To my dear little brother

March 6 2003 10.41pm

To my dear little brother, little Jesus.


I’d like to call you that, because Mr. Pessimister doesn’t add anything good. I used to call myself Mr. Pessimister back then, when I was oh so sad over a lot of things in the world. Imagine you calling me Mr. Optimister now. What an improvement from fifteen years ago. Ha! Anyways, you will not have an idea of what I truly mean by all the words I will write here. One thing, you’re still too young. I used to think I know a lot, having read a thousand or so books, viewed a thousand or two movies. I can also make use of those good lines that are so nice to hear like the one you quoted from Devil’s Advocate. Makes you so darn intelligent to other people. In this world, all you have to do is carry a nice line or two, or a nice tune, and everybody thinks you’re some talented guy, or some god.

When I was your age, I wrote, I think something is wrong in me. And I baptized myself, the Dream Shadow, whom no one minds, a dream, unreal, shadow, a lurking creature which nobody cares to look back to. The reason of course is quite clear. I do not look so good. Not unlike other guys in our school. I also do not have any money. We were very poor. I had to keep quiet everytime somebody speaks about some toys which I know I can never hope to own. That’s the result of studying in an exclusive school like Aquinas. There are lots of spoiled rich brats there who behaves as if they own you or can buy you and your whole family. Because of that, I wasn’t so good with people. That’s why I admire most of you guys because you fit well with your groups.

Then, because of that, I struggled hard to prove myself to the world, or yet, even just to me. I used to remind myself of the words from Desiderata: You are the child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have the right to be here. For me, that was very vague. I have the right to be here. But for what? Why was I born this way and not that way? And so, I struggled to excel in things that the boys of my age cannot do. That’s why I was into music, guitar, piano, drums, songwriting, poetry writing, short story writing, etc. I was just trying to convince myself that I have the right to be here, that I belong. I was trying to find my reason to exist.

Then came the “need” for philosophy. It came because of Ecclesiastes, a book in the Bible. There was this man, Solomon, deemed to be the wisest, richest and most powerful man of his time. Had a lot of wives and concubines. His life is that kind of life I want to possess. But then, here he is speaking of worthlessness of life. It’s as if everything one has achieved in the world would count for nothing. I found out later that the Jewish belief during those times center on a happy earthly life. It seems that “immortality of the soul” does not enter their belief system. But then if you will read at the end of the selection, you will see there, “The end of man and beast is the same. The body goes back to the earth whence it came, and the spirit comes back to God”. Wow, in my thoughts, here is an irresponsible writing which can be interpreted in a thousand ways, depending on what school you follow, Plato, Aristotle, Arabic philosophers, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, etc. Anyway, from that time on, I realized that one must know what he believes in order to be at peace. It was a long struggle. It started with David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Locke, and it was head jerking. I tried to write everything down (in my “One World”) but it came to a point when I would wake up in the middle of the night and be disturbed over why there are existents instead of nothing (On Being and Nothingness – Jean Paul de Sartre), so I gave it up. Until one day, in 1995, it resurrected again. From then on, until I don’t know, until now I guess, I never came back to the certainty of the “faith” I once possessed. There are voices in my heart trying to tell me that I have to do something for humanity. I eluded it when I became an accountant in the bank in 1998. Too much work. But then, it came back again in 2001 when I resigned. I thought it would leave for good. Till I met you.

I see in you something of me. I do not know where it would lead you. But in the end, let me tell you that it’s better to have searched and failed that never to have searched at all. It’s our duty. You do not have to accept. You have to follow with your heart. As Aquinas would say, if you love Lady Truth, the more you would wish to know about her. And the more you know about her, the more you become in love with her. Of course, in the end he said this truth ends up in God Who through Jesus Christ said, I am….Truth.

If you would ask me where the searching led me, I would tell you it led me nowhere but to more searching. About God, I do not know anything yet. I can prove that He exist. But whether He cares for us the way I believe He does, cannot be proven aside from the truth already found in the Faith. Of course, as in the case of many things, it is a thousand times easier to prove He does not exist. In court, it is the burden of the prosecutor to prove guilt, that’s why it is easier to prove acquittal. Because, all you have to do is to raise an infinitesimal shade of doubt and presto! One is acquitted already.

Proving He doesn’t exist is a thousand times easier. Oh, I have seen much more poverty and evil in the world. Just before you were born, I was already going to the slums interviewing people for the Legion of Mary, and there I saw evil at its worst. People who doesn’t care about their lives and their families. Makes one think of the first line of Das Kapital: Religion is the opium of the people. There was one time, armed by the “lyrics” of Schopenhauer’s songs and all the pessimistic philosophers whom I loved by heart – I tried to “convince” my grandmother that the world is really evil. But then, how could you go against someone who has seen it all, two world wars, three famines and a thousand storms?

After seventeen years, I have come to the realization that the world is not perfect. It is not the best, but it is not the worst either. It need not be the best because if it is, no one would think of the after life. We would think that this is it. Hence, I must behave as an existentialist, or worse, a hedonist, I would rape girls, pillage towns, kill my enemies. Because, this is it. It is not the worst, because you are here. You and I are here and all the pretty girls in a row. (How dare I call them evil!) Anyways, I also came to the realization that the world is not pretty messed up because of itself. It’s the people who mess the world up. If there is evil, it is because of freedom of the will. If there is no free will, I could kill you and say I am not free. God killed you. He moved me.

