It does not take much to attract media attention in the Philippines. You just need to do something “special”. Fortunately for Filipinos, their society had set a low bar for specialness. For many politicians, simply taking a bus or a train along with the peasants makes them special enough to be elected to government posts that put them in charge of hundreds of millions of pesos in public funds.
My colleague Chino recently wrote about how this might be a symptom of something seriously wrong with our society citing as an example Leni Robredo, wife of the late and beloved former Secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government, Jesse Robredo, who was depicted waiting for a public bus in a photo that had recently gone “viral”. Indeed, it is disturbing. When “achievement” and the hollow kudos that accompany it is seen to be so readily-accessible, even to the talentless, society is in trouble.
Senator Bongbong Marcos could become Philippine President by modelling his life around Jesus Christ.
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Which brings me to my point.
All that pretty much forms the groundbreaking idea underlying The New Testament that made it such a huge global bestseller. The Good Book cut down no less than Abraham’s God himself to size — turning the image of the crucified Son of God into history’s most powerful symbol: an image that launched wars, inspired the building of great nations, and incited humanity’s worst acts of genocide. The New Testament turned Abraham’s God from a pathologically wrathful, insanely jealous, and inconsolably vindictive god into a human being — someone’s son — who spent much of his public life on a PR blitz to convince people that his father is everything but the monster the Old Testament painted him to be.
So the lesson we can take away, thus far in this piece, is that The New Testament at a fundamental level is really not too different from a celebrity magazine like People or Hello.
The bigger lesson here, however, has more to do with political strategy, specifically around, say, Bongbong Marcos’s image problem. He is the son of a reviled former god who is rumoured to have done really bad things. Say, for argument’s purposes, Bongbong Marcos decides to run for president in 2016. What would he do? What could he do?
Bongbong Marcos could start by reading The Holy Bible.
Jesus Christ set out on his preaching career with a similar brand liability — his father. Abraham’s God (Jesus’s father) was the architect of an atrocity the cruelty of which dwarfs anything that any human that followed it has been able to perpetrate thus far. Jesus’s father annihilated all of humanity in a Great Flood. Not even Adolf Hitler and his impeccably-engineered Holocaust could have beaten that. Indeed, the combined efforts and results delivered by every mass murderer the world has so far seen will still have paled in comparison. The power Abraham’s God wielded with a wave of his wand to effect that deadliest of non-natural planetary extinctions makes the most fearsome of human military technology look like peashooters.
But Jesus Christ took up the challenge to repair that image problem and succeeded. He’s gone down in history as the founder of the world’s mightiest religion — in the name of his father. His is the Mother of all public relations coups. Catholic theology should be a required course in the pursuit of business and politics university degrees. Everything we ever learned about public relations we learned in Bible school. We can learn to sell ice to eskimos using Jesus’s teachings. Indeed;
People now love God thanks to Jesus Christ.
If Jesus could do it, Bongbong Marcos could do it.
Funny enough, a much-hated man, current Philippine Vice President Jejomar Binay, is now on his way to becoming President of the Philippines. A whole bunch of people are whining about this eventuality. How can this popular man be beaten? Simple. By fielding a candidate who can present himself to the electorate as someone lovable. The call to action for the Philippines’ Premature Opposition is, thus, quite straightforward. It’s time to get back to the basics. Politicians and their strategists who aspire to beat Binay need to turn to Jesus for their salvation. Jesus saves. His example will work even for the most challenging and hopeless of cases.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
Blasphemy to a whole new level, kudos actually.
Thanks. It’s really not blasphemy if you are citing Scripture as the bases for your assertions. 😉
I’m sorry but B.S. “what-if-god-was-one-of-us” Aquino already did that first. He was the son of the Deities Nonoy and Cory of the P500 bill, cut down to size: The smoking, lazy, feckless and emo guy that the Filipino can so relate to.
