“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world.
What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons
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Good morning!
I'm just going to shoot off some quick thoughts here -
I think we should never have removed Spanish from our national curriculum.
I think we should start thinking about the regional good more often - go ASEAN!
I think our President Noy is doing a splendid job. I think it is not fair to be so short-sighted, the work of reversing the tide will take a couple of generations. We are going to need a succession of strong and committed Presidents after him to bring our Country out of the doldrums.
And release Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani!
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More on the RH Bill -
I saw a struggling young mother with her baby once. She was trying to figure out if she could afford to get her baby a little pack of Bear Brand. The baby had a cleft lip and appeared to be malnourished. They appeared so poor and so desperate but largely unaware...
To me, her plight and that of her months-old baby girl seemed so overwhelming. I contemplated how she could have managed to conceive her baby through a free and human choice to have a baby. A few other questions came naturally after... what of the father, the family, the future?
I wondered if she could really be held completely responsible for bringing a soul into our world largely ignorant and so obviously unprepared to properly receive such a precious endowment from God. If not her, if not the father, certainly not the child. If not them, who?
I also wondered how many more young women like her will go through such an unnecessarily harrowing ordeal before their consciences become fully formed so as to effectively protect the freedom of their choices from the harshness of blind and random chance.
This is not the first time I've seen the hope of the poor burdened by so much weight.
Now, I look back at the debate on the RH bill and I ask myself, "is justice served to allow a condition like this to endure?"
The RH bill is NOT about abortion.
It is about human choice and about human choices freely and responsibly exercised in the context of Filipino society as a national whole.
The focus of the debates should shift more toward conscience formation and proper public (civic) education in the long-term and public safety, health and protection in the near to mid-term (our time frame still stands at 2012-2045).
If every Filipino were born with a properly formed conscience; if all our freedoms as individuals were - without exception - served enough even by human reason alone, then we would as citizens be completely right to immediately dismiss both the points as well as the failures (if any) of reproductive health practices in our Country.
Because if it were the case, human sexuality would not appear to be so beyond our natural power as human beings so as to consume so much of our time and effort in community with each other. We would have no need to debate the RH bill.
If every Filipino existed on the same plane of moral thinking, we would have been justified as a Republic to unanimously vote down the RH bill.
But since we all must as individuals exist on independent planes of spiritual maturity and since our common humanity must never again unburden itself of its duties and responsibilities to Sacred Life, the debate must continue.
We must agonize, we must fight our way toward a solution.
There should be a middle ground somewhere and somehow we have to get there...
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Finally,
I am proud of apl.d.ap and I know he's proud of me. Why?
Because we're both Filipino. We know it. We wear it. We flaunt it.
Mabuhay ka kapatid ko!
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So there. Everybody have a great weekend!
Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! God bless us all.
One Nation
Down with Filipino Crab Mentality!