In order to defend the ‘pro-life’ line, kill more, bomb more, cause miseries on more people, in the name of God! Praise be to God!

Urbanization is another mega-wave in our planet today, a wave that brings with it the ever-widening individuation of the human psyche. Herd discourse such as those peddled by the Pied Piper puritanical quacks, which induces a retreat to the folk spirit or folkgeist and is tantamount to retrogression of the species, has no place in an increasingly individuating psyche.

Spirituality may also increase with time, but this spirituality will be of the ‘seeker’ or ‘freethinker’ type, a spirituality that is not susceptible to mind-bending manipulation by the folk spirit Pied Pipers.  This could be the reason why, in the Philippines, amid the much ballyhooed 86% membership of Filipinos in the Vatican church or corporation, the devotees have voiced a predominantly pro-reproductive health inclination according to official nationwide surveys.

Obama has got nothing to do with this inclination, the legislators’ pro-active measure on population & development has been in Congress for nigh two (2) decades now, but we do see the increasing individuation among an increasingly sophisticated urban habitué led by the urban boheme & intelligentsia.The same Catholic puritanical quacks are joined by Christian Right groups in the USA in waging a last-ditch attempt to derail the popular gains of Obama versus his contender McCain as per latest survey.

The same sickening discourse, characteristic of mental bankruptcy and mediocre “understanding” (sic!) of the human condition, is being mass-disseminated by a loose alliance of cryto-fascists, all working to subtly use loin power to keep their groups in hegemonic positions in the private sphere. What nauseating, pathetic buffoons these folkgeist progenitors are! If they have nothing worth talking about, nothing worth their ilk, they better wrap up and mobilize for armed partisans and face their infidels in the Middle East.

While the same puritanical quacks, both Islam and Christian, would be busy slaughtering each other, as they did hundreds of years back, the true peace-loving, life-loving,  dialogue-wielding, universal love-driven citizens of Earth would be collaborating in their efforts for lasting peace and development worldwide.

[27 October 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

 

OPUS DEI ARMED SUDAN’S CHRISTIAN SOUTH

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Sudan is undergoing a schism, the dividing line being the north-south axis. North is the predominantly Muslim section, with large infusion of Arab genetics into the ancient black ethnicities of the area; south, the Christian section, with predominantly Negroid ethnicities as core population.

A cursory review of history would show us that the Arabs, who were at one time the nexus of world culture, easily reached Sudan and the northern African regions. Egypt, Sudan, Chad and other countries were a bit contiguous to Baghdad and Arabia, and so the Arabs could easily reach the area contrasted to the European lands near the Atlantic during their westward conquests.

We should also be reminded of the era of rise of capitalism when slave trade was a normal predilection of the British, Portuguese and other European powers. Arabs cashed in on the opportunity, raided Negro areas of northern and eastern Africa for the chattel (slaves). In the process, large numbers of Arabs decided to reside in Africa as new entrants or additions to northern Africans of Arab descent.

Let’s fast forward to the present when an authoritarian regime rules the whole of Sudan. Previous to the authoritarian drift of this nation, there were already covert operations by Christian clerico-fascist operators to enforce an agenda of creating a schism in the long run by carving out a Christian south.

The Opus Dei, to note, has been notoriously engaged as partner-operators of fascist forces for a long time. Having had practice in Spain as co-partners of the totalitarian Phalangist regime of Franco, the Opus Dei would later replicate their positioning for global power by arming and financially supporting Christian rebel forces such as the Irish Republican Army and the Croatian Army.

Croatia is an example of a mini-state carved out from a larger entity (former Yugoslavia) via an army that was practically entirely supported by the Opus Dei. For your own study of the subject matter, you may as well begin with the book Thy Kingdom Come by the controversy writer Robert Hutchison. From there you can branch out to other research materials regarding the fascistic group Opus Dei that aspires to be a modern Knights Templar aiming to defend the interests of the Papacy.

In my own country, the Philippines, couples of Christian militias suddenly cropped up in the southern island of Mindanao after the 2^nd world war. The militias went on a rampage of massacre of Muslims there, supported as they were by the big landlords and the Christian Right. A most notorious group was the Tadtad, which revived after long dormancy to help the Establishment contain the rise of the guerilla Maoists and Muslim rebels.

As you can see, Christian ultra-conservatives or clerico-fascists are carving out their own spheres of influence. With so much money stashed in many banks and secret vaults across the different continents, aided by the previous policies of financial and monetary liberalization that permitted unhampered money laundering across borders, the Opus Dei is so powerful today as to be able to create new countries out of regions that are predominantly Christian more so Catholic.

