Part 4: Alternative Paradigms In Search for Sacredness

Route of Moses delivering his people from Egypt to the Promised Land.

Alexander, The Great

Dr Abe V Rotor

“Why can’t many people find sacredness anymore?” asked Time in a special issue. Moses asked the same question, puzzled on why his people had turned their worship to a golden calf. Christ released His anger, the first and only instance, when the synagogue was turned into a marketplace.

I remember Alvin Toffler’s books Future Shock and Eco-Spasm. We are unprepared visitors of a changed planet who broke away too soon with the past. We are willing victims of an accelerated thrust of time and change. We are a people of the future too soon, carried away by the concept of transience and adhocracy, and not one of permanence. We created a throw-away society that we discard many things including values in favor of novelty.

We find little sacredness when we talk in the future tense, of foreign ideologies not founded by enduring philosophies, but of futurism, its promises of choice and kaleidoscopic images. How can we find sacredness in subterranean cities, in modular fun houses, in sprawling mega malls, in mail-a-bride and rent-a-person, in hurry-up welcome, in Batman, in temporary marriages? Welcome to the rental revolution, to simulated environments, the portable playground.

Gone is the homing instinct. Broken is the old family. If we are a product of periodicity, then we are but a drifting lead swept onto the ocean of change. No, we are not. Here we remember the classical period, the anchor against the fallacy of human dreams and ambitions. What caused the downfall of Alexander and Napoleon?

Here we remember the historical period. History is the greatest lesson of mankind. He who knows his history does not run and get a stabbing thorn. He who walks sees reality and the beauty of the countryside. We remember liberation theology – it is the catalyst of social justice; the feminist paradigm – it gives wholeness to man-woman relationship; the Filipino paradigm, the quaintness of Filipino life, shy from the world, but full of life’s simplicity as well as flavors, while ecological paradigm is making us move closer to nature.

The Internet Paradigm
Finding God on the Web

The Computer Revolution is touching our faith more openly and deeply now than during the age of Bible Study and Sunday Worship.

The marriage of technology and religion, though an ancient one (starting with the codification of religious belief in cuneiform writing), has gone farther than following Mass on television. It now makes available in the home through the Internet the subject of God in the countless denominations of faith. This leads to the creation of a cathedral in the mind, but what does it look like? Will a worldwide web bind all of us, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, together?

Time poses this question with a sense of optimism that opens the door to religious understanding rather than religious isolation and conflict. These electronic exchanges will ultimately help people from many religions understand the common ideas that bind them together.

“One of the causes of religious disagreement has been the sense of strangeness, of pure unfamiliarity,” says Notre Dame philosophy professor, Alvin Plantinga.

The world is about to plunge into a giant pool called globalization where the dividing lines of distinction begin to dissolve: sex, geography, public and private life, status, race, religion, trade, education, culture, many others. Will these end up into a “classless and raceless” society? what paradigm do all these offer for one in order to lead a true moral life?

As I walk on the road of change, I see a faint light from the window of an old house. It gives me comfort, more that all the stars I see above. ~

Comment:
Feminism gives wholeness to man-women relationships. Sin in man is pride, while in women it is passivity, Women nowadays are more compassionate and caring which breaks passivity.

Ecological - It makes us closer to nature and it is said that all forms of life and non-life are important to human life. Reverence to life is the key in this paradigm.

Analysis - it is about social justice, like meeting the people's need, removal of inequalities and respect of rights.

Alternative - Some Filipinos are shy, especially about religion. They are not that aware of certain things but are aware of the fullness of life through the alternative paradigms. - Chiara alyssa Cochico

Light from the Old Arch, UST-AVR