Straight From Pastor Ey

Wait! Before you click the “ back ” button on your browser, I was not really cussing. A friend posted a video on Facebook where I saw a pastor pound on his pulpit and shout at the top of his voice, “As a Christian, you’ve got to forgive. Now that said, and please don’t get offended, the new “f” word in this church is ‘forgive.’ Now, touch the person beside you and tell her, ‘F U!’” In this world where it’s easier to curse than confess, to refuse to give forgiveness than to release the person from guilt, that’s a timely word. I may not be as bold (read: daring) as that pastor in exhorting the church to tell and text people, “F U, y’all! ” But I encourage all of us to forgive. The Bible commands us to forgive exactly the way God forgave. “Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:32, The Message) We forgive because we are forgiven first. Psalm 103:11-12 declared that, “As high as heaven is over the earth, so strong is his love to those wh

No, I’m not talking about the hit song by the American rock band R.E.M. I’m talking about a CNN report regarding a prediction by a team of mathematicians that “ based on census data stretching back 100 years… religion will be driven toward extinction” in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Source: CNN Belief Blog ). According to lead mathematician Daniel Abrams, “Every single data that we were able to find shows that people are moving from the affiliated to unaffiliated. I can’t imagine that will change, but that’s personal opinion, not what the data shows. …[We] are not passing any judgment on religion… [We’re] just modeling a prediction based on trends.” (Ibid) Also, in other studies, these people are “the fastest-growing religious group in the United States” (Ibid). Those labeled “unaffiliated” are “ not necessarily atheists or non-believers… just people who do not associate themselves with a particular r

“I don’t know any other way to say it but they are like suicide fighters in a war.” That’s how one Japanese described the employees of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) now hailed as “The Heroes of Fukushima.” (Source: “From A Distance,” Carmen N. Pedrosa, Philippine Star, March 19, 2011) Japan has set a 20-kilometer safety radius. The US of A set it at 50 kilometers. These workers are right there in the nuclear plant complex. They are racing to keep the nuclear reactors at Fukushima from melting down. A worker saw the situation “like a death sentence” while another one e-mailed his wife saying, “Please continue to live well. I cannot be home for a while.” (Ibid) The Straits Times of Singapore published a blog entry of Tepco worker Michiko Otsuki. She wrote, “In the midst of the tsunami alarm, at 3 a.m. in the night when we couldn’t even see where we were going, we carried on working to restore the reactors from where we were, right by the sea, with the realization that this cou

The exercise of our rights requires maturity. A mature person respects other people’s rights in as much as he insists on respect for his rights. The problem is when that person fights for a one-way respect, that is, when that person demands that his rights would be respected but he would not respect others’ rights in return. Screenshot from GMA News Such I believe is the case between Hender Gercio, “a self-described ‘transsexual woman’ who had ‘undergone a gender transition,’” and Dominique Del Corro, a French language professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. (Source: www.gmanews.tv ) Gercio, “a former President of Babaylan, an officially-recognized organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students of UP,” (ibid) insists that the professor address him as a female. Del Corro, an evangelical Christian, refused to do so because of her personal religious beliefs against homosexuality. But Gercio insists, “My pronouns are MY pron