Accordingly, so gargantuan are the tentacles of the Opus Dei, with mafia groups involved in its money laundering, arms trading, and other large-scale crimes across borders. The group was to a great extent responsible for the collapse of the Vatican banks in the 1980s, a crash aided by a mafia Masonic group. That crash led to the domino effect of financial crash of Italy as a whole.

When that crash was investigated by the newly installed Pope John Paul I, the pope was tragically assassinated barely a month into office. It was the same mafia cum Opus Dei operators that were responsible for the assassination of the pope. Now that the pope comes from the extreme Right, the Opus Dei has no worry about further machinations behind the scene.

We should therefore be not surprised if Pope Benedict mouths lines about Christians as the most victimized by terror attacks of a sectarian nature. These are mere cover ups or masks for covert operations being undertaken by Opus Dei and another powerful force, the Society of Jesus, to bring back the power of the papacy in the globe.

In the Philippines, both Opus Dei and Jesuits openly supported the candidacy of the moron blabbermouth Noynoy Aquino, son of the late Ninoy Aquino (husband of former president Corazon Aquino) who was a CIA operative. Both Opus Dei and Jesuits were well positioned in power during Corazon Aquino’s incumbency, so you can see how they have gotten back to power with the victory of their blabbermouth puppet.

Thus, it should not surprise us to find out that Benedict badmouths those who persecuted the Sudanese Christians, as both Opus Dei and Jesuits were behind Benedict’s ascent to the papacy. The involvement of the both religious groups in Sudan’s Christian insurgency and the campaign for an independent Christian Sudan is logically expected.

Now that the Opus Dei has a stronger position in Africa and its puppet state Croatia is in operation, where would the group strike next to enlarge its fascistic sphere of influence and control?

[Philippines, 21 January 2011]

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LOIN EMPOWERMENT: CHURCH CRANKY POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Religious fundamentalism is among the mega-waves of the moment. Secularism, which was a 19^th century wave yet, had reached its full circle around the 3^rd quarter of the 20^th century. From 1980 onwards, with the advent of Islam Fundamentalism and Religious Right (Christian Right, Hindu Right), secularism has been taking the backseat as fundamentalism’s seductive new dogma delivered their devastating blows on erstwhile ‘enemies of God’.

Catholic fundamentalism has been riding along this mighty wave since then, and had already dealt its own devastating blows on perceived God’s enemies: (a) Irish Republic Army partisans killing thousands of children-women-aged ‘collateral damage’ folks; (b) Croatian Army, armed by the Opus Dei, storming the Serbian bastion, killing thousands of ‘collateral damage’ folks, and declaring a separate republic, along a largely contorted notion of ‘nation’ (ethno-nation); and (c) Christian militias armed to the teeth in many parts of the globe, causing enormous damages and misery on the affected folks.  

More such violent genocidal campaigns will be fomented by Catholic crypto-fascists in the months and years to come yet. This is not to count those hundreds of millions of deaths caused by the Crusades, Inquisition, imperial conquests of Catholic powers (Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, Hapsburg, etc). During the Philippine Revolutionary War against Catholic Imperial Spain, no less than half a million Filipinos died, while millions died more due to the forced labor, population resettlements, and abominable cruelties by the Catholic Spaniards.

If we reflect on all of those past genocidal campaigns done by the Catholics, and add the death tolls inflicted by contemporary terroristic adventurisms of Church partisans, we may wonder what ‘pre-emptive right’ do Catholic cryto-fascists possess that render them as indubitably clean, spotless, pure souls who cry wolf whenever issues concerning population control and/or reproductive health are raised, in the name of a new distorted moron one-liner ‘pro-life’.

The same puritanical quacks, none of whom lives a life that is unblemished and sagely worth our emulation, are again in the heat of raising the same fear-based ‘pro-life’ in the electoral campaign in America. Here in Manila, the same puritanical  quacks have been on the rampage over the legislative victory of the long-awaited Reproductive Health Bill, using the same pathetically bankrupt one-liner ‘pro-life’ spiced with highly nauseating lies about “the destruction of Philippine way of life” by the noblesse legislators. Nay, the same quackery has been raised by the fear-mongers to convince Filipino-Americans not to vote for Obama next week, for Christ’s sake!  

