What I Want for This Christmas

For this Christmas, I want the poor Filipino families living in the slums ofour major cities struggling to survive under the most inhuman of conditions to relocate and live inside churches, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, and chapels. If we have no heart to love our poor people, then let the Lord and his angels love them instead. In the meantime, I want those slums transformed and properly maintained and no longer used as garbage dumps to serve as emblems of the kind of love we have for our country. TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS For this Christmas, I want school teachers and college professors to bring students in touch with the finest achievements of the human mind. To teach them not WHAT to believe, but HOW to think. To make them appreciate that there is beauty and power in the mind that thinks. That there is more to freedom than just the freedom to enjoy mediocrity. That the individual is not the end and the aim of his own being: outside the individual is his family, his country, and indeed, the future of humanity. SELF-RESPECT AND DIGNITY I want our system of education to work for our self-respect as a people.
I want our system of government to work for our dignity as a nation. In
this way, none of us Filipinos need to kneel down and pray to a God existing inside a Cathedral that never works to begin with! I want all of us to acknowledge the fact that self-respect as a people and dignity as a nation should put us on the path towards the achievement of a higher standard of living and a higher standard of thinking in the Philippines - our country. MORE MEANINGFUL ROLE FOR CONGRESS For this Christmas, I want Congress to make more substantial changes for the Philippines than just change the rules of the game in how to quarrel against each other over nothing. The entire nation has a lot of catching up
to do with the help from science and technology. The RH Bill debate has been going on in Congress for 12 years now. In the meantime, 3 babies are born every minute of the day and night or 1.5 million babies born yearly in the Philippines. Most of these babies are in desperate need to be wanted and loved via nutrition, health, sanitation, and education which the RH bill could help provide, insure, and secure. THE SANITY OF CONTRACEPTION I want to see more social sanity behind contraception, and not the insanity
of unwanted impregnation. What we Filipinos desperately need is not more quantity, but only quality of Filipino life. Perhaps, under population control, like most other advanced Asian nations, we too can celebrate once a year
not the birth of a foreign Lord, but the birth of social justice via the growth
of Filipino intelligence throughout the land. It is silly for divinity to bless the poor, specially those poor in spirit. Theirs is already the kingdom of poverty in this Asia's only Christian country. RESPONSIBLE REPORTING For this Christmas, I want editors and writers of newspapers and magazines to publish more facts and information, and no more confusions, illusions, and delusions. The most noble of profession is the pursuit of the truth. It is, indeed, a great pity that the search of the truth has absolutely nothing to do with the system of information in and for our country. It is, in this way, that we can hardly think that a good society can be transformed into a better society for every one of us to enjoy. In the meantime, faith in a false belief
is the most dangerous element in any situation. Beliefs, especially "sacred" beliefs based upon falsehoods are utterly useless. Such false beliefs destroy the rare opportunity for social change and progress, economic stability, political sanity, and indeed, improvements in our history. FOR CHURCH LEADERS For this Christmas, I want the Cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, ministers, and the TV evangelists to admit they know nothing about God; they know nothing about life after death; they know not nothing of heaven or of hell; they know nothing about the virtues of adding to social welfare and to human happiness. Indeed, that they only know about the order and harmony in the universe, but they know nothing about the disorder and disharmony created by many kinds of silly religious dogmas, worthless doctrines, and useless sacraments that make for our sick society. FOR THE ARMED FORCES For this Christmas, I want the Philippine Navy, the Philippine Army, and the Philippine Air Force to protect and defend the law-abiding citizens of our Republic. Help instead catch to put in jail the lawmakers who are among the first law-breakers of our poor and backward country. Defend and also protect our rain-forests. What's left of it. 80% of them have already been cut down and exported for profit by corrupt and powerful lawyers as high officials in our government. CHURCH TEACHINGS For this Christmas, I want those burdened with guilt of the original sin to realize that they are wasting their time on this earth. The original sin is neither original nor a sin. Not even if it were committed by Adam and Eve, who originated nothing in the first place. How can any of us be guilty of anything original if there were, first and foremost, an original creator? BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIANS For this Christmas, I want the born-again Christians to realize completely that wisdom is functional, not biblical. Everybody, when he is born, fresh out of the uterus, is an atheist. No baby has any religion. Of course, as soon as infants are born, snatched out of the mother’s womb, adults begin to indoctrinate them. But all babies are atheists: free from religion, free from religious beliefs. No baby is born as a Muslim, or a Jew, a Baptist, a Catholic, or a Hindu. They are all born free and then indoctrinated. When they attain the age of intellectual maturity and they repudiate that indoctrination, they become in the real sense of the word: - “Born-Again Atheists.” They go back to the purity of their beginning, before any of these dreadful theistic beliefs was put into their receptively indiscriminating, little, and malleable minds. SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES For this Christmas, I want bible readers to admit one historical fact – for two thousand years in the world and 400 years in the Philippines, the truth has been defined not by reason, but by searching for it in the ancient Scriptures. Meanwhile, the revealed truth has yet to be revealed. No doubt, if all the answers to Filipino problems were found in the holy bible, if it had been the most excellent book for moral or spiritual guidance, then by this time, surely, it should have already straightened the mess out of our sick society that’s keeping us Filipinos famous as the Sick Man of Asia. All the problems of government and the ways to develop our local integrity and ways to cultivate our national growth and maturity are silent in the bible. Indeed, love, passion, and compassion are mostly derived from our sense of humanity. Never from divinity. Never from deviltry. FOR A FREE PHILIPPINES For this Christmas, I want the Philippines to be free – free from infantile pursuits, free from fear of the unknown, free from corruption, and free from biblical threats. I want every man, woman, and child – the citizens of our country – to live under the joys of a higher standard of living and thinking. Indeed, to enjoy the good life – one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. I want the Filipino to have faith – faith in himself, faith in his country, and finally, to have faith in this life, the only life we have on this earth. This will do for this Christmas. For next Christmas, I may want more, much more for my MERRY CHRISTMAS!