True Religion and Its Bias

By Pedro Pablo Morejon

HAVANA TIMES – I told her I didn’t know how to dance, but I could have been a great singer, as I sing in tune really well and think I have a musical voice.

“Sing me something,” she asked.

The first song that came to my mind was a Christmas carol. I sang it vibrantly, as if I were some kind of Luciano Pavarotti or like a peacock showing off all its colors.

Then, I remembered my Christian phase and we searched YouTube for ballads and songs that were lying dormant in some distant corner of my memory but were now coming out to make me relive my religious days, when I was just over twenty and believed and swore that Christ was my Savior and I was completely celibate, waiting for the woman of my dreams who never came.

We carried on listening to evangelical songs. I felt like I was back there, in that time and place of my life, shouting Hallelujah in the middle of the congregation, worshipping. My friend began to cry, overcome with emotion, as if she were a devout believer in Jesus Christ.

The emotion died down and I became clear-headed again. I was only 20 years old when I embraced the Christian faith. I was too young, naive, impressionable, vulnerable…

I didn’t have an identity, I felt like I needed somebody to save me, for somebody to give my life meaning. I wanted to believe I was important to somebody, that they loved me and that’s why I clung onto biblical promises, which I thought were the word of God. Jesus, God in the flesh who sacrificed his life for me, out of his love for me, to give me eternal life and an incorruptible legacy waiting in heaven.

I believed in all this despite the Great Flood, the Plagues of Egypt, the order to eliminate the Canaanite people at the hands of Israel, his avenger people.

I trusted in Him despite the fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorra, the deaths of 3000 Israelis in the Sinai Desert in one day because they worshipped a pagan god, the Hell of never-ending torment for the souls who chose the freedom not to believe or to worship other gods.

All of this despite the countless crimes committed by the Almighty Judeo-Christian God, narrated in the Holy Scriptures. I justified it all like a good fanatic, who saw blasphemy in these accusations against an allegedly good God.

That’s why I understand our parents’ generation, who from the beginning believed in a bearded Messiah and his new religion, which promised them Paradise.

They were young, naive, vulnerable, without their own identity, just like I had been. They became involved in the heat of their excitement, they gave their lives for this religion, tied to dogmas in the middle of speeches, the overemotional songs of poets and foolish folk singers, slogans, manipulation, and other methods of psychological control of the masses.

Not too long ago, I talked to a 70-something-year-old about the terrible crime in Bahia Honda (when a Cuban Coast Guard vessel rammed a speedboat and the subsequent deaths and injuries).

“It was an accident caused by those in the speedboat, no member of the Coast Guard killed anyone deliberately, you can’t go around believing all of the lies you hear on the Internet,” he told me. 

I understand his mental bias. His religion is the true one, he can’t be wrong.

Read more from the diary of Pedro Pablo Morejon here.