At last, I realized that God need not be proven to exist. He doesn’t exist for Communism, for Das Kapital, for Nietzsche, or for Voltaire or the billionaire next door, or for the untouchable in Calcutta, or for “Modern” Science, or for Niño, because they don’t need Him to exist in their world. Communism cannot disprove God because it just says that religion has become the greatest tool of Feudalism, to claim power for the rich, and so trample the rights of the powerless poor. Yes, these feudal gods slam them with a whip on one hand and a Bible on another. That’s why Communism erased the “need for religion”, which was present in Plato’s Republic and in Augustine’s “City of God”. It hated Feudalism so much and the religion it represents that they hang the words of “Joyful Science”: “God is dead!”, along with Mary Antoinette and the religion she represented and the over-all Feudal Lord of all, the Pope. They confiscated the Papal lands because they were feudal lands since the start of “Constantine’s foolery”.

But whatever one has to say against this God, the more you are pointing to the fact that He isn’t dead, nor does He not exist. There is a higher existence than all of us which no human science can prove or disprove. There is Tungsten or Vanadium, or whatever, even if you do not know what it looks like or what they are for. There is a planet Pluto, though you do not see it. You know it exist because Science tells you it does. And science speaks for humanity. It’s as if, it represents humanity as a whole. In the same way, every society in the world since the very beginning has believed in a form of diety. They believe that there is a higher existence than humanity as a whole. Thousands of books, bearing humanity’s ingenuity has proven on paper that there is a being above all beings which started it all. Some called him Monas Monadum of Leibniz, or the One Substance of Spinoza, or the Will according to Schopenhauer, or élan vital, First Cause Uncaused, Bathala, Brahma, Allah, Buddha, the First Unmoved Mover of Aquinas and Aristotle, the Necessary Being of the philosophers, the Grand Architect of John Damascene, the Ultimate Cause, the ultimate A Priori substance of Immanuel Kant. And a lot more philosophical craps, I tell you. Some, call him God. I call him my friend. Because he loves me and died for me on the cross in the united Person of Jesus Christ. He died for you too. And while He hangs there on the cross, He thought of you and me and how we would lead silly lives and worthless lives at first. But in the end, He smiled because He saw us pulled through.

God exists. And I know you know that. You don’t have to believe in it because it is a certainty. Those who say Satan exists must say first that God exists. St. Thomas Aquinas, dealt on the question of evil in “Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo” a book of a thousand pages. It is very complicated but here is the gist. Every agent acts for a good. No one acts for evil. No one wishes for harm. We are not free to will harm against us. In fact, suicide is still willing happiness, or freedom from anxiety or harm or from feared harm. If it is the case, then evil does not exist as a nature, but only as an accident. Indeed, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, evil is not a nature, but a privation of a good. For example, blindness is not evil, but a privation of something good which is supposed to be there. If evil is not a nature, it must be per accidens, it must exist only accidentally, that is, with some good. For example, death is evil, but if everybody lives forever, we would be overpopulated and so we would get hungry and so on.

It goes on to say that since the agent acts for a good and not the evil that accompanies it, evil exists only as accident in some good. It is hard to accept but indeed it is. For example, if you believe in Satan, he is viewed as some very nasty individual, a very evil being. But though he is thought to be “pure” evil, there is something good in him. Indeed, the fact that a being is existing, it is a good. For being is a form of good. Hence, a person’s evil deeds is just accruing to some good in him, primarily, to the fact that he exists. Indeed, the reason why he is evil is because he is alive. And life is a good. Now, the terms used here “good”, “agent”, “existence” are not regular words of English. They are philosophical words. These are debatable only because the terms we use are not on the same level. I think Plato speaks of something like it. “Define your terms and there will be no debates”.

Before I end this piece, let me assure you of my friendship. We met in this place because there is a need for us to interact. I have to remind you of your mission. Hehe.

A confessed atheist was trying to convince Jerome that he is blinded by the biggest hoax of the ages, that there is God.

Jerome said, “Have you read the Letters to Certain Youths?”

“No”, was the reply.

“How about Summa Theologiae?”

“I’m afraid not”

“And Radio Replies, or Summa Contra Gentiles?”

“No”, was the answer.

Jerome said calmly, “Then you are not an unbeliever. You are just ignorant”.

Here is a man, who read First Philosophy, Metaphysics, Physics, Republic, Immanuel Kant, Sartre, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzche, Marx, Teachings of Buddha, Krishna Consciousness, The Great Universe, Ang Dating Daan, Pasugo, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Will Durant, Hegel, Feuerbach, David Hume, Locke, Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, and a thousand other fools and half fools who either said This is the way or that “Eureka! I found it”. As Archimedes, they ran in the streets of Athens naked! But then, here he is, humbled by the experience. From then on, he doesn’t write pieces for posterity. Someone somewhere sometime might judge your piece of poetry as something foolish and a beating against the wind. Read. Learn first. Do not speak unless you are quite sure of what you are talking about. I was treated the same way too when I was as young as you. I was citing the Bible and debating some truths I thought I knew. But then, it doesn’t stop anywhere. The debate continues because, as Pascal would say, “The heart has reasons that Reason cannot explain”.


Bacon said, “Little philosophy leads men to atheism. Great philosophy leads man back to God”. I am not an optimist. I am a realist.


Sir George