“Catholic theology should be a required course in the pursuit of business and politics university degrees”
It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s already the case. This is a country where (I quote from a degree transcript I scanned for someone), ‘Life & Works of Rizal’ is a required component for a Bachelor of Science degree, along with other irrelevant fields like literature, arts and PE. Why don’t they want to produce specialists?
this country is not a theocracy. tama na ang pang-aangkin ng kristiyano
Running out of stuff to write about benign0? What on earth? Even though the Bible and Politics are closely related in a sense that they are both selling bullshit stories to feeble minded people, I still think that this article is a bit “out there” and I would file it under SciFi/Fantasy.
yes, this one is too ‘filipino’ in its logic, even for me.
Yeah, so a filipino goes and spends his life savings on a water-hose, P375.but the water comes out of it too slowly. so ,employing ‘filipino’ logic, to get the water to come out twice as fast…what does the idot ‘filipino’ do? He cuts the fuckin hose in half, OMG ! He cuts the fucking hose in half. Holy Shit, whatta fuckin idiot.
‘filipino’ logic, its its its…….
A politician whose life follows the pattern of the “Journey of the Hero”; as Ninoy Aquino’s did, will be irresistible to voters. This is because the human psyche possesses a common substratum that transcends all differences in culture and consciousness. Jung called it the collective unconscious. Archetypes are the basic components of human psychic nature. “The Hero” is an important archetype.
Jesus, Horus, Osiris, and other god-men, all had similar miraculous births, travails and tests. They were all executed and miraculously reborn. Aquino was crucified on the tarmac; but was reborn through the presidency of his wife and son.
Marcos and Binay need a assassination attempt against themselves to more closely adhere to the myth of the Hero. Maybe their PR machines could work something up along those lines.
information taken from: nancy.storm_AP Campbell powerpoint.ppt
http://www.district196.org/rhs/uploadfiles/nancy.storm_AP%20Campbell%20powerpoint.ppt
There you go. The stories that resonates the most powerfully amongst people are all based on a formula that evolved over centuries of scuccessful field tests across cultures. So Public Relations 101 really need not be about any sort of groundbreaking idea. It just needs to draw lessons from ancient religious texts.
Hijacking the human mind is pretty much an ancient science as evident in all these centuries-old religions. The ancient ways are so potent and have proven effective to the point of inducing their adherents to find glory even in their own deaths — even where no such glory exists.
Great article! I love how your imagination works! More power to you sir! 😀
Thanks!
Bobong Bong Jr. is already doing it by wearing tshirt with bible verse written all over his chest. I feel that if he’s found guilty on the current trial, he’s going to use that as leverage for the next election (Prisoner? Going to run for public office? Who in the military’s fucked up mind would do that? Oh.) Before election, every politician will be makadiyos, makabayan and makapal ang mukha. Except for Mar Roxas of course, who is too stupid to learn the art of pretending.
Mar Roxas is an epic fail in PR. All attempts to improve his image done nothing but harm.
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55: 8-9
Is this enough? Or you might want to be called the Omnipotent, Omniscience, and Al-Knowing Being if you have such characteristics then you are absolutely right that God made an atrocity during the Great Flood. Oh come on, what’s this another similar atheist argument of Ernest Nagel or Bertrand Russell?
I see you are lack of knowledge when it comes to the Bible maybe you are very good in secular matter but the matter about God I don’t think so. For your information the Great Flood was also written in the Quran so in that case you are also mocking the Almighty in the Quran. Don’t go to middle east and say something like this or write something like this in public because definitely your head will roll on the ground because they will translate this as blasphemy on the higher level.
Second, ancient texts? Okay read this, 35″Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. Matt. 24:35, theologians, and both scholars of the Bible and Quran considered both Holy Books are words of God. Where in the world that man can argue with the power of the words of God? If the author of this article will outlive the Earth then he is correct that the Bible or Quran are ancient and rendered to be irrelevant texts.
You’re right. One cannot argue with the word of God. Please accept my apologies for writing this article. 😀
Oh no, here come the religiots (religious zealots) who cry foul when their sacred texts or anything about their religion is “desecrated” 😉
I can’t seem to find a sound counterargument anywhere in the above comment through. It’s all just the same tired old classic fire-and-brimstone threat.
