Christianity a problem for us: it drives people off the plot

LEONARD FONG ROKA

IN THIS DAY AND AGE, CHRISTIANITY is an impediment to any form of human development in Bougainville, apart from the spiritual.

From the simple exaggerated Bible-based teachings, Christianity creates a senseless fear in the minds of our population on our economically-struggling island.

I was born and brought up in a hardcore Catholic family. In my life was nothing secular, just religion and its ways.

Reflecting, it is obvious I’ve lost so many opportunities that would have made me someone to make a positive contribution to society much earlier. It could have been different if my parents had brought me up in a balanced life culture—secular and religious.

My life was a struggle for the unknown good things in Heaven. My father was an auto-mechanic with the gone Bougainville Copper Limited. He never bothered to teach me how to dismantle and reset the injector pump of a diesel Toyota Hilux. But I knew Christianity.

Translating this into nation building, Christianity is a serious problem because it is leading the Bougainville people in the wrong direction.

I say this because, if you read the Christianity’s book of principles, the Bible, it is a book of contradictions. It needs an educated Bougainvillean to read between the lines; not the poor illiterate of society.

Getting the population of Bougainville educated is our goal to realise our ambition for nationhood.

I accept the fact that development comes into society through a man’s understanding and learning of the basics of economics and politics. These are not spiritual aspects of life. They are the fundamental bases to drive Bougainville forward.

Christianity can come into play when all loopholes are sealed and the island’s governing machinery is steaming forward. An educated population is the only group which can navigate a beneficial way between secularism and Christianity.

Christianity’s ritual of conversion has created fanatics across Bougainville. These converts have, with the unprecedented power of spirituality, condemned education, money and everything secular not worthy for the good of Man and Earth.

This is a sting to positive progress, for it is freely setting people off-track from Bougainville’s national goals.

In late 1999, a bunch of my schoolmates at Arawa High School quit school because of the Christianity-promoted 2000 supposed end of the world!

Every afternoon after school I saw them preaching the Bible in the public places in town when Bougainville needed them in the classrooms.

Christianity can distract us from pursuing a path of personal, family, community and national development through education.

Comments

[Peter Kranz]

Joshua - the death then resurrection of a God was a fairly common belief pre-Christianity. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis, Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as Ra the Sun god with its fusion with Osiris/Orion, Zalmoxis, Dionysus, and Odin.

Female examples are Inanna, also known as Ishtar, whose cult dates to 4000 BCE, and Persephone, the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose cult may date to 1700 BCE as the unnamed goddess worshiped in Crete.

It seems to be linked to the natural cycle of life/death/rebirth shown by the seasons.

A good analysis of this is in The Golden Bough by Frazer.

And Joshua, sorry but the resurrection of the dead is a common feature of the eschatology of Islamic, Jewish, Zoroastrian and Bahá'í faiths.

[Joshua Kaijankoski]

Apologies for the bad links. I should have used tags. I also regret the insensitive language of "right and wrong" because that's not even what Paul asked in the first place.

Let me re-phrase. The difference between Christianity and other beliefs is resurrection. No other mainstream religion claims resurrection let alone offer evidence for it. In the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:14 "...and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is without foundation, and so is your faith. "

I don't mind theological debates and take no offense if someone disagrees with me. But yeah, these things can turn ugly if we let them. Obviously if I could provide something that would convince everyone that Christianity is the way to go, I would. My job is to provide people with an option. They make the choice out of their free will.

I believe I have said my peace here and should anyone offer any opposing views, I will merely read them with interest and respond only if asked to. Thank you all for this very interesting discussion!

[Michael Lorenz]

Joshua's link doesn't work, the close bracket has gotten tangled up with the URL. If anybody wants to view the piece they need to remove the bracket after .htm.

For what it's worth I don't think that it is very productive to talk about rights and wrongs when delving into various theologies.

Right or wrong as we may be, God's love never wavers.

[Joshua Kaijankoski]

Hi Paul. Good points and questions. On the question of what makes Christianity right and others wrong, I'd like to point you to this article (http://www.messiah3.org/what_makes_christianity_right.htm as it seems to say it pretty well.

"What does matter however is when people change the interpretation and import of a statement in a text to suit their own perceptions, beliefs and objectives. Tell me that hasn’t happened over the last 2,000 years?"

It's called eisegesis (Noun: personal interpretation of a text (especially of the Bible) using your own ideas). Yes, it's happened over the last 2000 years and is still happening in every Christian group, unfortunately.

[Paul oates]

Hi Joshua,
While I agree with your simple statement, many adherents to other religions and cultures in the world would also say they too think the same. It therefore raise the question of what difference there is between many other religions and Christianity?

When reportedly asked to show them God, Jesus is again reported to have said that God is a spirit. ‘God is like the wind. You can’t see the wind you can only see its effects’.

