Evangelicals in Cuba – God as Witness
Photo Feature by Elio Delgado Valdes
HAVANA TIMES — At the entrance to the Havana Bay tunnel on Thursday and Sunday evenings a large gathering of people of all ages takes place with a specific objective: the word of God.
They don’t have a church to meet at, but that does not stop the pastor and his disciples from doing their job. Among their objectives is to guide young people who have dropped out of school, people who are or have been prisoners and their families, and others who at some time in life have been hooked on drugs and/or alcohol.
Abel Hernández Pérez, an Ordained Minister of Victory Outreach International is an enthusiastic and charismatic person who transmits his great faith. During the recent Easter week his congregation put on well some organized activities.
They staged passages of the Bible, including a very beautiful and well accomplished Via Crucis. The amateur actors were disciples of the congregation. With much love and good organization they did an admirable job with their theater piece.
Here are some pictures of what I saw on Easter Sunday, April 20.
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Actually I find sad the fact that the Catholic Church and the these Christians (evangelicals or whatever they want to be called) are bringing back the social separation issue that you won’t understand because you are not Cuban.
Your comment leaves me with a question. What is it that you find sad? The religious activity of some Cubans? The reaction on this list?
I detect quite a bit of anger from you. ….why would that be?
This is just sad.
Any country which outlaws religion, arrests, imprisons or deports clerics and demolishes houses of worship is a militantly atheist state. The USSR, China, and Cuba were all such countries.
I’ve read and watched Hotchens for years and am quite familiar with his skilled rhetoric. But at the bottom of it all his arguments are nothing more than clever dodges. Hitchens may claim to be a moral atheist because he grew up educated by the Church of England, of which faith his brother is still a practicing member.
WMIWJP ?
( Which musical instrument would Jesus play ?)
Yes, very spiritual.
Atheism was NEVER the reason the non-religious killed the religious.
There was NEVER a militantly atheist country, society, party .
OTOH, the religious killed the atheists and pagans for not believing by the hundreds of millions .
You’d do well to read Hitchens’ book as well as to watch his numerous You- Tube debates against religion before you post inanities. Hitchens not only explains where an atheists morality comes from but also does so in that 12 minute 59 second You-Tube clip you OBVIOUSLY did not watch.
The height of ignorance is said to be a denial of that which you know nothing.
Welcome to the heights.
The Communist Parties of which you speak had only a part of the 20th century to do their dirty work.
The religious crazies who kill those who were/are not true believers have been around for thousands of years doing their killing for God.
Hitchens never has explained where his “moral atheist” gets his morality from. He is like an anti-vaccine fanatic who decries imagined and exaggerated side effects of the vaccine, all the while benefiting from the immunity of the population he lives within.
Without God anything is permissible. History teaches us that is so. The militantly atheist Communists murdered tens of millions of innocent people, men, women and children, because these “moral atheists” decided the Kulaks and other inconvenient people needed to die to help build their socialist utopias.
I think we must accept that people turn to religion for many reasons. Often it has to do with difficulty and insecurity.
The best way to weaken religious belief is to work for a secure and fulfilling life for everyone in this world.
I was in Cuba last May and I certainly saw indications of religious feeling.
I was in a private home set up for religious services. On the wall I saw the word Oraciones (Prayers) and under that the words Familia and Empleo (family and employment).
On a week night we walked past a Baptist church in Santa Clara. it seemed to me that there was a good turnout. I also noticed the musical instruments on stage. From where I was on the street they seemed quite expensive.
“How Religion Poisons Everything” is the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’ book ” God Is Not Great” and should be required reading for every person who is thinking about taking up belief in God or who has niggling doubts about their religion.
For Christians I would recommend Hitchens’ 13 minute ( 12:59) debate segment on You Tube entitled ” Christianity is false and immoral “.
to understand ” how Christ was ” scapegoated ” -the tradition of scapegoating is explained- and why being forced to accept the torture and death of ” an eccentric preacher ” is immoral, totalitarian and just not true to the thinking of a supreme being.
The fact is that most believers will be unable to bear watching and listening to Hitchens’ 13 minute piece because it is so effective against the acceptance of the human sacrifice in exchange for our sins deal that was Christ .
As far as religion being a necessity for a moral life : Hitchens always asked his audience this question of his many debate audiences .
“Try to think of any moral act done in the name of a religion that could not/has not been done by a moral atheist.
Then think about any instances of evil being done exclusively for religious reasons.”
Most of our religions are atavistic beliefs from the Bronze Age and primitive societies of thousands of years ago and reflect those ignorant times.
Scientific fact is destroying the fictions of the Bible one by one and the Abrahamic religions are now a tattered mass of myths, legends and hallucinations proven to be just that.
As Neil de Grasse Tyson , the noted astrophysicist and host of Fox’s Cosmos series puts it: “I like science because whether you believe in it or not, it’s true.”
It is long past the time when humanity should have relegated modern religion to the same trash heap as all the other 999 gods that have existed and have been worshipped as real and then discarded as false.