Don’t worry about blasphemy Benign0.. As long as those Victoria Secret-Angels are on earth, I won’t go anywhere else.. Couldn’t care less about heaven or hell 😉
This is the most hopelessly funny comment I’ve read today! 😀
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Hamlet, Act One, Scene Four.
People are dumbkopfs when the simple message of the article flies over their heads. So what’s the non-dumbkopf interpretation here? People, the voters, are the reason they have bad leaders. They treat their “leaders” like celebrities, like gods. Thus, they set a low bar for “specialness” and vote and treat their “leaders” based on personality rather than platform. Till today, Philippine society has remained a cult of personality.
This time, Filipinos have outdone themselves. For lack of a viable candidate to challenge the most popular leading candidate, they are instead resorting to negative campaign.
Well, good luck with that. When you have an alleged crook leading the charge to Malacanang in 2016, the bar is set really low for anyone who seeks to challenge him. And yet no one has stepped up. That says a lot about this country of 100 million where not even one good president could be found.
Welcome to the apocalypse… Is it day zero now? Methinks not…
Even candidates with hope, like Richard Gordon, were the subject of negative campaigning. It’s as if the powers that be are deliberately limiting the choices of people come elections.
Just like in movies in which the masses prefer watching garbage, cash cow movies like those from mmff instead of those films that makes sense. Is it safe to say that the masses are stupid?
All of you seem to be all-knowing persons? Have you already asked yourselves what the most significant action you have done to make your country proud?
In asking that, I assumed that you have already done something that our country is now proud of. If so, what is it?
Unfortunately Bongbong Marcos never had walked on water…
There are better candidates, than these TRAPOS. The trouble is, we put our sights on these TRAPOS; and not on anybody else, who is more deserving.
It is Humanity’s effort to Humanize God; that made Organized Religions dysfunctional. This is the reason we have: religious inquisitions; religious wars; forced conversions; suicide bombers; cutting of hostages’ heads, in the name of God; and all kinds of evils done in the name of God and religions.
The teachings of Jesus Christ are still valid and working for me. The Parables, he had talked about. The love of neighbor; the love of God. The Epistles of St. Paul are inspiring. Paul was just a Tent Maker…and was a Jewish Zealot.
I do not believe in Organized Religions; but for myself, I believe in God. The stories in the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, may or may not had taken place.
Like the Book of Revelation, written by St. John the Divine. It is written in Riddles or Allegories. Why would God play Riddles on his creatures…this I don’t know…
Politicians and their strategists who aspire to beat Binay need to turn to Jesus for their salvation. Jesus saves. His example will work even for the most challenging and hopeless of cases.
========
What’s that? It’s like saying Lucifer should go to Jesus for their salvation.
Our corrupt politicians are beyond salvation…they already sold their “souls” to Lucifer, the Devil…Binay included…
This could be either OK for something as made up,
OR
it could be absolute asshole logic.
For instance, comparing ‘People’ magazine to the the ‘New Testament’, Please …that is absolute asshole logic, and at its deluded worst. Name a miracle performed in and reported in ‘People’.
and in case anyone is considering the scumbag Marcos the 1st as being ‘GOD’, just because he is ‘the Father’ of another in a long line of scumbags to vie for control of the banana republic in S.E.Asia,Bing-Bong….Sorry,its just too far a stretch.
and yeah, I get it,apples and oranges are fruits ,UH HUH !
I could see a bunch of logical fallacies in this sarcastic writing.
Strawman fallacy – misrepresenting something to make it easier to counter
Moral equivalence fallacy – assuming that two moral issues have similar weight, even though they are completely different
False analogy – An argument based on the assumed similarity between the two things being compared, when in fact they are not similar.
Begging the Question – An argument that includes a conclusion within a premise; or assuming as true something that needs to be proved.