I suggest that anyone who reports what someone said decades after they said it may well only be able to recollect the import rather than the actual words. It doesn’t therefore really matter what was actually said but the import of what was implied.

What does matter however is when people change the interpretation and import of a statement in a text to suit their own perceptions, beliefs and objectives. Tell me that hasn’t happened over the last 2,000 years?

The essence of any discussion such as this is surely not to lose sight of the simple truths that were originally presented and be diverted by those who have unseen agendas.

[Joshua Kaijankoski]

And to make it very simple for everyone to understand, and as Peter Kranz already mentioned, a true Christian is someone;

1) Who loves God with all their heart, soul, and mind.

2) Loves their neighbor as much as they love themselves.

That's it, that's all.

[Joshua Kaijankoski]

Yuambari, If you don't practise proper hermeneutics, you can make any passage in the Bible mean whatever you want. The true message of the Bible is whatever it was meant to say. True Christianity follows the teachings of Christ the way He meant them.

You gave a good example yourself with www.godhatesfags.com. The Bible clearly states that God loves everyone so it would be unbiblical to say that God hates homosexuals.

God loves homosexuals but hates homosexuality, that's two different things. So it's pretty safe to say that I will disavow any hate group that call themselves Christians and make it clear that I, as a Christian do not share their twisted beliefs.

Another example are the Snake Handlers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling) that base their teachings on a wrong interpretation of the Bible.

If you follow proper hermeneutics, you will only get one true interpretation. Google hermeneutics, eisegesis, and exegesis if you want.

The fact the the Bible has been translated and copied many times over doesn't mean that it's changed in any way. That's a ridiculous notion especially since we have manuscripts that are over 2000 years old that prove that the biblical text hasn't changed.

All doctrines of mainstream Christian denominations are obviously based on original text in the original language. Any serious theologian and biblical scholar is fluent in ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek.

I studied Koine Greek myself and I have friends that can fluently read the text of the earliest manuscripts in both Hebrew and Greek. So any doctrine and interpretation is based on the original text.

[Yuambari Haihuie]

One should be careful of those who profess access to 'true' Christianity, there is no independent objective truth from 'true' Christians but only the 'truth' they've gained through the practising of their own contrived rituals.

It is thus easy for Christians to disavow other Christians based on their own interpretation of their guiding text. The Bible is a text which has been literally translated so many times, that every passage when read anew is also interpreted anew.

The Bible is not a Mathematical textbook, it doesn't offer us that kind of truth, it is narrative taught to us, which is understood and expressed through practise; that is the only truth it has ever offered.

[Peter Kranz]

The two (logos and sophia) come together in the Hagia Sophia in present-day Istanbul. The church was dedicated to 'Logos' often interpreted as the holy spirit.

Check it out - a masterpiece of Byzantine architecture.

It has been a Byzantine then Orthodox church and an Islamic mosque - now it's a museum and has survived earthquakes and bombardments and wars, and dates from 360 AD.

The Church was dedicated to the Logos.

Sophia is the phonetic spelling in Latin of the Greek word for wisdom – the full name in Greek being Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, "Shrine of the Holy Wisdom of God"

[Peter Kranz]

Michael and Paul - yes indeed. Interestingly John draws a connection between Christ, The Word (logos) and
wisdom (sophia).

"Logos" means a lot more than simply a word, it can cover "an account" or "the principle of reason".

It became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge hence wisdom.

The Stoics then used it further to mean the divine animating principle pervading the Universe.

It's reasonable to assume that John had some knowledge of Greek philosophy.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

"Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

[Michael lorenz]

Yes the word in Koine Greek (which along with Aramaic was the lingua franca of Jesus' day -Alexander having displaced the Persians centuries before Jesus appeared on the scene) for Christian love is agape.

It is the self-sacrificing, unconditional love of God for his creation which we are called upon to reciprocate by applying it on one another and the creation in general.

This contrasts with another kind of love, eros, with which most of us are familiar. :-)

However some hold that the two are mysteriously related. The current Pope, Benedict XVI, proposed in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, that both eros and agape are aspects of divine love.

According to the Greeks, eros has a mother and a father whereas agape has an obscure origin.

Plato's Symposium is a discussion on the nature of eros. A short excerpt:

... “But who then, Diotima,” I said, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?”
“A child may answer that question,” she replied; “they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them.
For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant.
And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish.
Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit of Love. The error in your conception of him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the beloved is the truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.” ...

[Paul Oates]

My understanding from a presentation I attended about 50 years ago is that the original Aramaic (that Jesus spoke) was translated into Ancient Greek before being translated into the King James and then New English versions we were taught as children. In Ancient Greek, there were two words for our expression 'life'. The first was 'Bios' that dealt with material life and (I don't have the letter omega on my keyboard) the three letters 'Zed, Oh, Omega' that meant spiritual life.

