From: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste
MONDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2013
George from Kisii has written a very touching email. He is wondering where the world is headed to, cardinals, bishops, priests lobby for homosexuality in Vatican, some religious kill innocent people, burn churches in the name of God, politicians go there own way, everyone the same.
An American journalist specialized in American politics and society, Christopher Lynn “Chris” Hedges tries to answer some of these questions in some of his best quotes. This is because we live in the world where people create their own ‘gods’, faith and religions.
The world where people destroy their own health and run to their doctors to perform miracles, and when cures come slow they blame the doctors for not caring enough, the world where lawyers tell lie in court, and where impunity destroys justice.
The world full of vanity- it is the excessive belief in one’s own abilities or attractiveness to others, a form of self-idolatry, in which one likens their self to the greatness of God for the sake of their own image.
The world where people elect bad governments, corrupt leaders, criminals, exploiters without thought, thus making them despotic, crony hence destroying their own freedom and then they complain about their bad leadership, only to re-elect them for another term come another general elections.
We live in the world where education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge change, make minds, not careers. We live in the world where we just accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it.
We live in the world where fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret.
Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests.
The world where the liberal church is largely middle class, bourgeois phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialization and global capitalism. The world where instead religion should fight for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, cultivating empathy and defying the powerful, it wounds its own sheep.
We need religion Pope Francis defines as providing mentorship. A religion that leads you to believe in God and do what God commands. You don’t believe in a Muslim God or a Catholic God, Anglican, SDA, Baptist, Pentecost, etc, there is no God for these sects, but God, the Father, Abba, the light and the Creator of us all to continue His creation here on earth in doing what is right.
Pope is talking here of a religion that leads us to love people before trying to save them. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.
Religion is not about going to church, synagogue, a mosque, etc. It is about doing the will of the Father (Mt 12:50). For Christians Christ’s preaching was plain, easy, and familiar.
Christ was so intent on his work, that no natural or other duty took him from it. Not that, under pretence of religion, but of doing the will of His father. “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, is my brother, and sister, and mother”.
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.com
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Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ UN Disarmament Conference, 2002