From primitive to sophisticated barbarianism

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA
December 1, 2009

WE seem to be swinging from one outrage to another these days. In the local scene, we just had that shocking massacre in Maguindanao. Everything in it was just unspeakable. Is it still possible to have such brutality at this stage of our national life?

This looks like our version of America’s 9/11 carnage. The deliberate malice put into it, the conscience-less killing of everyone in the group irrespective of whatever, in short, barbarianism in its distilled form, is simply too much for an average heart to bear.

I normally don’t like to talk about this kind of events. Silence is a preferable option if only to lighten the ugly scenario. Talking adds fuel rather than douses water to the sickening situation. But this one grates at the guts and one simply has to instinctively react.

Let’s pray that this incident will yield us tremendous lessons we need to learn quickly and permanently. Let’s remain positive and hopeful! Let’s do everything to make this a thing of the past, never to happen again in the future.

But as if this black-eye to humanity is not yet enough, we also are now witnessing another form of barbarianism in the world stage, perpetrated by highly educated people, the elite of the world of sciences and technology, the cutting-edge in human knowledge, but, sadly, not much more.

Lately it has been discovered by hacking the computer of the Climate Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia that many of the data made to support all this hysterics about global warming and climate change are not all true.

Some important data, significant to the issue but contrary to their position, have been dumped, and there appears a massive and systematic effort to manipulate the public to believe in their assertions. More and more shenanigans are now exposed. What the hell is this!

Though there are many global warming skeptics who also are scientists, these have been effectively sidelined and projected as obstructionists to what they call as obvious pieces of evidence of global warming.

Al Gore, the self-appointed patriarch of this group, managed to make the film, “The Inconvenient Truth,” that mesmerized a lot of people and won him a Nobel Prize. I heard that he is raking in a lot of moolah!

But the first time I heard about global warming, I checked the relevant write-ups in the Internet, and while I followed the arguments of the supporters, I was also aware that there were dissenters who sounded to me also serious.

I was amazed that the doubters and deniers were not given a fair chance to present their ideas to the public. Dialogue and discussion between the two camps were discouraged. That’s when I started to look deeper into the issue and to probe into who the people, pro and con, involved are.

I just wanted to have glimpses of whether they are competent scientists who also are believers, or just scientists but not men of faith and vulnerable to play politics or to ideological biases.

Sorry, I have to use these criteria in this increasingly maddening world driven by all sorts of man-made inventions but putting God aside. That’s my basic guiding principle. Science has to go with faith. Any attempt to separate the two is immediately suspicious to me.

This issue cannot be resolved by science alone, especially if it’s a science already prostituted by politics and ideologies. Faith has to come in. Our human condition demands it.

And I found out that while all sorts of people can be found in both camps, the supporters tend to be non-believers and just contented with being “pure” scientists, while the doubters and deniers are at least open to the faith.

Of course, there are many who are neither strong supporters nor strong deniers, but are just swept away by the bandwagon effect of the controversy. They like mouthing hand-me-down clichés just to be with the flow.

Among these are clerics and other religious people whose pronouncements peppered with global warming terms sound really funny and ridiculous. I just pray for them and hope their embarrassment will not be too biting.

Of course, many public officials like to play Pied Piper mostly for the fund of it. I often wonder whether they really know what they are talking about.

This is now the modern, very sophisticated barbarianism that seems to be committed flagrantly and with impunity against the whole of humanity, and not just Maguindanao.