When Religion Replaces Intelligence

“Faud[sic].. Manning does not have to answer to anyone, he is the "Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago,"…….. As long as he has God on his side now, we need to understand the changes that need to take place for all this to happen. Stop living in the past and begin to embrace change, or you will prove to the populace that you are one with something to hide? Fight your battles on your knees!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The quote above is an excerpt from an anonymous reader’s reaction to
"Fuad: Manning must answer" Trinidad & Tobago Express | Monday October 16, 2006.

The article was about Barataria/San Juan MP, Dr Fuad Khan’s call for a Commission of Enquiry into the attempted coup of 1990 in response to Prime Minister Manning’s recent admission that he had advance knowledge of the attempted coup.

Multiply the blind denial of the reader's sentiment by at most four hundred thousand and you have the makings of an eternity of spinning top in mud, the likes of which we have never dreamed ourselves capable. But maybe our bellies are stronger than we imagined or, like hogs, mud is we ting.

God is on the Prime Minister’s side?
I am not at all comfortable with anyone who claims to or is said to have God on his/her side. That always seems very cart-before-the-horse to me. To say that is to imagine that this omnipotent entity is a force that can be co-opted to serve an individual’s or a country’s interests. The last leader to the North to make such a claim has been performing in anything but a godly manner.

A leader does not have to answer to anyone?
Does anyone understand that WE put our leader in power? Do we comprehend that WE hired him, like any employer hires an employee, to do a job? Has it ever dawned on us that just as we have to answer to our bosses, our leader has to answer to us?

Stop living in the past?
To use a very ordinary example, when our children come to us with poor grades on their report cards, don’t we want our children to explain why they find themselves in this situation. Doesn’t this include examining the past so that we can make plans on how to address the problems in the present so that there will be an improvement in the future. Doesn’t everything have a past, present and future? How can we evolve if we don’t examine the past that affects our present and will determine our future?

Embrace change?
What is informing this change? A brand new team? A newly found intelligence, and that along with the acquisition of God as a star player?

Fight your battles on your knees?
Hmm...I think I will bow out here and let other minds take over:

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish. ~Unknown

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. ~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

This doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind. ~ Herbert J. Muller

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. ~ Virgil

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings. ~ Helen Keller

Jesus did not die at the hands of muggers, rapists, or thugs. He fell into the well-scrubbed hands of deeply religious people, society's most respected members. ~ Brennan Manning

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~Blaise Pascal

Let's quit fiddling with religion and do something to bring the world to Christ.~ Billy Sunday

Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that shall not be made known. What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. ~ Matthew 10:26-27

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. ~ Ephesians 5:11

and to end on a lighter note:

Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine. ~ Austin O'Malley

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"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare