Apakah ugama Yang Benar Disisi 'TUHAN'??

Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 24, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


FR. ESTANISLAO Soria, a priest in the Archdiocese of Manila, now goes by the name of Muhammad Soria, having converted to Islam.

It's rare for a Catholic to be converted to Islam. Much rarer still 'perhaps a million in one' does a Catholic priest renounce his faith and join Islam.

But it doesn't matter. God is God, no matter what you call the Supreme Being. Whether it be Allah, Yahweh, Bathala, Dios, it's still the same Deity we all worship.

God doesn't care what your religion is. He only cares for you.

There is no such thing as the "true religion" or such people as "the chosen ones."

Religions or people claiming to be the direct descendants of God are hallucinating.

For if God had chosen a particular religion and a particular people as his representatives on earth, why didn't He just create one single race?

Why did he create Chinese, Africans, Caucasians, and Asians?

It's high time religions taught their followers that there are other ways of worshiping God and those ways are not wrong, just different. As different as the color of one's skin from another human being who comes from another continent.

I watched a movie where one of the characters asked another what his religion was.

The guy who was asked said he didn't have any religion because "religion divides people."

How true. Instead of uniting the human race, religion divides. Christians versus Muslims, Catholics versus Protestants, Sunni Muslims versus Shiite Muslims, Ang Dating Daan versus Iglesia ni Cristo.

In the name of God, millions of people have been killed. The Crusades that lasted centuries and that pitted Christians against the Muslims were launched in the name of God.

The early Catholic Church punished with death people it thought were non-believers or heretics.

But why is this so when we worship only one God?

God neither favors any religion nor any particular race.

We—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, atheists—are all His creatures.

All of us come from Him.