Come to think of it, if we examine the underlying logic of the puritanical quackery, we can see the fear of Church Hierarchs & lay leaders in a rapid diminution of church devotees across the coming decades. The political economy of church operations clearly reveals thus: the more people participating in church life, the greater the power of the purse of the Bishops, priests, religious orders, and lay organizations. This reality of political economy explains why the Church today remains very powerful, because it is the world’s wealthiest corporate entity taken in the aggregates, whose wealth no nation or corporate group can ever surpass.

To restate the thesis in another manner: loin power means purse power. Following from that logic, purse power means greater prestige and political power by the Church. A diminished loin power, due to the meteoric ascent of ‘reproductive health’ and/or ‘pro-choice’ discourse in the realms of legislation and administration also means the consequent decline of the purses of the Church operators.

As the issues and defenses are raised across partisan lines, Islamic partisans are mobilizing their forces of engagement, ready to start a World War III in their region, a war that could embroil the entire planet in another 30 Years War and see the eventual erasure of nations in a Post-Westphalia regime. Catholic militias and terrorists are increasing by the numbers across the globe, evidenced in my own country by the return of the infamous Tadtad and Ilaga groups that have regrouped and mobilized to engaged marauding Jihadist terrorists in their Mindanao backyards.

Since the Church is awash with cash, gold bullions, estates, and hedge funds anyway, every Catholic diocese may as well begin arming militias and related partisans who would be tasked to run after Catholic infidels or those who do not follow the faith in the manner so dictated by Paleolithic fogey dogma. In order to defend the ‘pro-life’ line, kill more, bomb more, cause miseries on more people, in the name of God! Praise be to God!

Urbanization is another mega-wave in our planet today, a wave that brings with it the ever-widening individuation of the human psyche. Herd discourse such as those peddled by the Pied Piper puritanical quacks, which induces a retreat to the folk spirit or folkgeist and is tantamount to retrogression of the species, has no place in an increasingly individuating psyche. Spirituality may also increase with time, but this spirituality will be of the ‘seeker’ or ‘freethinker’ type, a spirituality that is not susceptible to mind-bending manipulation by the folk spirit Pied Pipers. 

This could be the reason why, in the Philippines, amid the much ballyhooed 86% membership of Filipinos in the Vatican church or corporation, the devotees have voiced a predominantly pro-reproductive health inclination according to official nationwide surveys. Obama has got nothing to do with this inclination, the legislators’ pro-active measure on population & development has been in Congress for nigh two (2) decades now, but we do see the increasing individuation among an increasingly sophisticated urban habitué led by the urban boheme & intelligentsia.

The same Catholic puritanical quacks are joined by Christian Right groups in the USA in waging a last-ditch attempt to derail the popular gains of Obama versus his contender McCain as per latest survey. The same sickening discourse, characteristic of mental bankruptcy and mediocre “understanding” (sic!) of the human condition, is being mass-disseminated by a loose alliance of cryto-fascists, all working to subtly use loin power to keep their groups in hegemonic positions in the private sphere.

What nauseating, pathetic buffoons these folkgeist progenitors are! If they have nothing worth talking about, nothing worth their ilk, they better wrap up and mobilize for armed partisans and face their infidels in the Middle East. While the same puritanical quacks, both Islam and Christian, would be busy slaughtering each other, as they did hundreds of years back, the true peace-loving, life-loving,  dialogue-wielding, universal love-driven citizens of Earth would be collaborating in their efforts for lasting peace and development worldwide.

[Writ 27 October 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

RELIGION AS LEGITIMATION OF GREED

Erle Frayne Argonza

Is religion a truly reformed institution as what its leaders have been claiming? After Vatican II and all those post-Vatican II doctrines that were elicited from this grand reform movement, has the Catholic Church been truly reformed?

Writing to his friend Dr. Blumentritt in 1890, Jose Rizal, top patriot of the nationalist movement, explicated:

I wished to hit the friars but as the friars utilize religion not only as a shield but also as a weapon, a protection, castle, fortress, cuirass, etc., I was forced to attack their false and superstitious religion, to fight the enemy that hid behind it! If the Trojans had placed a grand Pallas Athena over their fortress and from there had fought against the Greeks with their arrows and their arms, I believe that the Greeks would have also attacked Pallas Athena. God ought not be utilized as a shield and protector of abuses, and less to use religion for such purpose. If the friars really have more respect for their religion, they would not use so often its sacred name and would not expose it to the dangerous situations. What is happening in the Philippines is horrible. They abuse the name of religion for a few pesos. They hawk religion to enrich their treasuries. Religion to seduce the innocent young woman! Religion to get rid of an enemy! Religion to perturb the peace of marriage and the family, if not to dishonor the wife! Why should I not combat this religion with all my strength when it is the primary cause of all our sufferings and tears? The responsibility falls on those who abuse the name of religion! Christ did the same to the religion of his country, to the Pharisees who had abused so much! [Letter to Blumentritt, Paris 20 January 1890. Epistolario Rizalino, V, Part II, No. 85, p. 528.]