Hasty Generalization – A conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence
I wonder if the person who wrote this thinks he is any better than the people he is describing and trying to “teach” them how to pervert Biblical teachings and use it to serve their selfish purposes. The writer seems to be very brilliant in perverting the Bible to make it look like God is evil while I get the impression that he thinks he is the righteous one that does society a great favor in exposing evil people and the evil God, all of that of course, on the basis of his….uhm…opinion?
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes And clever in their own sight! (Isaiah 5:20-21 NASB)
Sir Benigno, in case you missed it, the message of the Old Testament is to make people recognize the face, reality, and feeling of evil opposed to the Holiness and justice of God. There is an abundance of miracles in the Old Testament period to demonstrate the power of God manifested in physical form but still people are stubborn and choose to disobey God and do evil. Therefore the justice of God was also manifested materially to those who practice wickedness, sometimes in the form of a great flood, an invading army, rain of fire and brimstone etc. to make people realize the seriousness of sin and its entailments. The New Testament’s message on the other hand is forgiveness, grace, mercy, peace, hope, salvation, and love as God Himself took upon Himself what is supposed to be ours – the punishment for our sins and broke its power that it is now possible for us to break free from its slavery.
There are 3 main ingredients for violence – people, weapon, and ammunition. Violence is a willful act of a person to inflict harm and violate the rights of another person, regardless of which weapon of choice it needs ammunition even if using barehands. Ammunition is not necessarily in the form of bullets or arrows but also in intangible forms like words, ideas, or symbols especially if it is filled with hateful, sarcastic, vitriolic, disrespectful, and condemning messages. And this article, i think, is one of those ammunition.
My freedom > your beliefs.
Please do not impose what you believe is the truth on other people. I’m sure you tell yourself that you’re doing this to help “save” unbelievers, but the sad and painful truth is that “witnessing” is just another form of referral. Dibs on that great mansion promised in the kingdom of your god? 72 virgins anyone?
How can you make love to 72 Virgins?
In Islamic countries; wives are sold and bought by dowries. If you have money, you can buy many wives. If you don’t have money; you rely on “Maria Palad”…so gullible believers; believe, after they die in battle for the Islamic causes: the reward is 72 Virgins and Mansions…
Please do not impose to me your belief that your freedom > my belief. Your logic self-destructs. Everyone who share his or her opinion is trying to impose his or her beliefs to others. This is what I want to impose on you, your freedom < truth
Yes you are free to believe what you "want" to believe but you cannot escape reality. You are free to do what you want to do but you cannot escape the consequences. You are free to express your ideas but you cannot avoid opposing ideas. None of us have absolute freedom, because to have absolute freedom is to be God. From the moment we are born our freedom is already contained. We did not choose our parents, race, face, heritage, gender etc. Although we were given some freedom it is to be used with certain boundaries, and if we "choose" to violate those boundaries there are consequences.
Problem with some people who are full of themselves usually feel they are the "enlightened ones", the freethinkers, set apart from the majority whom they think has lesser intellect and therefore they have unlimited freedom to give "a piece of their glorious minds" and "think" for those whom they think are not thinking.
By the way I am not a Muslim. I am not doing this to "save" unbelievers but rather to "defend the Christian faith" which is being attacked with the hope of preventing other believers from going the wrong way. Just to make it clear, I am not defending God, He does not need defending. For the unbelievers I am not that arrogant to think I can save them, it's only Jesus that has the power to save. Even if He use me to reach out to unbelievers, that is not my own doing. Because for most unbelievers the problem is not intellectual, but moral.
Skeptics have long been trying hard to destroy Christianity attacking viciously with cosmological, teleological, historical and archaeological arguments but time and time again humiliated by the "truth". The last thing they can attack is on the moral side, the purity of Jesus as they try hard to make God look "evil" like the one who wrote this piece probably influenced by fictional books like the ones written by Dan Brown who based it on gnosticism.