If one then looks at what was reportedly said in the original Aramaic and then written in Greek some 60 - 70 years later, the quote: "I have have come that ye may have life, and have it more abundantly', may start to make more sense. If people could start thinking in terms of compassion and helping others it might be possible to better understand the real impact this person had on the people he met.

All the panoply and material wealth, power and enmity created over the last 2,000 years has been designed to enhance the control and power of those people who then took over the movement. If the original concept had to be personified in order for the 'hoi polloi' who notions of religion had evolved over thousands of years, then maybe that was done to try and ensure those who were explaining the message weren't instantly put to death for heresy.

Ultimately, the message was so incompatible with those in charge of organised religion and government that these people made sure their power and control wasn't usurped. Nothing new with that situation is there?

[Peter Kranz]

The key point should not be about specific religions and churches, but about Christ and what he taught. The two are distinct, which some 'religions' don't like to be reminded of.

I despair at the influence of some 'Christian' churches, but take solace from the words of Christ's immediate followers.

"Love your brother as yourself, otherwise you don't love Christ" (Epistle of St John).

I think the Greek word is Agape.

[Arthur Williams]

Leonard - Thanks for a thought provoking article on Christianity's role in the ABG, PNG and indeed the world. You said, 'My life was a struggle for the unknown good things in Heaven'.

Perhaps the point of your post could be said to be “My life should be a struggle for the unknown good things on Earth'.

On 30/6/2012 The Times of London printed an article entitled 'The Church must speak out on money and morality' by David Meara, Arch Deacon of London. He drew my attention to a new book by Michael Sandel entitled, 'What Money Can't Buy – The Moral Limits of Markets'

It set me surfing the web and at http://s.huffpost.com/images/v/logos/bpage/politics.gif?29 I read more about this topic. I particularly noted the following two paragraphs which may help with seeing the role of religion and hopefully God in the developmental future for PNG

...Of course, people disagree about the norms appropriate to many of the domains that markets have invaded -- family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and the way we contend with the prospect of death.

But that's the point: once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the good they touch, we have to ask where markets belong -- and where they don't.

And we can't answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them.

Such deliberations touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread.

For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave them undecided. It simply means that markets will decide them for us.

This is the lesson of the last three decades. The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance.

Our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicity about the meaning of the goods and social practices we prize...

See also Dr Allan Marat's speech in Rabaul reported in today's Post Courier, 'Without Jesus Christ in PNG politics, the Government will have no wisdom and will always rule with injustice and unrighteousness.'

[Ganjiki D Wayne]

Yes the problem described is not Christianity. The true principles of Christianity are what are expressed in the Bible...not exactly what is practised by "Christians"....

[Giorgio Licini]

Well, what is described in this article is not Christianity but something for which I do not have a definition... sorry!

[Joshua Kaijankoski]

As a protestant missionary, I feel compelled to respond to your article. I agree and disagree with some of your points. I agree that there have been many horrible things done in the past in the name of Christianity and still is.

This Christianity that you refer to is called religion and is not the Christianity that I try to promote in PNG. A true Christian is someone who has a personal relation with Christ, not someone who follows some religious rituals and does this and does that but not this or that.

Unfortunately, true Christianity gets mixed up, and bunched up with the religion called Christianity and we feel the brunt of the increasingly intolerant attitudes of the western way of thinking towards Christianity.

Now, I'm not saying that Catholics are not true Christians. As I said, it's a personal relationship with Christ. A true Christian can be a Catholic, Lutheran or somone who does not even belong to a church or denomination. I just happen to be a Pentecostal.

So what's happened in Bougainville and many other places all over the world, is a shame but it is not the result of true Christianity. It's a result of it *not* being true Christianity.

[Robin Lillicrapp]

Hmmm! Australia is a secular society, in the main, and it can't get a lot of things right either; whether it be about taxation or illegal immigration etc let alone some of the puerile policy decisions in the S Pacific, issues which are often discussed on the blog.

Indonesia is a secular society (professedly) and it has what many would call an abysmal record in its dealings with W. Papuan issues that often are a reflection of the travesties of social injustice suffered by many Bouganvilleans.

Education is a two edged sword. The oft discussed and lamentable failures of the largely globalised OBE methodology is clearly a negative in the experience of PNG in recent times. It is an educational methodology disseminated by the institutions "secular" in nature.

It does depend, I think, upon who wields that sword as to effective outcomes.

And don't forget, Secularity has its religous expression too. It is called Humanism. It has its "Bible" called the Humanist Manifesto.

I dare say there would be a division of opinion among observers of the noxious practises of industries at work today around PNG as to what philosophies are underpinning their operations which often are in direct opposition to the best interests of the nation.