Tell me, anyone out there, fellows of the Planet, a clear 118 years after Rizal exposed those abuses of the clergy, whether religion had been truly reformed since then. Articulate to me those liberative pursuits of the churches that have indeed resulted to many souls attaining the awakening of the nirvanic bodies or souls that finally qualify them to enter the spiritual dimensions and never to come back here.

Do make your own assessments and evaluations of the true efficacy of church philosophies and practices, whether they indeed succeed or that they are mere legitimations for the greed and lust for power of a few men in the cassocks.

And by Church here, we no longer refer just to some local churches here in Manila, but rather the whole Church with a capital C as s social institution. Globalization has brought with it the globalization of crimes, and necessarily the globalization of greed. Amen. Aum.

[Writ 13 June 2008, Quezon City, Manila]

POPE HONORED UNPRECEDENTLY IN USA: WHY SO?

Erle Frayne  Argonza

 

U.S. President George Bush seems to have honored the Vatican’s chief prelate with an unusual pomp. The news were all revelatory of the unprecedented treatment the Pope received in his recent visit, a behavior that quite baffles many observers most especially the foreign relations experts.

 

Not even chiefs-of-state from other countries normally receive such a treatment accorded on the Pope, a fact that the state officials themselves pronounced. Yet here is the Vatican’s chief-of-state receiving precisely that ‘most preferred status’ among the various chief executives of the planet.

 

The most obvious answer that can be advanced by unthinking observers is that the Pope is a pious figure. This being so, he deserves the accolades and respect that any eminently pious personage deserves to have. This reasoning is old hat, simplistic or simpleton reasoning and has nothing to do with the reality of the moment.

 

That reality has a great deal to do with economic malaise that America and its northern allies are currently experiencing. Growth has all but flattened in most OECD nations, including Japan and Canada. The USA is coming off as worst, given that it already experienced a recession at the inception of this new decade (2001-02), and here it comes off again with a 2^nd recession within the same decade.

 

The recession is surely bad news for America. For an economy of a size so large it contributes to 22% of the World Gross Product or WDP, a 2^nd recession within a decade spells enormous disasters bordering catastrophe and total collapse. The collapse could lead to a depression, and the depression could lead to massive capital flight by both portfolio and strategic corporate investors.

 

Americans surely don’t know the gravity that the economic malaise had befallen their super-nation, don’t know the consequences of faulty actions and old solutions that hardly work anymore. Among those old tools are the interest rate intervention, fiscal incentives (tax cuts) and further liberalization of the economy. A faulty action would be the rescue of bankrupt banks such as that done on the Bear & Stearns, which was copied from Japan’s experience in the 1990s of ‘crisis management’.

 

The Vatican is watching all of these events, on top of its keen observation of the political aggressions of the USA from 2001 onwards. The aggressions have angered Moslems no end, and the political volcano of the Islamic world could very well spill over into Europe which is the Vatican’s home sweet home. Likewise does the Vatican, which is so awash with money, watching the unusual cross-border financial flows occurring as the Northern economies, led by the USA, are in panic response over their respective shocks and crisis.

 

The world has to admit this: the Catholic Church is the largest global corporation. There resides the power of the Vatican: in the power of its purse. So huge is the Church organization-wise, so vast its financial and estate assets, that no one single corporate group can ever match its resources at hand.

 

It would surely be stupid and suicidal for any corporate group or nation to ever challenge the might of the Vatican head on. Instead of clashing with the Vatican, the appropriate foreign relations template must be that of cooperation and dialogue.

 

And this is what the inner circles of Bush surely have in mind during the Pope’s visit to America lately. Show some semblance of infatuation with the Church, for it can potentially help the USA solve its cash starvation to pay $50 Trillion worth of debts, balance its perennially deficit budget, put some plugs on capital flight, and loan out gold bullions to shore up the pathetically low gross international reserves.

 

That, fellows, is the true reason behind the unprecedented reverence and most honorable treatment on the head of the Catholic Church by the state officialdom of America lately. And that show of respect must have paid off well in the short run.

 

[Writ 28 May 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]