Willful unbelievers reject every reasonable evidence for Christianity even if it is beyond reasonable doubt. They resist God because their pride won't allow them to admit their need of Him and surrender their "will" to the greater will of God. They don't want someone telling them what is right and wrong, they want to decide it for themselves thinking they know better and feel holier than God. They think they should be the teachers of mankind and yet they put the blame on God if something goes wrong.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
C. S. Lewis
These people are proud and arrogant, daring even to scoff at supernatural beings without so much as trembling. But the angels, who are far greater in power and strength, do not dare to bring from the Lord a charge of blasphemy against those supernatural beings. These false teachers are like unthinking animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed. They scoff at things they do not understand, and like animals, they will be destroyed. (2 Peter 2:10-12 NLT)
Whatever you believe, belongs to you. Don’t force people to believe, if they don’t want to believe…if you believe they will be burned in Hell…it is their choice…if they believe to have 72 virgins, after dying in battles with infidels…it is their choice…just don’t force anybody to convert to your religion…and if they don’t convert: you cut their head…
to the writer of this article, i should call you ignorant. To be honest yeah. i respect your point of view. If you guys are an atheist its your choice. Im a Christian and i guess the “atmosphere” of every atheist is “dont force me your faith”.
BUT to the writer i call you ignorant. Yes. You speak as if you know the meaning of the old and new testament.
I can see you like a child reading a Pathophysiology book and trying to preach older people about what he read about the book.
Shame on you as a writer. If you really want to prove for yourself that the God of the Bible and the Bible itself is false, try going out to Christian Churches first. Try to study the bible based not on your self-biased reading. Try. And then you decide whats true and whats not.
The Wisdom behind the Bible is not suitable for one-dimensional thinkers. Those who read it and think that they understand it. The wisdom behind is too deep that ignorant people and stupid people (those who think what they know is true – all the time) will not understand it. Thats what Jesus told in the New Testament as well as the Prophets of the Old Testament. Ill give my 2 cents that you dont know it. 😉
Lol! Is there a sound argument somewhere/anywhere in what you say above? Coz I seem to be missing it. 😀
Sorry if my question is a little bit personal but, are you a Christian, benign0?
That aside, I’m a Christian myself. But I do agree with your assessment. The Old Testament did portray God as a vile being, but I think it’s more of how the it is written that resulted into such outcome. The Great Flood might actually sound atrocious, but it you did read Genesis, there is a reason why God did it.
But then again, the Old Testament is rarely used by the Catholic Church because it is supposedly reserved for God’s chosen people.
There’s this article I’ve read a long time ago about how Jesus saved his father’s image. It included some in-depth comparisons of the Old and New Testaments.
Yeah, “there is a reason why God did it”. And if we are to believe that his will be done in the supposedly mysterious ways that he works, there is also a reason why God unleashed an earthquake in Nepal and, before that, Haiyan upon the Philippines. Unlike Hitler who, himself, had a characteristically German way of justifying exterminating Jews, God wins whatever argument you throw at him simply because he has sole claim to being the “creator” of “everything”. So, by that logic, everything is pretty much his to destroy on a whim. His “will” be done, see. And because the “way” of his “will” is infinitely mysterious to us mortal scum, it is never our place to question it.
So, yeah, I think you pretty much nailed my point. If the Hebrew God was such a PR nightmare Jesus somehow remediated through his sheer charisma, there’s lots there Bongbong could learn from that case study considering that his dad, Ferdinand Marcos, put side-by-side with that old Hebrew god hands down cuts the more charming figure.
God is definitely at work in your heart benigno, I wonder how long will you resist Him? How long can you reject Him in your heart? I pray that you will continue to read the bible and for you to continue writing posts like these that shows your inner struggles with God’s will in your life. May God open your heart full to the wisdom you can gain from His words. Keep reading the bible until God will finally speak not just into your mind but into your heart.
Thanks for your well-thought-through thoughts. 🙂
They want us to believe in god.
They don’t even agree to themselves which one.
And yet we’re being called fools.
OMG! Our god is a male being, invisible no bones no flesh no penis yet still being called Father.
wow. a marcos AND a catholic apologist.
and this was supposed to be a website for progressive thinking.
never thought i could do better.